Driving Social Media From Behind the Firewall

This is a guest post from Michael Brito, and the fourth and final installment in the Internal Social Media series. Michael is here to share with us some of his actual, real-life experiences with implementing social media inside organizations.  Special thanks to Michael for sharing his experiences from the trenches. You can follow Michael on Twitter or check out his social media blog.

Most of my professional career, I have been fortunate enough to work for some fantastic global brands; Hewlett Packard, Yahoo! and Intel. Within these organizations, my core focus has been driving consumer engagement using tools and strategies of the social web. And even though HP, Yahoo! and Intel are completely different organizations, many of the same challenges and conversations have arisen quite consistently.

Here are some things I have learned a long that way that I hope you can start thinking about within your organizations or small business:

Measuring Social ROI

A few years ago, it was the standard to measure growth rates in Twitter followers, Facebook fans and RSS subscribers.  Couple that data with a few slides from Omniture and management was all good; they rarely asked any questions. Even today, these are still very important metrics to analyze and report on but the bar has been raised.

The question we need to start asking ourselves is “how do we go about quantifying these numbers to show how they drive true business value and/or revenue?” Some have done a really good job, like Dell and the Dell Outlet Twitter account; but even then, there are several unknowns like the whether or not the sales from that program cannibalized higher margin sales on Dell.com or elsewhere.

I have read post after post that talks about “100 ways to measure social media”; and while these may be really good ideas, I think that having 100 ways to measure social media is contributing to the problem.  There is a lack of focus and specificity; like having metrics A-D-D.  If I am leading a marketing organization, all I have time to look at is 2- 3 metrics max.

So, these metrics should give me the insight to determine if the amount of financial investment I contribute to social media is actually driving sales, retaining customers or cutting costs. I don’t have the magic formula because there isn’t one. It will be different for every organization. And driving brand awareness won’t cut it anymore.

Research

There was a time in my life when I hated research; especially since I spent three years in grad school, yes three.  But research is a valuable asset if you do more than just talk about it.

The Forrester Social Technographic Latter of Participation is a great resource that allows marketers to understand how their users interact and behave on the social web. At Intel, we hired Forrester to map our internal audience segments to the technographic profile and the insights we learned were eye opening.  Since then and during my tenure at Intel, we used that data (which was not public) to drive many of our social media engagements; some of which are still in existent.

For example, last year at Intel we launched Digital Drag Race as a part of the Core i7 product launch. Digital Drag Race was a contest that focused on user generated video. We knew from the research that a high percentage of our segment was considered content creators (i.e. those who create content and share it on the web) so we built the entire program around that specific behavior.  The results were fantastic and we exceeded the metrics goals we decided upon prior to launch.

Top-Down Organizational Support

If an organization is not ready to embrace social media 100% internally from their leaders, they will not succeed in driving effective customer relationships externally. Embracing social media is more than simply saying “we want to join the conversation” and then investing a couple hundred thousand on a Facebook app promoting the next product. It’s a cultural shift that starts at the core of the organization; with the very people who represent the brand.

It is critical that management empower their organizations to work collaboratively. Building communities from behind the firewall is no easy task. There are a lot of things to consider; and collaboration across the organization (marketing, legal, PR, business units, customer support) is imperative. Decisions can take months and sometime years. Having adequate support and empowerment from senior management is important, especially during the budget planning process.

Full scale integration with other marketing channels: launching a blog, twitter account and Facebook page is useless unless there is tight integration across the board with retail, online, search, channel partners, resellers, paid media and the list goes on.  I don’t think it’s realistic that every piece of external communication has “social” built into it but it should at least be explored. In my experience, social media is usually an afterthought and this needs to change. Social media is an excellent way to humanize a brand; and adoption of it is growing exponentially across the globe. It’s important that brands think about integration from the beginning to prevent themselves from having disjointed, irrelevant communications.

Seeking Participation Across the Organization

A blog is good, but a blog without a solid editorial calendar, a human voice and a subject matter expert is not good.  Too many times, marketing and PR departments launch blogs and expect for people to actually read them.  I am sure it happens in some cases, but the true value in social media is when you have subject matter experts engaged with consumers on the social web answering product relates questions and/or offering customer support.

This brings up a whole new set of challenges, especially if the organizational culture has not fully embraced social media.  Usually marketing and PR departments have to seek out “volunteers” in the organizations or find the employees that are already active in the space. And even then, most employees who are interested in volunteering and are passionate about their products have other responsibilities so bandwidth becomes an issue.

The last thing you want to happen is for an employee to build up a solid reputation online and become a “trusted advisor”; to then have to abandon the community because of bandwidth. One solution would be to hire dedicated “technical advisors” where their sole responsibility would be to engage online; or seek management support in adding in “social participation” related job responsibilities within various job roles across the organization (i.e. a network engineer would code 80% of the time; and blog/tweet/whatever for 20% of the time). It would be part of their job and they would be measured on it.

Global Social Media Programs

This was part of my responsibility at Intel and it’s not easy. What may work in the US, Canada and maybe the UK will not necessarily work in India. For global brands, this nut has yet to been cracked but there are some good learning and best practices that can help brands manage this.

At Intel, there was a team that launched and managed a “social media integration forum” conference call once a month. Marketing leads from across the world attended and shared a little about any past or present campaigns or promotions. The calls were excellent but the challenge was that they were rarely actionable.  It was more about sharing and less about planning.

Marketing departments must not only share what’s going on in their regions; but they should also work together on integration with these various programs.  It’s going to be a challenge because social media is culturally driven.  However, there are certain things that US teams can do to help other regions succeed in the social web like providing digital assets (videos, widgets) that can be translated in various languages. Also providing a tool set or framework that will help global teams to create blogs/communities; and then consistent sharing of best practices and key insights.

Your Turn…

Thanks again, Michael, for sharing your practical and tangible experience around internal social media! What do you say folks? What questions might you have for Michael, and what experiences have you had that might be similar or different? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments.

Tagged as: Michael Brito, Online Communities, Organizational culture, Social media, Social network