EcoSure

The third company I talked to was EcoSure. EcoSure was happy to help me, but could not reveal who their clients are due to company client confidentiality. That is why there are no specific companies names involved in their answers or this entry.

Background:

EcoSure is a food safety and quality assurance service division of Ecolab. They focus on Brand Protection, Food Safety and Risk Minimization Services to the Food Service, and Hospitality and food supply Industries. They have over 400 certified professionals across the country that helps provide: food safety evaluations, brand standards assessments, customized training, data management, employee/guest safety assessments, guest experience assessments, and health reporting.

Analysis:

Currently EcoSure only has a blog and a message board for their Specialists. It is used to allow their Specialists to communicate with each other. The reason they have a general message board is for anyone and everyone who had a question to be able to post it and it allows the Specialists to answer those questions, and it allows everyone to see it. They also use it to provide the individual businesses and customer program updates to their contractors.

Over all, they say that they keep the blog relatively updated, although they said it depends on the cycle they are on. Sometimes it’s updated multiple times a day and sometimes it’s only once a week. But over all they do make it a priority to keep it as updated as possible by their customer support team.

As stated above, they only have a blog and a message board, but they are very open to using other social media sites. They said that the reason that they haven’t gotten more involved was due to the fact that they didn’t want to overwhelm their employees by having too many social media sites to keep up with.

According to the Groundswell Forrester B2B Profile Tool with 100-499 employees and the primary purchase category being services, their main categories are Spectators at 74% and Joiners and Critics are tired at 37%. Spectators read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video from other users, read online forums, read customer ratings/reviews, and read tweets. Joiners maintain profile on a social networking site, and visit social networking sites. Critics post ratings/reviews of products or services, comment on someone else’s blog, contribute to online forums, contribute to/edit articles in a wiki.

The best plan of action for EcoSure to get more involved with social media that would help their company, would be to have a more a blog that is more accessible by the public. Where not only their Specialists can post questions and answers but allow their clients to post problems, complaints, praise, and/or love for EcoSure. By doing that, they would be able to send that link to perspective clients which would give them a way to look the communication between the clients and specialists and the EcoSure headquarters. And it would show them how problems (or possible problems that could arise if EcoSure were hired) were solved. It would also be wise for them to have a LinkedIn account as well since their main focus for clients are other businesses. It would be an easy way for one company to look up another without having to contact them. A twitter, which may not be 100% necessary, I also think would be helpful to keep in contact with their Specialists, Clients, and other employees, in a user friendly way that's short, sweet and to the point.

Conclusion:

There are a few different ways that EcoSure can get more involved in social media and by doing so, they potentially have a way of also boosting their ROI. It would be something that would take a lot of time to get started and it would potentially need to be someone's main focus, but I definitely think that it is something that could pay off in the end.