Corporate Social Media Summit – Part II

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

During this second part of day 1 we saw brands such as GSK, Cisco, Lego and O2/Telefonica discuss some of the hottest topics within the industry right now.

Session 4 – Workflow And Process – How To Order Social Media Within A Multi-National Corporation

On this panel, Andrew Warden (Cisco), Al Shah (GSK) and Roy Jaqcues (Sysomos) discussed how social media could be evangalised, structured and encouraged internally within large corporation. Each panelist started with a brief presentation, for which we have the highlights below.

Cisco

Andrew Warden started by saying that at Cisco Mobile and Social are very much seen as intertwined, rather than separate elements. His argument centred around the fact that mobiles are very social objects. As such any internal policies should coverd both these fields.

He highlighted that from a policiy perspective there were 3 key stakeholder groups he had to deal with:

• Employees
• Customers & Partners
• Management

Cisco is one of the leading app developers within the Apple App store and as such are constantly dealing with the issues around ensuring user adoption. Andrew provided a number of tips to increase adoption levels and ensuring your efforts don’t fall flat:

• From the very beginning invite all departments to ensure they can have their say early on. Don’t alienate anyone
• Start small. Find the evangalists and early adopters and grow your base from there

GSK

Al Shah talked about the issues he had to deal with in getting GSK to adopt social media technologies. He mentioned several crucial reasons why he felt a corporation such as GSK should encourage use of social media internally:

• Improve collaboration
• Break down internal silos
• Raise morale and increase employee retention

In order to be able to gain buy-in from the key internal stakeholders its important to demonstrate success stories and prove value, both to the employee who will use the technologies and the management team who’ll have to sponsor and allow it.

He listed a few crucial success factors in getting employees engages with social technologies:

• Develop trust
• Allow fun & social engagement, don’t restrict the use of these tools to work only
• Don’t force use

You need to give people the space to find their own value from these tools.  He also provided two top tips on how to convince senior management:

• Build a case around an existing business concern
• Don’t use buzz words and talk in the language they know

Al mentioned an internal case study where through a message board GSK managed to rule out a new product development track thanks to cross-departmental collaboration through social technologies.This saved the company months of time and millions of pounds. That’ music to the ears of senior management.

Sysomos

So far, there are plenty of companies who have demonstrated great success with social media from one angle (for example to create awanress or increase sales), but very few have been able to demonstrate a sustainable long term integrated approach.

Interestingly, Roy noted that most brands still enter the space out of fear rather than focussing on the opportunities. This is a point I have argued previousy.

According to Roy there currently are three phases most businesses are in with regards to social media :

• Trial
• Transition
• Strategic

It should be the goal for each company to move down this path to eventually have a fully fledged long term social media strategy.

Session 5 – Establish Your Social Media Team As Thought Leaders And See The Long Term Proft

This panel saw Lars Silberbauer from Lego and Tamara Korcak-Novicka provide an insights into how their companies are currently active within social media.

Lego

The focus for Lego is all around the long term and about creating sustainable engagement. In order to do so it’s essential to understand people’s social needs.

Lars highlighted a couple of very interesting things:

• The company owns the trademark, but people own the brand. Don’t be afraid to set the brand free
• Lego has segmented their customers in various groups. The most frequent and high volume buyers are not marketed to increase sales, but are leveraged as crucial influencers and ambassadors
• Lego stimulates people to use Lego bricks as a creative tool and let their imagination run free. They have both Owned and Earned media platforms for User Generated Content where they engage with Lego fans
• Lego do deal with issues via social media, but always try and take the conversation out of the public domain

He also showed a case study around George, a fictionary Lego character that was created to launch a Lego mobile app.  They created a specific Facebook Fanpage for George and people were encouraged to let George travel the world and post the coolest pictures of his travels. I encourage to go and check the Facebook Fanpage as it really demonstrates high engaged people can be with a brand.

Lars also pointed out that social media cannot fix a brand, but it should build on the core premis of the product. If this promise sucks, social media will not change this.

O2/Telefonica

Tamara highlighted her 3 step approach to creating a cross regional social media strategy for a large corporation

• Evaluate current use of social media across the regions
• Develop consistent strategy
• Create a framework for measurement

Telefonica has a cross regional overarching strategy, but the local regions have freedom to adjust this approach for local needs.  From a central perspective the Telefonica team enables the local teams to exectute through various means:

• Providing guidelines, policies and frameworks
• Building overall business cases around local examples and campaigns
• Providing an internal platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration

From the very beginning senior managers from each region were included in the process. This helped get buy-in early on and ensured that Telefonica from the very top helped to stimulate the adoption of social media within the organisation.

Tha’ts it for day 1. Our coverage of Day 2 will follow next week.

Were you at the event? We’d love to hear your thoughts, so let us know in the comments.