Social Business

June 28th, 2009

Organizational social anxiety

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:05 pm

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Social Media, Worker, Caroline Dangson, Social Media Movement, Jennifer Leggio

Guest editorial by Caroline Dangson, IDC

As I talked to the vendors exhibiting at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, I noticed less emphasis on the buzz word social and more emphasis on collaboration and getting work done.  From these conversations I realized that the enterprise is not yet sold on social.  Some executives hear the word social and immediately think Facebook (the poking and throwing sheep) for business.  And believe it or not there are executives still fearful of the transparency that comes with the social media spotlight.  The social media movement is disruptive because it challenges traditional power structures - no one person gets credit; no one person has power.  Executives who do not understand what social can do for their business only see that it forces them to give up control and power.  Hence, there is still a need for education.

The social media movement has divided the enterprise into two camps.  There are companies that trust in social media and are embracing these new ways of doing business.  On the other hand, there are companies that are fearful of changing the way they do business and need concrete, quantifiable evidence that social media provides a return on investment.  I believe the tough economic situation is making this divide even more pronounced as it pushes companies to either take risks or retreat into comfort zones.  What is interesting is that executives fearful of the social media movement have no way to stop it as individual employees are bringing these tools into the workplace.  According to a mini poll conducted by IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group this past January, 51% of total respondents said employees at their company use social networking services for business.  Two-thirds of those who are using social networking for business do so through a self-directed, not corporate, initiative.

Corporate culture has everything to do with adoption of social media.  I believe the number one factor preventing full adoption of social media is the lack of executive trust in employees.  This culture is about control and creates a workplace of silos.  This type of workplace is not set up to be social and the silos are barriers to worker productivity.  The fun factor for this environment is low and young, energetic talent will come and go.  I think connecting employees and allowing them to have some fun is an important investment as it keeps workers interested and invested in the company.  Talent attracts more talent and keeping these workers is a key business objective.  Companies also face the fact that close to 20% of U.S. executives, administrative, and managerial employees will retire in the next five years.  The next generation of workers have grown up using social media.  Organizations who want to attract these workers need to understand how they work.

Those who use social media for personal reasons can more easily translate its value for business purposes.  This is why so many social software vendors are finding success in offering free trials - get your hands dirty, realize the value for you, get addicted, and get sold.  This is really a great prescription for what I call organizational social anxiety.  Fear comes from inexperience.  Failure comes from not trying.

Caroline Dangson is a research analyst covering social media with IDC’s Digital Marketplace team. In this role, Ms. Dangson drives IDC’s Digital Marketplace: Social Media service which advises clients on how to leverage social media to effectively communicate and collaborate with target customers and business partners based on actionable primary research. She also tracks trends for enterprise social media participation, monitoring and measurement in this program. In addition, Ms. Dangson runs the Digital Marketplace and New Media Watch program, which delivers timely and frequent strategic news analysis and opinions about the most important events in the online marketplace.

June 25th, 2009

Pitney Bowes branded community reduces customer support costs

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:24 am

Categories: Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Jennifer Leggio, Pitney Bowes, postal rate change

During the 2007 postal rate change Pitney Bowes, which provides postal equipment and services to businesses, received more than 415K support phone calls on the rate change alone, all in under a month. This was in addition to the company’s usual flow of customer calls, so its support teams were moving fast and furious.

In 2008, the $6.3 billion company decided to do things a little different. Pitney Bowes implemented an online community, provided by Lithium Technologies, to proactively provide answers to presumed frequently asked questions about the latest rate change — and also empower users to help each other.

Lithium’s “engagement communities” are essentially branded, custom user-powered social networks for companies who want to encourage communication with and among their customers. These communities can include RSS feeds, polls, integrated search, private messaging as well as interactive chat and blogs, leveraging the principles of social networking to improve customer service as well as branding and marketing.

Mike Hardy, strategic communications program manager for Pitney Bowes, said that the company decided to implement a Lithium community rather than a competitive community due to the Lithium’s focus on succcess versus tools. He said the decision was validated when they were able to get a full community up and running in a matter of weeks, in time for the 2008 rate change. According to Hardy the community had a significant impact on the business.

