CorpComms Magazine

Helen Dunne shares the insights from a lively morning panel discussion how social media can effect change, from generating sales to engaging employees, within an organisation.

ALEX PEARMAIN, HEAD OF SOCIAL MEDIA, O2 IN THE UK

I think the pace of change, and the wider media environment, is helping to make the business case. But the first question seems always to be Where should it sit in a business? Comms people think it should sit with them because they look after reputation. Marketing says it should sit with them because it is really all about the consumer. And then someone in IT will say This is a real risk we need to look after it. This is the dullest conversation known to man. Work out the bottom-line benefit to the business and then you can work out where it should sit.

Internally, there is definitely more openness because we are a tech company. There is lots of enthusiasm, but it does make my job very different from others. It is about channelling that enthusiasm and providing the structures for which it can take root.

Customer satisfaction is more of a net basket measure across the business; we can't say Yes, customer satisfaction went up due to service and in the service mix we changed these things. But we get fantastically high 'right first time' measures amongst customer service rates on Twitter. I don't actually think that is unique to Twitter per se; it is more that people who go there have a very specific grievance. Generally people on Twitter are a savvier customer: I have this make of phone, with this operating system, and it won't do x. We also see increased number of positive advocacy afterwards. People who say Wow, thanks O2 for sorting that out do tend to use slightly more social media channels.

We can put a cost on every single interaction; that justifies shifting the investment sideways from a phone line to someone on Twitter. But do you want to lose that personal phone contact? I'm not an advocate of a social-only care model because it doesn't actually deliver the touch points that you want with every single customer. There is a role for every care model.

We get about 100,000 people reading our blog, so it is a valuable channel. Forward-thinking media organisations have found that this is currently one of the best ways to communicate. It allows you some permanence and some long form to thoughts while being more open and receptive, whether it's through comments, sharing or tagging.

BARNEY O'KELLY, HEAD OF COMMUNICATIONS, STRATEGIC AND DIGITAL, BAE SYSTEMS

We stayed away from financial metrics because we were dealing with a relatively sceptical audience. We focused on the engineering mentality that we have in BAE Systems. Problems needed solving. We had numerous stakeholders that weren't quite sure what the company was doing. We wrapped the social media piece into that. We said that we can go to these places and insert ourselves into conversations that people are already having about the company and it can help us achieve some of our objectives. We focused around mostly intangible objectives, things like talent capture and supporting business winning.

How you start the conversation is very important. We are really trying to think of firstly, what we talk about, secondly, how we phrase that conversation and inject positive emotion.

We are lucky that the largest proportion of our business is now in America; it seems as though there is a 12 to 18 month lead-time on what happens in this space. We also have a chief executive in the States who is a big advocate of these tools. That really helped open up the avenues. As long as they are doing it and nothing goes wrong, the more reassured the rest of the senior management gets.

Recently, our chief executive blogged on part of our strategy. The first comment back was a quote from the blog saying I don't understand this - can you explain it for me? And you begin to realise what your audience wants. It is that golden rule of communication - it is not about what you want to say, it is about what your audience wants to hear. I think any element that allows you to have a dialogue in which people say I want to hear this, I don't like that or I want to know this is valuable.

For me the real benefit in using social media internally is the ability to connect up people and communities; when you are looking at an organisation, the lines become blurred between personal and private interests, and that is how we create communities in a business.

I think the important thing is to focus on the channels rather than the behaviours. If you need to do customer service through social media then Facebook is the wrong place to do it because most people don't think it is a place to get a rapid response. Focus on where people want to get certain types of information.

TOM GLOVER, HEAD OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS, FINANCIAL TIMES

I think we were quite fortunate as we had good tracking built into the main ft.com website so we could track the sources coming into the site; we quickly found that the people who were coming into social media were more likely to register on .com than on any other source so that was the best performing source of registrations and although the traffic is relatively small compared with some of our marketing SEO work it's probably the best performing and fastest growing part of our traffic.

And for us we could really show that this was a really important part of our business and that gave us instant credibility.

