Social listening - Tesla and the marketing of the future

Tesla is a company that has recently been getting a lot of attention. Whether it be from word of mouth, their very outspoken CEO Elon Musk, or how they've been changing the future of autonomous driving and electric vehicles. I chose to write about Tesla for multiple reasons, I am very interested in upgrading my vehicle soon and I am looking at electric type car as an option, and obviously you can never overlook Tesla itself. The second reason being I just recently watched the Joe Rogan podcast interview with Elon Musk on it and he is an extremely interesting person to me. Upon following both Tesla and Elon Musk on twitter, I came to realize something.. I have never once seen a Tesla ad but every person I know is fully aware of the Electric Vehicle company Tesla. With virtually no paid advertising, Tesla has one simple goal in mind; to provide some of the best in class EV models that offer high performance, energy efficiency, long range, and sleek designs and help make the future a better place. 

Both Elon Musk and Tesla themselves are extremely active on twitter. Twitter is my main access of social media and the primary one I use when I decide to spend my time on it. Though I dont use the app to its full function of interacting with random people and giving my opinion on everything that pops into my feed, I do like to follow brands and retweet the funny and/or cool things that show up in front of me. Looking onto the explore page with just one keyword; "Tesla", you can immediately find thousands of tweets of what people truly think of Tesla. 

This tweet was the first thing that stood out to me. Although good publicity and bad publicity are publicity none the less.. having a tweet like this from a verified user with 6000 followers is a negative voice to 6000 separate people which could spread like wild fires. Although there was no major replies of actual relevance, Tesla spearheading the autonomous driving movement, having car troubles cosmetic or not is never good. 

However, Elon Musk has been notorious for always being an extremely active twitter user and tends to frequently reply to Tesla owners via Twitter. Although the outcome of this tweet was unfortunately negative on @Lockl34r's end, having a CEO that seems like a real person and reaches out to people via his social networking platform tends to be a good thing more often than not.

Here we have general talk about Tesla as well. CleanTechnica is an account with about 160,000 followers on Twitter. You can see a lot of interaction with these accounts throughout twitter regarding comparisons of vehicles between Tesla and other EV companies. The fact a major EV twitter account is replying on behalf of Tesla themselves in good faith shows how far Tesla's word of mouth advertising has gotten them.

Tesla is a company that is trying to promote a cleaner and better future in the form of a luxury vehicle that is ever changing. Starting off with EV's, the company has slowly worked there way into making renewable resources such as solar panels a common place item. They have slowly began to capitalize on the clean environment movement and have done so by speaking not only with their actions, but throughout various social media platforms as well. I believe Tesla is using social media practices extremely well right now. Whether it be from Twitter, YouTube reviews, Instagram post or even having there CEO go on one of the most popular podcast out right now, Tesla is advertising extremely well for not using any traditional style marketing such as commercials.

Tesla isnt a perfect company however. Looking up how the company deals with customer service.. it has quite a large amount of mixed reviews from perfect service to "I will never purchase a Tesla product again." However, with all growing companies and one that is growing as fast as Tesla, customer service can be a tricky situation. Tesla currently doesnt have any customer service via twitter or any other social media.. That has been a growing field in regards of interacting with customers as the more platforms you can reach out to the farther  your name and brand will spread. From a personal stand point, if I was a brand manager I believe trying to respond to every customer is one task of a business. Having multiple customer service platforms that people can reach many different ways is a sign of a great company. Prompt replies from real representatives create a sense of realness that many companies lack today and are trying to gain back. I would always respond to the customer, however, I do not believe they are always right. I think giving the best answer you can give and hoping it can resolve the issue is the proper way to go about this.

This assignment was a lot trickier than I initially expected. It is actually quite difficult finding proper tweets and sources to help reinforce the point you are trying to make. I also learned that even a loud voiced CEO and great word of mouth doesnt solve the problem of having issues. Overall, this post was quite interesting as I got to delve into Tesla a little more and help create a more reinforced opinion of both the company Tesla and Elon Musk himself.