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30/11/2011 by
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Corporate Social Media Summit – Part I

ViralBlog were kindly invited to join the Corporate Social Media Summit hosted in London on the 28th and 29th of November. This is part 1 of our full coverage of both days.

Interestingly, most people in the room were senior marketers at some of the largest and most successful brands. All these brands clearly social media very seriously as there did not appear to be a single intern in the room!

In fact, at first glance it was surprising to see that most participants were slightly older than you might have expected. This shows that senior marketers are clearly realising the impact of social media on their brands.

Session 1 – Sales As Part Of The Social Mix, Where It Fits And How To Make It Work For You

The day started with a presentation from Bill Tolany, head of Promotional Commerce at Whole Foods. Whole Foods has a
relatively small marketing budget and relies largely on Word of Mouth, of course making social media a perfect fit for their organisation.

Local stores have a lot of autonomy in the way they approach their local community. This means that in social media each store has their own social media presence to engage with that local audience. From a central perspective HQ liaises between stores and provides best practices, content and advice. This is done by one FTE as well as people who have a part responsibility towards social media.

A few comments during this presentation stood out:

– Their social content is spread 85% responses / 10% content / 5% promotions and this grew organically

– It’s OK to repeat messages, as they can get lost in the volume of updates. If people don’t appreciate what you
are doing, they will tell you. Test, rather than make assumptions

– Email is still a crucial element of the marketing strategy and drives most sales. Integrate this into your social strategy, it’s part of your fanbase (think Owned media, before Earned and Paid)

– Encourage people to react/interact. Ask questions, leave blanks for them to fill, etc.

Session 2 – Harness Top Quality Engagement & Build a Solid And Broad Fanbase To
Utilise Enhance Engagement Strategies

This presentation was followed by a panel made up of Debbie Weinstein (Unilever), Michelle Hayes (Paddy Power), Joe
Hanley
(IBM) and Wendy Gold (Microsoft).

The panel focused on engagement strategies, with each panel member giving a brief case study around work their brand had done.

Key take aways from each panel speaker:

Unilever

–  Match social media tactics to a business opportunity

– Drive people up the Advocacy curve: Fan > Social CRM > WOM at scale

– 3 keys to social CRM: Continuous, Valuable, Conversational

Unilever has a central excellence team which provides education, best practices and testing. Executation and
implementation is done by Global and Local brand teams.

Paddy Power

Paddy Power’s strategy consists of 4 elements: Monitor > Serve > Engage > Excite

They started with an audit to see where people were talking about the brand and topics relevant to the brand.

Interestingly, a case was mentioned where their Twitter audience was asked to give suggestions for the football player
they wanted to see in the next Paddy Power TV ad.

The Paddy Power social team’s focus is split as follows:

Listening – 10/15 hours per week

Engaging – 15/20 hours per week

Measuring – 5/10 hours per week

IBM

The IBM case was around the launch of Watson, a new B2B tool by IBM. To illustrate its potential they signed up Watson as a contestant on the hugely popular Jeopardy TV show.

This campaign resulted in a huge uptake (over 1.3 billion impressions) even among consumers, although it was a B2B
product, simply because it was a very powerful story. A decade earlier a PC, Deep Blue, became the first PC to beat a grand master at Chess – could a similar machine achieve the same result on Jeopardy.

As this machine was geared towards the field of medicine IBM engaged with the online medical community and influential bloggers to bring about a dialogue. They asked their opinion how this could have the most positive impact on their profession. Interestingly, IBM used experts from within the company to deal with these infuencers, which allowed them to add value through expertise and insights.

Four key learnings for IBM from this campaign were:

1) Add value

2) Create a constituency

3) Encourage people to learn

4) What’s the extra final incentive?

Microsoft

At Microsoft digital sits largely within the PR team. Marketing and customer service are involved and there are monthly editorial meetings to ensure all teams are aligned.

Microsoft is often perceived as a huge corporate beast, completely closed off from the world around it. As such they have made moves to become more open, which means that each employee is free to express him or herself through blogging. This helps them become more open and approachable.

Their moves into social have largely been triggered by their learnings from the launch of Windows Vista, which has universally been seen as a nightmare case study.

To avoid a similar scenario they opened up the process and created a Beta version of the product, allowing anyone who wanted to test the product before it was officially launched. This resulted in over 8 million test drivers of Windows 7.

They follow a 3 step process: Listening > Learning > Engaging.

Our partners SocialMedia8 have actually worked on this programme and you can see the case study on their website.

Q & A

A few interesting comments also came from the following Q & A with this panel.

– Influencers should be invited in and be made part of the process

– Complaints should be taken out off the public domain and dealt with individually

– Most social media activities were being managed in-house, but there is a large role for agencies to provide a wider perspective and avoid tunnel-vision

Session 3 – Social Media Sells – From Consumer Engagement To Delivering Business
Objectives

This session focussed on how Living Social utilises social media to bridge the gap between online engagement and offline
footfall to stores.

Living Social’s core goal is to utilise online conversations to drive offline traffic into brick and mortar stores. The
presentation was largely focussed on Living Social as a platform and what it offers brands, there were some interesting take aways:

– For their model to work they need to provide new and exciting deals each day. Their content needs to be spot on
for their audience

– They are very good at understanding their audience and tailoring experiences towards their needs

– Offering an experience is absolutely crucial in getting people to talk about something and share it

Lastly, they follow a four-step model of customer engagement: Interact, Engage, Act, Feedback.

They also shared a very cool video of a guerila campaign they have done recently. Certainly a very shareworthy experience.

YouTube Preview Image

Stay tuned for part II of our coverage.