Need Inspiration?
A great way to get ideas for how your organization can use social media is to check out what others are doing. Here’s a comprehensive list of sites below (and one book) that will get you started.
Did I miss any collections? Please let me know in the comments and I’ll add them to this list.
- WOMMA’s Case Study Library
- List of 35+ Examples of Corporate Social Media In Action from Mashable
- Peter Kim’s Long List of Social Media Marketing Examples
- Ray Schiel’s Categorized List of Examples
- Get Elastic’s “110 Ways Retailers are Using Social Media Marketing“
- The Association Social Media Wiki’s List
- Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
- Now is Gone List of Case Studies
- The Corporate Twitter Awards List
- Forrester’s Groundswell Awards
- List of 75+ Big Brand Corporate Blogs
- Ignite Social Media’s 26 Social Media Marketing Examples In Depth
- The Twitter Brand Index
- NewPR/Wiki’s List of Corporate Blogs
- The Sniki Wiki Social Media Wiki
- 300+ Cases & Examples of Social Media Marketing
- Society for New Communications Research Award Winning Case Studies
- The Blog Council (NEW)
- Collaboration Project Case Studies Library
- 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them
- Hospital Social Network List
- Non-profits that Tweet
- GovTwit Directory
Described by WOMMA (the Word of Mouth Marketing Association) as: “a “how-to” resource intended to help you gain a better understanding of the different types of word of mouth marketing that exist, as well as how to put them to work for you.” This is a very usable tool that includes searchable database of word-of-mouth/social media case studies. You can also browse by categories such as “Create a Blog,” “Work with Online Communities” and “Establish A User Community.”
Mashable has a list of more than 35 examples of companies who are experimenting with Social Media along with links to examples of their social media effects in action.
Former Forrester analyst Peter Kim has compiled (and is keeping updated) a very long “A to Z” list of companies who are using social media. Examples range from Absolut Vodka’s YouTube Channel to Zappos’ 13 corporate blogs.
Peter has recently put these examples into a Wiki framework: Wiki of Social Media Examples for future collaborative efforts.
Peter has also provided a list of international social media case studies for Canada, Australia, Germany, Malaysia and the U.K. Note: For those interested- there is also a list of German social media case studies compiled by Benedikt Koehler on his German language blog – Social Media Marketing In Deutschland.
On his blog The Global Social Media Network, Ray has taken Peter’s list a step further and organized the examples into useful categories such as online video, blogs, social networks, widgets, etc.
Get Elastic, the E-Commerce blog has compiled a long list of examples of retailers using social media marketing in helpful categories such as Facebook applications, Youtube Videos and Podcasts, Second Life E-stores and Twitter applications. Separately, Econsultancy maintains a list of US retailers on Twitter and a list of UK retailers on Twitter.
The Association Social Media Wiki has a growing “A to Z” list of some 100+ associations using social media with links to the association’s social media web pages. Ranges from the American Library Association’s Second LIfe intiative to the Urban Land Institute’s blog.
Maintains a directory of Fortune 500 companies that have active public business blogs. The blogs are listed along with links to reviews of the blogs.
Geoff Livingston, author of the book Now is Gone maintains a list of social media case studies on his blog of the same name.
The Stratius Blog has a list of nominees and winners in categories of companies who are using Twitter. Includes companies such as Whole Foods and Jet Blue.
Write-ups on 150+ submissions for the 2008 awards as well as write-ups on the 2007 winners of the Groundswell Awards by Forrrester. The awards showcase organizations that have shown “excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal.” Nominees in 2008 include social media programs such as Quickbooks’ Community Site and Rubbermaid’s Adventures in Organization blog.
For more in-depth case studies, the book Groundswell written by former Forrester Analyst Charlene Li and current Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff cites 65 corporate examples including 25 full case studies in a variety of industries and countries around the world. Click here to check the book out on Amazon: Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Debbie Weil, author of the “Corporate Blogging Book” has posted a terrific list of 75 “Big Brand” corporate blogs from Accenture to Zillow. The list also includes some big name associations and non-profits.
Lisa Braziel is writing a series of posts taking an in depth look at 26 of Peter Kim’s social media marketing examples including Animal Planet, Clorox, Exxon Mobil, Delmonte Foods, and Best Western.
Provides a list organized into categories such as Business, Education, Entertainment, etc. with links to sub-categories within each.
An extensive A to Z list of corporate blogs on this Wiki, a collaborative tool for PR professionals
The Sniki Wiki Social Media Wikis lists companies (and also non-profits) leveraging social media for clients, and provides information on organizations building campaigns that integrate social media to connect with customers. You can add your organization’s social media activities to the growing list.
