FreshNetworks Blog

Yesterday I attended an email marketing roundtable hosted by Econsultancy. Having a social media agency’s perspective gave me a good opportunity to learn how email marketers currently view social media, as the new communication channel was discussed frequently.

Email has a well established track record of delivering ROI, whereas discussions continue in terms of social media’s value. However, information offered by Econsultancy and Adestra from their 2011 email marketing industry census suggests that there are opportunities for the two channels to integrate further:

• 72% of the companies surveyed by Econsultancy did not measure how email marketing impacted social media activity (just 1% responded that they use sophisticated measurement)
• At present under a quarter of companies (23%) say their email is currently well integrated with CRM data.The future of email will involve further development of integration with web analytics and social media data.

In addition to Econsultancy’s findings, interesting opinions and findings were shared in the discussion:

• The extremely personal nature of an inbox is significant, and email marketers have to offer something of value in order to maintain access to it.
• The proportion of emails that are opened on mobile devices varies from 2-20%, which tends to be affected by industry (publishing was cited as an example of the higher end) – as the number of people using mobile devices to access social media grows, perhaps we can expect further convergence of email and social messages in a mobile-optimised format.
• One suggestion is to use email to send a digest of a brand’s social media activity – offering a summary of the week’s most interesting blog posts, tweets and Facebook activity might catch the attention of people who do not have the time to constantly follow a variety of social channels, and might give a reminder to visit.

It is understandable that social media skeptics will hold email marketing close to their hearts – it has a solid history of delivering results, and is relatively simple to track – whereas the new kid on the block remains elusive in both these areas. In my opinion, social media and email are not mutually exclusive – those who learn to implement both in a strategic  and integrated manner will learn and communicate far more effectively than those who treat both channels separately.

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.

At FreshNetworks we work with many clients to develop and implement their European social media strategy – either for US companies who want to translate the work they do in their domestic market for their European brands, or for multinationals who are looking to develop a social media strategy that they can use across their European markets. For many brands who are developing how they are using social media this will be a common need. They want to understand where social media fits internally, how to manage it across their markets and how to measure and evaluate the success you are having. For many multinationals, these decisions might be made across markets. Or at least a series of guidelines and processes need to be defined that are then interpreted in each market.

A common mistake that multinational brands risk making is to build a European approach to social media by taking a tactic that has worked in one country and trying to implement this in other markets. For example, taking a campaign that might have been run on Facebook in Italy and trying to implement similar campaigns across all their European markets. Such approaches – socialising tactics across Europe – tend to be very difficult to make a success. For the simple reason that a tactic that works in Italy may not work in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain or other European countries. In these different markets, different consumers use social media in different ways; and different consumers want different relationships with brands. You cannot just take a tactic that works in one country and apply it across Europe. When you are developing a European social media strategy for a brand you should develop just that – a strategy, not a set of tactics that you hope to use in each market.

The ideal European social media strategy will provide a framework in which each market can operate. Ensuring that all markets are contributing towards the same overall aims, although they may do this in different ways. You should be able to measure and control each market according to the same set of metrics (although individual markets may add their own measures to these). And you should be able explain and understand why each market is doing what they are doing according to a common set of goals and direction.

A successful European social media strategy for a brand is not a set of tactics to implement across all markets. This never brings as much success as a brand might realise. Rather it is a framework and common approach. A strategy that each market can adopt and work within. Developing their own tactics and creative solutions that all contribute towards the same end goals and the same measures. You may find great insight and innovation from sharing these tactics, and you may find that some do translate between certain markets. But your strategy should not be based on these.

Over the coming fortnight we are going to be looking at a set of issues that brands face when developing a European social media strategy – from sharing best practice and the need to produce a common set of measures and reporting, to the challenges of working across languages and how to implement social media monitoring across markets.

See all our posts on developing a European social media strategy

An issue for many brands who are developing a social media strategy is how they translate what they do in one country into other markets in which they operate. As a European social media agency, we are very used to helping clients take a US or UK strategy and then roll this out across the rest of Europe. And in doing this we have looked at organisations who have done this well. And those who have done it badly. The usual mistake is to assume that what works in one country can be taken and implemented in another country with no changes. More often than not this is not the case.

In this week’s video post, Matt Rhodes talks about how to approach developing a European social media strategy and why what works in one country might not work in others. Matt discusses how each country in Europe has different ways of using social media, and how these influence the way strategies should be developed. He gives three areas that brands should investigate when launching social media activities across Europe:

1. The audiences are very different in each country in Europe – they behave in different ways and have different needs
2. The social media landscape is different in each country – Facebook is not always the right tool, you need to understand what is right in different markets
3. The position of a brand is different in each market – your brand may be different in different countries and your aims in each might change

As more brands are looking to develop European and even global social media strategies really understanding these issues is becoming critical. It would be great to hear about your experiences in this area so far and how you see the differences across Europe.