General Electric is a global digital industrial company with products ranging from aircraft engines, power generation, and oil and gas production. The company has presence in approximately 180 countries across the globe. Until recently, the company’s segments included Power, Renewable Energy, Oil & Gas, Aviation, Healthcare, Transportation, Energy Connections & Lighting and Capital. Over the past year, GE has streamlined its focus around its Power and Aviation sectors. (Source)
As mentioned, GE has streamlined its focus and has been in the news a lot lately after sector spinoffs and sales, new CEOs and stock price volatility. Knowing that, understanding GE’s brand sentiment is important. To most “cleanly” pull brand sentiment information on General Electric as a company (vs. productions) I used “@generalelectric”. The mentions that appeared seemed to all do with GE as a company. “@generalelectric” brand sentiment ratings on Social Mention indicated:
- 36%likelihood it is being discussed on social
- 1:1 sentiment (positive compared to negative)
- 31% passion (repeated mentions of brand by same author)
- 31% reach (uniques referencing brand/total mentions)
In 2017, before the more recent company spinoffs and stock price falls, GE launched the #BalancetheEquation campaign. #BalancetheEquation came from an announcement from GE that they established a goal of having 20,000 women filling STEM roles at GE by 2020-which would be a 50:50 representation for all their technical entry-level programs. (Source) The campaign hijacked other trending hashtags to push the message of #Balancetheequation (Image Source). Shandrow states, ” Start by creating and posting more of the kind of content that you notice followers like, share and comment on the most.” (Source). In the case of GE, they almost guaranteed they were using content followers tended to like, share and comment on by using popular and trending content and conversations.
After reviewing the campaign that came to life on social, I dug into some of the qualitative and quantitative data to inform how the campaign preformed and how it could have been optimized.
Quantitative
- Ratings of the top languages used when #BalancetheEquation is mentioned helps understand geographically who is participating in the conversations
- Understanding different spelling variants of the hashtag, particularly when it is a main communication point in the campaign, helps optimize content (social or not) to best resonate with the audience
(Image Source)
Qualitative
- Understanding the most used hashtags/phrases that accompany #BalancetheEquation give context to how the audience is talking about the social campaign. This information can be used to continue the conversation with the audience in the same way they are currently having it
(Image Source)
In Shadrow’s article, it states, “The top metrics to track are the number of followers you attract and keep, along with cost per lead and cost per acquisition” (Source). ROI in the case of the GE #BalancetheEquation social campaign would relate to the number of women STEM recruits or hirers they received during the duration of the social campaign to meet their goal in 2020 in comparison to how much paid support they put behind the initiative.
Jennifer Layton 