By Eloise Grey, Community Management Consultant at eModeration
Minded to see how large enterprises were integrating social media into their businesses, I recently attended the Cloudforce London Expo (#cloudforce), hosted by software company Salesforce.
I had thought that social enterprise was about businesses who wanted to do public good as well as make money ... but here, social enterprise meant social media, in every corner of enterprise: not just online communities and marketing but company collaboration (email is dead!) sales, customer service, human resources; in fact, everywhere.
If we don't get open and social ... there'll be a 'Corporate Spring'
Salesforce COO, George Hu opened proceedings by scaring us a little with predictions of a "corporate spring' if we didn't get social and open as business operators. Where 2011 had been the 'year of the social revolution' - as seen in the Arab spring - 2012 might augur a corporate revolution thanks to the 'defining company of our generation, Facebook' and the child-prodigies we have in the ranks of our employees, way ahead of us in adoption of technologies. So, we must engage internally in the same way we are trying to engage externally. You can see Hu's speech and many others on the conference site.
Some key Salesforce customers shared the way that social media is integrated into their enterprise - below were the ones I found most interesting ..
Burberry: If you're not social, you're going nowhere
Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts shared (via video) her strategy of being fully digital end-to-end and being totally connected on all devices. "You have to be a social enterprise...If you don't do that" she said, "I don't know what your business model is in five years time." Burberry have integrated the Salesforce social media tool, Chatter, the medium by which employees could collaborate and engage with each other. Without much of a push they got half their 9,000 strong employees using this tool within a year.
Spotify: social flattens the hierarchy
Music--sharing service, Spotify use Rypple to manage their employment systems. "With social we're all peers, and hierarchy doesn't exist" .. "You can thank people for work done, and make it public; we all want praise!" ... "You can put objectives and targets onto this system and link up with anyone who shares those objectives."
I can see the value in knowing the objectives of others in the company: it's very useful to know what our colleagues' motivations are as we attempt to engage them with what we want to achieve. Acccording to Spotify, this connectedness makes for better coordination: they felt strongly that the way they work should mirror how their own products work and how their employees engage with technology outside work too.
Incidentally, the cloud-sourced Spotify playlist chosen by attendees greeted us loudly on arrival. Seems rock-fans won the voting. I say no more.
Kimberly-Clark: social solves customer queries - fast.
Kimberly-Clark's use of social enterprise increases the velocity of their organisation. Teams work in communities and are all connected, so customer queries can be posted by customer support to product or technical teams and answers provided practically instantaneously. The open-ness of the system means that responses are organically peer-reviewed and the quality therefore improved.
Spcial also means that customers are providing support to each others, without needing employees to contribute. All you need is the platform and the community set up in the right way and you're off...
Customers are giving us permission to have different conversations with them. Conversations that are about solving their problems rather than simply marketing. Look for an inspiring book: Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky - the must-read which inspired Kimberly-Clark to embark on this social leap forward.
Devices Devices Platforms Platforms!
It was a chorus that ran through the day that mobile is huge and everyone has different devices; in work and at home so embrace and enable. Some tools enable customer service to see a user's social profiles (only if they've say it's ok, mind) and even see the devices they use.
Video gamer publisher, Activision are seeing customers abandoning the phone and flocking to Twitter and Facebook so they had to 'meet the gamers where they are'. They demo'd an experience whereby a customer service phone exchange brings up the users' social profiles (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) and what devices they use. For example they can see customer Joe Bloggs is an iPhone user and can start a Facetime conversation with him and solve the problem there and then.
Tools like Facebook or similar social tools allow users to help each other without the support team needing to intervene. That's nothing new to us community managers, but interesting to see that the penny has dropped all over big enterprise and that we're in a mass adoption stage.
Saleforce acquired Radian6 last year, and it was interesting to hear more about the enterprise-level social monitoring and engagement suite in use. If you aren't aware of Radian6, it's one of the biggest ' social listening' tools, allowing you to monitor the conversation around your brand and keep on top of each Twitter message and brand response. HP told us how they could see they were in 47% of the conversation around printers - but more than that, they can see what other brands customers are talking about too.
Not just for alerting you to crises: use of a monitoring tool like Radian6 shows you who your advocates are and helps you to engage with them directly. It augments - or even replaces - expensive focus groups, with conversations about your brand measured and analysed.
But what about the small guys?
Not everyone can afford these tools though. But you can still apply the principles used by the larger organisations to pockets more shallow.
The principles are:
- Engage with the tools your customers are using and start thinking about mobile if you haven't already.
- Watch your back! Or, more positively, find out what your employees use and engage with them in that style and on those devices without looking like a parent trying to talk teen. Treat them as experts and respect their feedback.
- Learn to be comfortable with the two-way conversation with customers, clients and employees; before long you'll be more informed, work more efficiently and you may even find you love this closer connection!
- Try out a range of tools, some of which are free or with an affordable entry-level, such as: Sprout Social, socialmention, tweetreach, twittercounter.com and don't forget that Facebook Insights has a wealth of information.
- For enterprise social networks, Yammer has a free service, or even open a private Facebook group. eModeration uses Yammer as the 'social glue' which binds 160 or so virtual working employees together, and it's been so successful we can't think what we ever did with it.
Think about a life beyond email, and social might become the core to how you work internally, externally and with partners.