FreshNetworks Blog

Social business - the scale is international

Continuing from our definition of  social business, this post will introduce look at 3 brief case studies of multinational companies that have successfully adopted social business.

As part of the 2.0 Adoption Council, IBM (in association with MIT Center for Digital Business and the Dachis Group) has published a series of case studies demonstrating integrated social business. Here is a summary of three of the largest:

Alstom

The French multinational has 70,000 employees across 70 countries – giving great collaboration potential, but the formation was fragmented  due to growth through acquisitions and mergers.

The Alstom University focused on their people and process before considering technology. Running a series of pilot communities allowed them to receive executive buy-in, which promoted adoption by employees. Awareness about the community platforms and collaboration tools was achieved by a video shown at company events, and education was provided through an e-learning programme.

By taking this people-centric approach Alstom succeeded in creating a collaborative culture throughout the company, where the social tools were treated as a means instead of an end, and collaboration was not relegated to being used only virtually.

IBM

In an organisation as large as IBM (nearly 400,000 employees worldwide),  initiating change requires advocates.

IBM’s initial aim was to develop social collaboration for the IBM sales team, but their long term aim was to roll this out to the entire business. In IBM’s case a pool of 50 enthusiasts grew to 250 within six months, and was over 1,300 within a year.

An important part of IBM’s approach was to highlight the benefits of collaboration to its employees through blogging and sharing content. The aim to “evangelize everyone” and promote understanding of the benefits has been reinforced with top-down encouragement, with IBM CEO and President Sam Palmisano encouraging all IBM staff to use social collaboration in their day to day work.

Nokia

With almost 60,000 employees and an autonomous culture, Nokia found that social media tools were being used independently of each other and social media silos existed throughout the business. The challenge was for Nokia to harness these individual networks into one collaborative social business strategy.

The success hinged on executive support, which granted two internal pilots to take place in the business. The micro-blogging pilot has already seen success, and a crowd-sourcing pilot has even resulted in a change to the company culture. One key benefit was a boost to employee morale – the feeling that they are being listened to and the potential for recognition of their ideas has given the company a “feeling of connectedness”.

Learnings

It’s essential for buy-in from an executive level in order for a large company to become a social business. It’s also important to remember that technology should only enter the equation after considering the people who will be using it. These mini case studies show the strength of social business in terms of scale.

As all these examples are technology companies – it could be argued that they could integrate social business more naturally. In the next post of this series, we’ll look at companies who are already using social media and should be thinking about taking it further – if you have any suggested examples please do leave a comment below.

“Social business” – what does it mean? We’ll be exploring the concept of a social business in a series of blog posts over the coming weeks.

What is social business?

The term “social business” predates social media (referring to “a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective” – Wikipedia).

However, in the context of social media we define it as: the implementation of the unique communicative properties of social media across all levels of a business.

Examples of social business integration would be:

• Collaboration tools – allowing colleagues to work on a project simultaneously and remotely.
• Customer service – responding to questions, complaints and suggestions made on social networks. This can be handled collaboratively such as BestBuy’s Twelpforce.
• Internal communication – intuitive messaging that is free from fragmentary nature of email.
• Social CRM (SCRM) – customers will increasingly expect consistency and awareness of their social history with a company, no matter who or what department they interact with.

Why should I be interested in social business?

While the marketing potential of social media is well known, social business offers smoother internal workflows for employees, as information is passed and updated in a fast and intuitive manner.

Consumer social media is important for communicating with the public, but Facebook or Twitter are not always suitable for internal use by enterprise, and so specialised software and tools are required. While these may have a Facebook-like “feel” to them for easy employee adoption, enterprises have to be prepared to roll out new platforms, as integration across the entire organisation is essential.

So why are companies not using social business yet?

Fundamentally it’s because businesses are daunted by the implications of making fundamental changes to their operation. While social business is designed to be scalable,  the first step  requires a desire and understanding of its importance from the top-down.

Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter has written on the topic of the “social maturity” of an organisation, and similarly their progression through a variety of organisational models. We will consider these models, and the future of social business, in the later posts of this series.

Image courtesy of shutterstock

During 2010 we saw a significant jump in the demand for pan-European social media strategy and execution. In some cases we’ve championed centralised operations and in others we’ve worked with local social media agency partners. We thought it might be useful to provide a social media agency list to help you find the very best in-country agencies out there.

Here’s our starting list of Europe’s top social media agencies. We’ve focused on independents and pure-plays where possible. Please let us know what other firms (and countries) deserve inclusion and we’ll keep it updated.

France

Affinitz – an independent social media agency with over 10 years of experience, Affinitz offers their own community platform which has been implemented by the French Military to create their own social network, and they have also developed a blogosphere for French lawyers. Affinitz also offer services for Facebook, with clients that include Virgin Megastores.

Social Strategie – a pure-play social agency that offers a variety of approaches to social strategy and community management.