“According to industry benchmarking the average support call can cost $5 to $10 each,” said Sanjay Dholakia, CMO of Lithium. “A community support approach really can increase savings for a company.”

Specific to Pitney Bowes, Hardy said that call reduction was noticeable after the community was implemented, but it could have also been due to other factors, such as a less complicated rate change than 2007. He did say that the main question “How do I update rates on my machine?” was viewed upwards of 37K times, which would equate, according to the industry benchmark, of about a $70K support cost savings just for that question alone.

Because Pitney Bowes customers were able to use a “self-service” model to find answers, the company estimates that the total savings amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, implementing the community, while it began with a support issue, is only half of a two-pronged social media approach. The other half being actual customer engagement.

“We’re approaching our 3,000th registered users, which is not huge compared to some consumer electronics companies, but that’s a big deal for us,” Hardy said. “We also have to keep in mind that users do not have to register to view or read the content; they log in if they want to engage. But our page views are still skyrocketing.”

To manage the community, Pitney Bowes has its customer support staff helping to moderate, and also uses a paid moderation service provided by Lithium on a halftime basis.

“We’re very happy with the service and the help we get from Lithium, including bi-weekly team meetings with their community development team to make sure we’re getting the most out of the community,” Hardy said.

There were some lessons learned along the way, however.

“We came out of the gate with way too many topics out there,” Hardy said. “We quickly learned that with too many topics and not enough interaction to start, it made the community seem empty. It’s what I call ‘empty restaurant syndrome’ — if you look in a window and no one is in there, you likely won’t go in.”

Hardy said that the company quickly pruned down the community and focused the activity, and also put some promotional power behind the community. After making those small changes, the community really started to grow.

Altogether now, the Pitney Bowes` community provides general discussion areas where customers can engage with one another around various mailstream topics, in addition to “Ask the Expert” forum events where a Pitney Bowes expert hosts a week-long discussion on a specific topic of interest. Pitney Bowes has also launched a “Think Tank” forum where customers can post and vote for ideas about Pitney Bowes products and services. Pitney Bowes management reviews these ideas, plus other customer insights gained from the community, during a monthly executive steering committee meeting.

June 18th, 2009

Facebook launches in Persian to support communications around events in Iran

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 8:47 pm

Categories: Facebook, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Facebook, Twitter, Iran, Language Translation, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Jennifer Leggio

Facebook tonight has released a test version of its site available in Persian. The social network claims that amidst this week’s Twitter use for communication around events in Iran, its users were sharing content in Persian, however the site navigation was only available in English. This change will make it so that “Persian speakers inside of Iran and around the world can begin using it in their native language.

According to the company’s announcement:

Persian was already in translation before worldwide attention turned to the Iranian elections, but because of the sudden increase in activity we decided to launch it sooner than planned. This means that the translation isn’t perfect, but we felt it was important to help more people communicate rather than wait.

The language translation is now live, according to Facebook, and those users with browsers set to Persian will automatically be directed to the translated test version. Users also have the ability to change their settings on Facebook under the “language’ tab to read the site only in Persian.

Facebook stresses this is, indeed, a test version and suggests anyone having corrections or suggestions do so through the translations application.

This announcement by Facebook comes on the heels of a week in which social network communications, primarily through Twitter, became critical during the disputed Iran election. Twitter even rescheduled maintenance set for Monday afternoon to ensure that the site did not experience disruption during daylight hours in Iran.

June 17th, 2009

Building walls between PR, journalists: A worst practice

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:32 am

Categories: Marketing, Public Relations, Snake Oil, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Journalist, Newsletter, Reporter, Service, Wall, Help A Reporter Out, ProfNet, Source, Public Relations, Corporate Communications

One of the elements I love about social media is the tearing down of walls. I have an incredible network of contacts on multiple social networks to whom I can reach out in mere minutes. Just this morning, even, I put out an inquiry for this very blog post on Twitter and received about 100 emails within an hour. It’s a beautiful thing.

