This is a guest post from Dallas-based Social Media Strategist Danielle Glick. She owns and operates the company DG Design. I asked her to analyze Roots’ on-site Social Media efforts in order to get an outside, objective opinion for one of PFSweb, my current employer’s, clients. She did an excellent job and I highly recommend her social media marketing services for small businesses.
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Social Media Report Card; A Case Study with Roots International
What is a Social Media Report Card?
A social media report card can be used to grade a company on how well they are using social media channels, either within their company’s web site, an external social media network, or their entire network of online social media channels. In the case of this article, we will use Roots International as a case study example.
Who is Roots International?
Americans may recognize Roots as the official apparel brand of the U.S. Olympics Team. Ironically, they are a Canadian company who also makes handcrafted leather bags and wallets, designer leather messenger cases, leather iPad cases and sleeves, full zip hoodies, men’s wrist watches, ladies wrist watches, and shoes. In other words, they make what you need to look athletic, rugged, and stylish.
What the Grades Mean
We will grade each aspect on a scale of 0-5, followed by a comment that explains why it was graded at that level.
0= does not exist, could not be graded
1= poor
2= mediocre
3= average
4= good
5= social media honors
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Social Media Report Card: USA.Roots.com & Canada.Roots.com
These two web sites are essentially the same site. We will be grading them in terms of how well they incorporate Root’s other social media channels. To get a complete view of how well any company’s web site incorporates social media, you can’t look at just their home page, you need to analyze landing and detail pages, plus any social media links and blogs. Here we’ll be analyzing four key areas that make external social media channels effective on a .com site: visibility, sharability, content, and response.
The Home Page
Topic: Social Media Sites’ Visibility
It turns out that Roots has a lot of social media channels, including: Facebook fan page, Twitter, YouTube channel, Flickr, two blogs (Roots Buzz and The Source), and a custom feedback community (“Your First Roots“). Would a user realize all of this after skimming Roots’ home page? Let’s see…
Visibility of social media network links: 1
A 5-rating would be a web site with easy-to-spot logo icons for all of the social media channels used by this brand. These logos should be in either the global header, footer or other fairly prominent place. On the Roots USA home page, Facebook and Twitter logos are entirely missing; however, buried in the massive footer area is a nav bar with social media links and a “Connect with Roots” section that links to all of the social media channels. The best thing going for social media here is that the main feature graphic of the site incorporates a video thumbnail about Roots history and leather shoes and links to an internal page that enlarges the YouYube video. The problem with this is that Roots bypassed a huge opportunity to encourage subscribing to their YouTube channel or to alert you in some way that they even have a YouTube channel with more videos available. (At least the video content is engaging.) Overall, the social media visibility on the home page is almost non-existent.
Visibility of blog link: 5
“Blog” is part of the global main navigation bar. Hooray! The only slight negative about this is that Roots has two blogs, and this link only takes you to one of them.
Dedicated conglomerate social media page: 2
The best way to promote your social media sites on your main web page is to add a conglomerate social media landing page and use it to pull in live feeds and links to all of your other social media channels. Roots has a “Connect with Roots” section buried in their footer, but they don’t have a landing page for these social media links (although their blog sort of serves this purpose).
Topic: Sharablility
Sharability speaks to the ease and number of options by which users can spread their favorite web site content to other social networks. Does Roots prompt users to share content…?
Includes Facebook Like this button: 0
Includes Tweet this button: 0
Includes conglomerate share feature (i.e. ShareThis): 0
Includes Facebook Connect: 0
Love Roots? Too bad, they have no easy way to share their home page with any of your friends.
Landing & Detail Pages
Sometimes, a web site does a good job of promoting social media on their home page but falls apart once you click one or two levels in, and other times the home page has no social media links while individual product pages allow you to share and leave comments. Let’s see what Roots does…
Topic: Social Media Sites’ Visibility
Visibility of social media network links: 1
Visibility of blog link: 5
Dedicated conglomerate social media page: 2
There is no improvement from the Roots home page when it comes to the social media, blog, or congolmerate links on product landing pages, such as this page showing leather messenger bags.
Topic: Sharablility of Individual Products
Includes Facebook Like this button: 0
Includes Tweet this button: 0
Includes conglomerate share feature (i.e. ShareThis): 0
Includes Facebook Connect: 0
Easy to comment: 2
If you look at a product page such as leather fanny packs and click on any of the products, you will see zero links to share each item. However, you have the ability to write a review and rate the product, which is akin to leaving a comment. First though you have to create a Roots account, so there’s nothing positive here about the ease of leaving a comment or sharing your opinion to other social media sites.
Blog
Roots has two blogs, and we’ve already analyzed how one of them has almost no visibility (“The Source“) while the other has a prominent place in the main navigation (“Roots Buzz“). Now let’s examine the social media effectiveness of these blogs themselves…
Publishes at an appropriate rate: 5
They write new blogs almost once a day, a rate which keeps their site content fresh, provides new information for people to share, and is difficult for most companies to keep up with.
Balances info vs. advertising: 5
Their blogs balance informational/news content with new products and events (advertising). There is not a sense that they are pushing you to buy their products.
Includes calls-to-action: 5
These links serve as effective calls-to-action, that help users get more contextual meaning from the blog.
Cross-promotes their other social media sites: 4
Their main blog, Buzz, incorporates iconic links to all of Roots other social media channels and includes the live feed from their Twitter account. They could have improved this aspect by also including their Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube feeds. However this would turn the page into more of a social media dashboard, or conglomerate page, which we already discussed above that they are missing.
Feels personal/human: 5
There’s nothing robotic or corporate here. Their blogs are written with an informative, yet personal tone, which tends to be what resonates best with consumer-based blog audiences.
Responds to comments: 0
Despite a left-column section that highlights blog comments, I could only find one user comment, and no one had responded to it. Social media is a two-communication medium, and it appears Roots could be doing a lot more to engage their audience in back-and-forth discussions.
User Feedback Community
In my digging on Roots’ web site I discovered a small link in the footer, “Share Your Story“, and this is the only reference to this page that I could find. This page leads to a page that encourages users to tell their story about their first love of Roots’ products and read about others’ stories. This type of content needs social media sharability and more visibility on the home page to be successful and useful. It’s a great idea with a poor implementation.
Score Card Summary
Home Page: 8/35
Landing & Detail Pages: 10/40
Blog: 24/30
As you can see, Roots does a poor job of incorporating their numerous social media channels into their web site; however they keep an excellent blog.
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