Vanksen – a digital agency that offers social media, the group also has offices in Luxembourg,  Switzerland and the USA. They have considerable experience working with perfume brands such as Chanel, Givenchy and Roxy, and have recently launched the Facebook page for Citroen France.

There’s also some interesting discussion about this on Quora.  

Germany

KKLD* – as a creative advertising agency KKLD* has been working since 2005 in fields other than digital. Their clients for social media include BMW, Mini, Lufthansa and Telekom (T-Mobile).

Nodes – a pure-play social media agency with a team of 15, Nodes is particularly focussed on Facebook, and has developed apps, games and landing pages for clients that include VW Denmark, McDonalds, GSK, Pepsi and Dove.

TLGG – proclaim they are “Germany’s first social media agency”. Their clients include Subway, Triumph Motorcylces. Their work with Nutella has brought the brand’s Facebook fan count up to 110,000 and places it 10th out of all German brands on Facebook.

Italy

Ambito5 – the 5 refers to the different areas of digital that Ambito5 covers, however social media occupies a large portion of their portfolio. Clients for this team of 16 include Gucci, Sony and Virgin Active.

TheBlogTV – this innovative agency focus on user generated advertising, primarily via video and TV shows, but also offers community creation and management. Their crowdsourced video content has been used by Fiat, Honda and lastminute.com

Populis – the 6 different languages that the homepage is available in give a clue to the expansive range of Populis’ content, with articles and videos created by native speakers. Based in Italy and Ireland, their professional Italian blog network Blogosfere is the largest of its kind.

The Netherlands

Favela Fabric – more of a social business consultancy, they seem open collaboration and value creation. Clients include KLM, Shell and ABM AMRO.

Finchline – this social media monitoring and analysis agency focuses exclusively on media and comments made in Dutch, reducing noise and clutter. They also offer free social media boot camps twice a month.

Tribewise – in addition to social media services, Tribewise are offering a white paper which describes 20 case studies of Dutch companies that have started utilising social media (a registration is required to access it).

Yocter – a pure social agency, Yocter offer companies advice and presentations on how to best use social media, and is an innovator of their own software solutions. Their name comes from the term yocto, the smallest SI prefix at 10⁻²⁴ (still a long way off from the inverse of a googol!)

Norway

Face2Face – are using social media to take their 1:1 field marketing experience online. Their social strategy has been used by the Oslo Camerata orchestra, and their Word-of-mouth clients include American Express and Shell.

Isobar Norway – Norwegian social media agencies Sermo and Suddenly Oslo have recently become part of the super-agency Isobar Norway.  Sermo’s clients included Dell, Siemens and Universal Music.

Spain

Layerbit – this full service digital agency is based in Madrid, Houston and Buenos Aires. Their social media activity includes community building, and importantly also covers Tuenti, the “Spanish Facebook”, another example of the value of using local experts in different markets.

UK social media agencies

At present, coming from a larger market, UK agencies are running the most pan-European campaigns. There are probably 20 UK agencies with around 10 people. This list includes a couple of them alongside the bigger independents. I have put in the agencies we most respect because of what we’ve heard directly from clients and the work we’ve seen them produce.

FreshNetworks – That’s us. We’re not #1 in Europe yet, but we’re working on it.

Nudge – A nine person team with a Facebook focus. I particularly liked their PoweRBrands Facebook page for a graduate recruitment.

We Are Social – One of the UKs first social media agencies to get to scale. Most well known for their excellent Marmite campaign. They also have offices in both Italy and France – both have been going for around a year now, and they”re up to 10 people in each of the office.

iPlatform – especially good for Facebook fan page builds – a number of large advertising and digital agencies outsource Facebook dev to them.

Made by Many - They don’t call themselves a social media agency but they did do an inspired website takeover for SXSW last year and I’m looking forward to whatever they have in store for 2011.

1000 Heads – A word of mouth agency that must know every Nokia lover on the web – they’ve been managing their social campaigns for a few years now. Also good on offline/online integration.

eModeration and Tempero – both have excellent moderation capabilities built over 5+years (a number of social media agencies outsource moderation to them). More recently both have been developing community management capabilities.

NixonMcinnes – Brighton’s best social media agency, now calling themselves a social consultancy – so I hope you don’t mind being included.

Also worthy of note:
- Once independent but now part of a group: Headshift (Dachis – I loved their One and Other work), Jam (Engine) and Techlightenment (Experian – but a tad skewed towards social tech rather than social agency).

- PR firms turned social: Wolfstar, ImmediateFutures and 33Digital (a small team punching above their weight). It’s hard to find a PR agency that is not turning itself “social” at the moment, but I think these have made the shift better than most.

Anyway, that’s our starting point. Have we missed you out? Or are you a client working with an agency worthy of note due to scale or the quality of work they are delivering? Feel free to let us know.