That’s not to say that I don’t need to reach beyond my network at times to find fresh sources. How boring would it be if I consistently quoted or wrote about people only within my network? So I use services like Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and ProfNet when I need a little extra oomph for a story — or even have a fledgling idea and want a sanity check.

Enter my confusion when yesterday, I ran across a new-ish service called Reporter’s Source, which runs off of pretty much the same premise as HARO. Sources subscribe to a newsletter, journalists send in queries, sources respond to queries. Oh, but there is a catch. Respondents don’t get to reach out to the reporter’s directly. They get to submit their responses to the folks at Reporter’s Source who screen and determine which pitches get back to the journalists.

What?

I find this baffling. Why, in the age of breaking down communication barriers, would you think that a service that builds walls is a good idea? As a blogger and a one-time PR person, I don’t want anyone playing god with my content.

One of the things I love about HARO (not so much ProfNet — it’s so daunting), is that I do sometimes get pitches that are left-of-center. I can think of at least three blog posts that have developed from people reaching out with a connected, if not perfect, idea. What’s even better is that if I get pitches that are just ridiculous I forward them over to founder Peter Shankman, who takes action, sometimes even banning PR people from the list for violating HARO’s terms of service. Speaking of Shankman, I asked him his thoughts about the gatekeeper approach.

Next: HARO and Reporter’s Source respond –>

June 16th, 2009

Seagate uses social media to 'humanize' storage devices

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:20 am

Categories: Brand Management and Monitoring, Branding, Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Seagate, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Social Media, Twitter, Seagate Technology LLC, Harris, Q., Jennifer Leggio

It was about two years ago that storage device company Seagate realized it had to get into the social media game. The company’s initial strategy was to listen, build community and learn. So, the communications team set up a presence on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and so on, and strapped itself in for quite the ride — and learning experience. Today, the company’s social media efforts are a much more strategic component to its overall marketing mix.

I spoke with Rich Harris, who is responsible for the overall social media effort for the company. This encompasses Seagate’s corporate blog strategy, social platforms, ROI measurement, a bit of video and content creation, and in-depth analysis of analytics/reports as they pertain to social media initiatives. Harris discusses the company’s redefined strategy and use of social media to reach a broader audience

“Seagate has just scratched the surface of where we think we can take our social media vision and roadmap,” Harris said. “I think you will see a much wider scope of content and engagement coming from us, ideally on a global level.”

Q. [Jennifer] How long would you say that Seagate has had a social or digital program in place?
A. [Rich] As far as the full social media program goes, it’s really been just about a year. We put the framework together about 18 months ago, but up until July of 2008, Seagate primarily focused on building relationships in the blogosphere, but had yet to fully embrace social media tools as a communication platform. Pete Steege, a Seagate marketing manager, started the first official Seagate blog called “The Storage Effect” in 2007. So, you might say that launched us into it. We built from there adding online properties and a blogging platform. The response has been very positive. It’s an exciting opportunity for the company

Q. How big is the team? How does this team interact with other divisions within the company?
A. Seagate’s social media team is currently made up of one senior manager directly responsible for the overall strategy, planning and implementation, and a support team of 6-7 internal contributors that blog and assist with editing/packaging of the various social media content that we push out there - video, audio, and market segment focused blogging.

Q. When considering new programs, what are your first steps?
A. Our first steps are to look for a marketing/content gap that needs to be filled for our customers. Alignment with our global marketing and corporate priorities is always top of mind. And we closely monitor feedback on Twitter, Facebook, as well as SocialMention.com and other various analytics tools that we have in place to see what the people out there are saying. Resulting programs could be anything from viral videos, contests, to sponsoring events where storage is a key component of the lives of the audience involved.

Next: Impact of the economy and measuring ROI –>

June 15th, 2009

Would you 'TweetPsych' a prospective employee?

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 4:44 pm

Categories: Career Development, Social Networks, Twitter

Tags: Hiring, Twitter, Recruitment & Selection, Productivity, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Jennifer Leggio

Earlier today Twitter was all abuzz about Dan Zarrella’s new Web service, TweetPsych, which provides a psychological profile of a person based on his or her tweets. It’s a pretty nifty idea and Zarrella has a bunch of background on the science around it on his blog. The server has been struggling today due to all of the buzz, so be patient. It’s fun and worth it.

