General Electric and Social Media

General Electric and Social Media

Introduction:

In 1892, a merger between Edison Electric Company and Thomson-Houston Electric Company formed the General Electric Company. (http://www.ge.com/about-us/history/thomas-edison)  General Electric is a global industrial conglomerate with the headquarters located in Fairfield, CT employing approximately 308,000 globally.  General Electric competes in over 175 countries in the following industries: Aviation, Healthcare, Power & Water, Oil & Gas, Energy, Lighting and Transportation. They had 148.6B in revenues in 2014. (GE Annual Report (2014), http://www.ge.com/ar2014/assets/pdf/GE_AR14.pdf)  “The GE Beliefs” drive the performance of the company and the actions of the employees.  The beliefs are; customers determine our success, stay lean to go fast, learn & adapt to win, empower & inspire each other and deliver results in an uncertain world. (GE Annual Report (2014), http://www.ge.com/ar2014/assets/pdf/GE_AR14.pdf) 

Benefits of Web:

According to J. Binder of Money Management, “An interview with Digiday, GE’s executive director of global marketing Linda Boff said that social platforms have allowed the company to get closer to its customers and tell stories about the human impact of what it does.” (https://econsultancy.com/blog/62684-how-general-electric-uses-facebook-twitter-pinterest-and-google/) “Social media is essential component of business development, relationship management, customer insight, communication and product management”. (Binder, 2014) GE has realized the advantage that social media has on their B2B market and is using the following social media types: Facebook (1.3 m likes), Twitter (343k followers), Instagram (186k followers), Pinterest (25k followers), Google+ (873k followers), Colab (100k+ users), Vine (110k followers), YouTube (66k videos) and Kaggle/GEQuest (http://www.gequest.com/). The numbers listed next to each one of the social media uses is only within the main GE page.  GE also has sub-pages by the business.   They can now have conversations with companies and people that share their passion. It gives opportunities to learn and share ideas.  They show the world that they are a company and that their brand is human.

Current Social Media Use:

When GE uses social media like Twitter and Facebook, it is to attract new business and keep the old customers.  Social media allows customers to see GE and the human impact that they do.  That is a key factor that GE uses social media to show how humanize the brand.  They allow people to see behind the scenes of what GE is. (Bhargava, 2014) Will now address each of the social media platforms GE is using today.

GE has attracted 17,000 followers on Pinterest which is giving brand exposure. (Moth, 2013) Instagram is showing images of jet engines, turbines, factories and locomotives which show that GE is more than appliances. (Frink, 2014) Vine allowed GE to launch #6SecondScience Fair, which encouraged people to shoot their own science experiments. (Frink, 2014) Vine and GE with the #6SecondScience Fair allowed interaction by allowing sharing anyone’s ideas to potentially be featured and recognized by GE. (Bhargava, 2014)

 In 2013, GE reported Google+ having 42,000 followers on the main GE site (Moth, 2013) but according to www.ge.com you see that they now have 873,584 so social media usage is increasing.  Like all of GE social media sites the photos and images are incredible.  Kaggle and GEQuest is a crowdsourcing community.  It is a community of data for scientist to inspire conversations between each other. (Bhargava, 2014)  The latest experiment on www.gequest.com is challenge participant’s models that better optimize flight paths and reduce airline costs.  The last social media is Colab.  This is an internal used social media that allows GE employees to communicate on projects, blog or collaborate.  We have the ability to join canvas or streams and allows us to keep up with what is happening globally within GE.  This is where the social media revolution began for GE.  "One of the things that make GE work is being able to collaborate across diverse business sets, and so from that perspective we've always looked at how we get employees together to solve problems and share best practices," Utterbeck said. "So from an ROI perspective, we didn't spend any time figuring out the dollar nuts and bolts on this -- we know the value is there." (Golulart, 2012)