Social Strategy at Nike

，，Case study: social strategy at Nike

What defines a stakeholder?

A stakeholder in an organization is any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization's objectives.

How do stakeholders vary in their salience?

The stakeholder identification can be based on three variables:

Power to influence the firm

Legitimacy of the stakeholders’ relationships with the firm

The urgency of the stakeholders claim on the firm.

The stakeholders can be divided into the following types:

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(Source:Adapted from Mitchell et al. 1997, p.873.)

What are the challenges of managing different stakeholders?

1.As a project manager, it is common to get many disparate visions from different

stakeholders, so it is a challenge to get all disparate visions aligned with reality, and keep them that way as the project progresses and variables change. it’s also one that’s critical to the project’s success.

1. The stakeholders lose confidence in your ability to do your job effectively, so they don’t

have so much passion to do work.

3. It is easy to have divergence between different stakeholders when they don’t have a common understanding of the scope, the timing, the budget and the resource demands during projects.

4.It is very hard and important to let every stakeholder know the details and how the whole project is processing.

Who are Nike’s stakeholders?

Customers; communities; employees; governments and interest groups.

Direct stakeholders of Nike are Mark Parker, Douglas Houser, Trevor Edwards, Donald Blair and Charles Denson. In regards to companies, Vanguard Group and Growth Fund of America are two of the largest stakeholders in Nike. 84 percent of Nike shares belong to institutional and mutual fund firms.

Who are Nike’s partners?

Apple Inc; TomTom; Atmos; Futura; Dupont; EA SPORTS; APC; Aston Martin; Everlast; LLamasoft; Liberty London; Payless; Rane; Philips and so on.

How does Nike engage stakeholders in a different way?

1.understanding: in the early stages of program development, Nike engages stakeholders

to help understand issues like what are some of the challenges we face? Where are the

greatest challenges?

2.weighing options: When having ideas as to the direction of grantmaking, Nike vet ideas with key stakeholders to help better consider the pros and cons of different approaches.

3.prioritizing: once having developed five or six areas that could successfully focus on, Nike engage key stakeholders to help prioritize among those areas.

4.implementing: make stakeholders to be key partners in helping with implementation.

5.cheerleading: engaging stake leaders from the beginning and kept them abreast of progress and decision making, then they’ll buy in to what you are trying to accomplish and they may help spread the word about what you are trying to achieve.

6.evaluating: stakeholders can be involved in evaluation planning, and they can inform your evaluation team about what’s working and what’s not working from their perspective.

What advantages does this social strategy have for the organization?

This social strategy helps foster closer relationships with customers and create a community and link product with experience.

Evaluate the Nike+ ecosystem as a foundation for the company’s social strategy.

Nike first started with Nike.com website and work with the up-and -coming media group Gawker and emerging Internet video site YouTube, also, they created a blog called Art of Speed. Even the traffic was not staggering, the Nike’s communications manager still said that it’s the right community, it may be small but it’s an important and influential group. This really showed that Nike really want to foster a connection with its customers.

Also, Nike linked with MySpace acquired lots of friends which allowed Nike to become one of the biggest worldwide company on the global football soccer market. Partnering with Google to develop another social network website called

yoga.com. This website focused on football soccer and mainly for the people who loved it. From this website, it is useful for consumers to foster a closer relationship with the sport and the world cup so that way it associated with the Nike brand. Besides that, people can create discussion groups through online TV channels from Joga.com. So from the website, it is obvious that Nike tried their best efforts and really wanted to get feedback from its consumers. Nike was still able to create a community and have more of a collaborative network which also allowed for higher efficiency.