On his blog, Monty C. M. Metzger has pulled together a list of more than 300 companies who are active in the Social Media landscape.
The Society for New Communications Research has published 50+ case studies from their awards which honors individuals, corporations, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and media outlets that are pioneering the use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities, virtual worlds, and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media, journalism and professional communications, entertainment, education, social initiatives, government and politics.
The Blog Council, a group for senior executives responsible for social media at large corporations including Walmart and GE has it’s own blog The Blog Council Blog that specifically covers corporate social media success stories and examples and also, in partnership with Alltop, offers immediate one-page access to over 150 corporate blogs – All The Top Corporate Blogs.
Watch videos from the October 08 Blogwell Conference: How Big Companies Use Social Media with presentations on Walmart, Graco, Intel, Cisco, UPS, The Home Depot and Kaiser Permanente.
Terrific set of case studies of social media in federal, state and local governments. The Collaboration Project is an independent forum of leaders committed to leveraging web 2.0 and the benefits of collaborative technology to solve government’s complex problems. Powered by the National Academy of Public Administration, this “wikified” space is designed to share ideas, examples and insights on the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the field of public governance.
From Mashable: Results from querying 40 of the best brands experimenting with Twitter about how they’re using the micro-blogging platform.
From Ed Bennett: Hospital web manager Ed Bennett maintains the Hospital Social Network List, which currently has over 185 hospitals with links to their official blog, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube sites. For other nice lists of Health 2.0 companies see Dose of Digital’s Pharma & Healthcare Social Media Wiki and the Health 2.0 Wiki
From Beth Kanter: Great roundup that includes list and examples of non-profits on twitter. Includes links to several different aggregated listings of non-profit Twitter pages. Includes link to Mashable’s rundown of 26 Charities and Non-profits Who Tweet.
Drectory of government agencies using Twitter with the goal of including all facets of government on Twitter: state and local, federal, contractors, reporters, academics, judicial branch and more. The list will be a living list and will be kept updated via BearingPoint’s own research, as well as submissions from site readers.
Other Interactive Insights Group Resources You May Find Helpful
How Smart Marketers Think Like Media Companies
HOW-TO: Write Effectively for Twitter and the Social Web
Facebook for Business Superguide
Superlist of What Not To Do In Social Media
HOW-TO Build & Manage Your Brand Identify with Social Media
Social Media Metrics Superlist – Measurement, ROI & More
December 3rd, 2008
Tags: caseStudies · Groundswell Awards · socialMedia99 Comments







99 responses so far ↓
What a brilliant and unbelievably useful list. Thanks guys
@dmhprior
Your very welcome@dmhprior! Let us know if you find any other lists we should add.
Many thanks for sending these invaluable resources. This is an amazing and useful list!
amazing post…seriously!! thanks a lot guys.
robin since u asked about other useful lists-posts on various statistics of the digital platform since nos put up by various people/bodies vary a lot. a consolidated list of all the relevant stats -1 for only social media,1 for mobile marketing & 1 for internet in general will be quite useful.
Very useful, thanks for all the research and sharing!
Robin, thanks for pulling this list together. Super useful!
Great list of lists Robin, I would love to see the long list of case studies aggregated and categorized based on business function, ie. marketing, product development, employee communication, PR, customer engagement etc. also differentiating between tactics and strategy. Maybe a spreadsheet is in order, I will give it a go when I get time.
Thanks Karl. Please let me know if you create a spreadsheet to categorize this as you mention and I will link to it here!
Excellent , very useful!
Thanks for adding us to the list, Robin! We definitely appreciate it.
—-
312-932-9000 / michael@blogcouncil.org / twitter: merubin
I am a Blog Council employee and this is my personal opinion.
[...] the pudding. Share case studies. I have some on Delicious here. Mr. Brogan has a pile of them here. This post has a ton of other resources. (No more telling me you don’t have examples of people doing [...]
kick ass list, i just sent this around to everyone on twitter, love it!
i think it would also be great to have a list of social media failures, if there are any.
Jacob
Thanks Jacob. I’ve actually been collecting some links to “anti-case studies” or bad examples so to speak…hope to compile them at some point in the future.
Insipred by Peter Kim, I started a wiki that’s meant to capture Canadian examples of social media work. Of course, there will be some overlap with several on the lists on here, but I’m hoping that this becomes a Canadian resource for those involved with social media to share their work.
http://socialmediacasestudies.wetpaint.com/
Killer list! It struck me how often these will need to keep updating (fortune 500 blogs, twitter brands, etc.). But it’s really nice to be able to see who were the first to the game… I’ll come back for sure. @mistabhilash
Federated Media’s CRO & Publisher, Chas Edwards, chronicles metrics, successes & flaming disasters in digital marketing at http://chasnote.com/ (and yes, he’s my boss, but don’t hold that against him).