For the first time, we are able to show some numbers behind these campaigns. For example, if over the weekend we have had a couple of large stories out then we can show on Monday morning what that has meant in terms of traffic etc. We can use bit.ly to show how content is being shared online. More than ever, we have the ability to show that we are progressing. It gives me the ability to show the scale of audience that we are reaching. We are not a conservative organisation at the FT, but we are conservative about protecting the brand and its reputation.

The team in charge of social media need to be trusted to uphold the reputation of the brand. We set up a senior strategy team. The view is sometimes Let's get a few interns on this but nothing could be further from the truth. We are using the most senior people we have, that want to and are really up for doing this.

In terms of groundswell of support from employees on this, there is a real sense of excitement around social media and that takes the board with you as well.

Our human resources have struggled to keep up. Purely as a PR team, what we have to manage on a day-to-day basis now is frightening compared to a decade ago. We cannot grow a whole new team; the onus is on us to be smarter and redeploy resources.

ROB BLACKIE, HEAD OF DIGITAL, BLUE RUBICON

The industry has been very bad at communicating the case for social media. A business case based on rationality means that you have a business objective and a strategy to achieve those aims. The emotional case is quite unusual. The world has changed so that senior people have a much lower amount of knowledge than junior people. That makes them feel extremely vulnerable and I think, therefore, the business case is about emotional reassurance. Often the best way to start is something quite small and dull that actually has a business case.

It could be something as simple as social media guidelines that mean that staff know what they can and cannot do. Similarly, how many FTSE 100 companies have an online press office that is difficult to update so if news breaks there is a delay before people can be told?

Most things take a few years to go mainstream. You probably don't need to be at the cutting edge as nobody is there yet. If you want to get to the average man on the street, then what you want to do is about three or four years behind. Copy other people, experiment with stuff and do stuff that is low cost.

Often by doing the small things you will learn what works for your business rather than trying to jump in with a perfect solution at the first instance. Take your time. Products get commoditised quickly so you can get things very cheaply off the shelf.

There is no such thing as information overload; there is just filter failure. We think that we have to listen and respond to everyone and every comment. Any sane strategy must be to actively ignore the vast majority of them and have a customer service spin off. If you have a strategy in place then you can actually make that rational case to your chief executive.

Social media allows you to measure in new ways, if you engage with those numbers then you can make a very strong business case. Connect up that data with what is working and what is not working so well. I have been looking at the media coverage of companies over the past 20 years and what impact that has had on the public; most often people discuss it for five minutes and that's it. Rather than getting a little 'news in brief' in a newspaper, do the occasional thing that has very high impact.

Data management is becoming more important. That doesn't mean that we need to become statisticians but it does mean that we should probably do some numbers and find people to translate for us. One of my team speaks fluent geek. We need people who help us to organise data. Connect the hard world of the data to the much softer world of the heart, which is where you actually change people's minds on things.

I deeply dislike Klout; a computer cannot know your business objectives. You may have a huge number of spam followers and a very high score.

Alternatively if you work in the media industry and [culture secretary] Jeremy Hunt follows you and hangs on your every word, you may have a very low score but that is extremely valuable.

SIMON SANDERS, HEAD OF DIGITAL, LANSONS COMMUNICATIONS

I think that the starting base is always about addressing individual problems. It could be about idea generation; it could be about getting feedback; it could be about reducing costs. It is all about opening up your organisation to the conversation that is taking place.

It is very easy to make the case for social media in customer services because people are very vocal about their problems. But there are so many different things that can be done; it does depend on the audience that you are addressing. Standing out in some way you break down into two further things: awareness and sales. I'm interested in brands that I may have heard of or have some relationship with.

There are great opportunities to make those who know your brand aware of your other products. You can socialise and humanise your products or services. The key is to ask whether the business is ready become more informal. Organisations can put training sessions or presentations up on slideshare, which allows people to access this material when they want rather than at a time when you demand it of them. You can get stats on who has watched it and when, and you can get comments and feedback.

With services like LinkedIn, and also any social networks, you can knit between them and cross post and find different audiences. You can link to Twitter. You can have your slide presentations. You can use it as a recruitment channel, a community forum or a place where you can foster relationships without necessarily selling your own business.

Blogs enable you to engage with an audience that is actually interested in finding out something about you. It is very easy to subscribe. It just comes to you when there is something new to say; I think it is a great way of keeping in touch.

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