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We have two case studies on our blog and it would be wonderful if you could have a look
First one is on one of our clients – Kaya Skin Clinic
http://windchimesindia.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/kayaonline/
Second is on Barack Obama political campaign
http://windchimesindia.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/barackobama/
Nimesh
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Great list, going to take me sometime to get through this.
Bit slow on the uptake of this post, thanks to Senor Rubel for sharing, although I probably already missed Jacobs share.
Thanks for this huge list of lists. I also published a list of German social media marketing cases some weeks ago: http://blog.metaroll.de/2008/11/28/social-media-marketing-in-deutschland/
Great list, Robin! I would like to add a few additional list/resources. Government is doing alot in this space right now.
See The Collaboration Project from the National Academies of Public Adminstration for a terrific set of case studies of social media/collaboration in federal, state and local goverments. http://www.collaborationproject.org/display/case/Case+Studies
Also, see USA.GOV for a number of directories like:
Government Blogs: http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/News/blog.shtml
RSS Library: http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Libraries/RSS_Library.shtml
Finally, a (looong) list of government tweeters on Twitter is available at http://twitter.pbwiki.com/USGovernment.
Cheers!
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Great list! Very comprehensive! Thanks! @dyejo
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Robin. Agree with all those here. Great work! And, it goes on… I guess I should thank all your guest blogger/commenter’s as well. This blog has been a goldmine of advise and advisors. Bookmarked this one. Thanks again. @rickshatto
91 cases:
http://patternlanguagenetwork.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Cases/
and
74 design patterns:
http://patternlanguagenetwork.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Patterns/
Thanks for sharing.
@litmanlive
This is absolutely terrific. I am going to make a blog post on this.
I maintain the Hospital Social Network List, which currently has over 185 hospitals with links to their official blog, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube site. – http://ebennett.org/hsnl
Hi Ed. Thanks so much for bringing the list you maintain to my attention. I’ve updated the Superlist to include this! Health 2.0 is certainly an exciting area!
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thanks for an incredible resource and your hard work to put this together. it is much appreciated by your fellow social media industry peers.
I’ve referenced this list on my own blog and hope readers follow my advice to make sure and visit here and give you a big ol’ THANK YOU!
Thank you Mark! I appreciate your nice comments and also the fact that you have referenced this post on your own blog!
Excellent post. I like the one with the hospital list, since I have a medical centre in Bangladesh and intend to open another one there that will be non-profit and I am building a network of support.
You have indirectly assisted in this coming into fruition.
Thanks
Azzam
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I created Matrix for social media efforts (On Twitter, Blog, YouTube, iPhone App Store, Flickr, Facebook) by 20 US retailers. Readers of this blog can have a look @ http://www.infosysblogs.com/multi-channel-retailing/2009/03/iphone_apps_the_latest_entrant.html
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Excellent and comprehensive list.
As a community manager working to enhance the brand of my clients, these sort of comprehensive looks at the industry are invaluable.
Best,
Mike McDermott
Bash Foo Social Media
http://bashfoo.org
Very useful! Thanks, I will pass this along.
Very good collection. I´ve twittered your link at http://twitter.com/Steinhoefel1/status/1686521160
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Amazing article thanks….
Thanks for sharing I’ve just collected some links for my job
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Great list..
@socialhospital
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Visible Banking: The Directory of Social Media Initiatives in Financial Services http://bit.ly/7KKmHM
Agree with comment #1, “What a brilliant and unbelievably useful list”.
Think you can add some more companies to your list:
IBM, IKEA (as in http://www.scribd.com/doc/20001363/Social-Network-for-Corporate-Internal-Communication)
Nokia, Intel, TransUnion, ICAEW Online community, SocialMediaToday LLC (as in http://www.slideshare.net/david_terrar/the-business-case-for-corporate-social-networks-1552528)
Congratulations for your work, incredible work!
Thanks for all, this post is the best post to found emarketing exemples, thanks!
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Hi. This is a great and really helpful list.
Here at The Group we’ve put together a corporate blogging directory you might find useful. To try to make sense of the corporate blogosphere the (ever-growing) directory is divided into company blogs (the perspective from inside companies) and insight blogs (the view from those on the outside looking in) and contains over 220 entries.
Take a look here: http://www.the-group.net/index.asp?pageid=230
Thank you Frank for leaving the link to your Blog Resource!