In terms of uses, I’ve beeen enjoying myself. On the not-so-serious side, I used it to psychologically profile a couple of ex-boyfriends, just for kicks. After I stopped laughing, it got me to wondering how else people might use this tool other than justifying break-ups.

Could TweetPsych be used in the hiring process?

We’ve read a lot about how companies are checking Twitter feeds and FriendFeed and other feeds to determine what prospective employees are up to in their off time, or even to see if they pay enough attention to work. As much as a stretch as it might be, would you do a TweetPsych profile on someone you’re thinking of hiring? And does Zarrella have an opportunity to monetize it in this regard? I’ve seen a lot of “fun” Twitter tools and applications. This is the first one I’ve seen that people might really use seriously — whether they should or not.

As an aside, I was finally able to get my “profile.” What does this say about me? Wait, don’t answer that…

June 11th, 2009

AMD uses Radian6 as a preferred 'listening' engine

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:06 am

Categories: AMD, Brand Management and Monitoring, Corporate Social Networking, Social Business, Social Media, Social Media Measurement

Tags: Engine, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Jennifer Leggio

One of the biggest challenges social media enthusiasts face while trying to sell their executives on a progressive marketing program is proving the value of listening. The concept of purely outbound marketing is old, yet safe, and many companies are afraid to invite the scary conversations in and take action on them.

Technology provider AMD had no such fears when instituting a social media program, but it had a significant advantage: it’s always been engaged in “social media,” even before the popular term was coined, with its expansive user communities.

Chris James, social media and community strategist at AMD, is responsible for leading the social media charge. His objective is to utilize social media across all points of marketing and public relations to reduce costs by scaling and getting in better touch with customers. James is also responsible for driving information about the marketplace back into the business, and says that while other businesses leap first into creating a presence with social media tools, the company’s first objective was to determine what was being said, by whom, and where it was all taking place.

“Our core need is to engage in listening and utilizing as much as we can of what’s going on out in social media to inform business decisions – whether its messages and marketing, language and press releases, customer insights, and so on,” he said.

Next: Listening at CES –>

June 9th, 2009

Squarespace: Stop harshing my Twitter experience

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 1:01 pm

Categories: Brand Management and Monitoring, Marketing, Microblogging, Social Business, Social Media, Twitter

Tags: Apple iPhone, Twitter, Blogging, Search, Marketing Research, Internet, Marketing, Jennifer Leggio

So Squarespace, which does hosting and other webby stuff, is doing an iPhone giveaway via Twitter. Basically all a Twitter user needs to do is enter the #squarespace hashtag into a tweet and then he or she is eligible to win a $199 Apple gift certificate (which could be used for an iPhone). The catch? Said user must enter every day (i.e. #squarespace in the tweets) for a new chance to win.

Earlier today I saw a bunch of positive comments: “Cool for SEO!” “Great way to trend on Twitter!” Etc. Ok, sure, fine. But lately, more of the comments I’ve seen are along the line of this one, from my pal Mike Fratto:

It’s getting really, really annoying. I only follow about 850 people. That includes a mix of dear friends, security nerds, hockey fans and folks I read. My TweetDeck “All Friends” column today was swimming with #squarespace hashtags. It made me want to do one of two things:

1. Unfollow* my poor friends (if I didn’t already unfollow them for #spymaster)
2. Buy them all iPhones just to stop the madness

As I wrote about Turner Broadcasting this morning, this is a case of a decent idea that was taken too far and is starting to turn people off. What about a contest that encourages people to deliver some value? Yesterday Smashwords CEO Mark Coker did a Twitter contest — Tweet something about Smashwords and you could see your tweet in an ad in Writer’s Digest. Coker did two things right: 1) He asked for substance 2) He ran the contest in a short time. It was interactive — it wasn’t just pushing out noise. It allowed him to engage with his users.

How is Squarespace ever going to engage with these users? Honestly, the only reason I even looked to see what Squarespace does is due to responsible blogging. I otherwise wouldn’t have taken the time to look.

Contrary to recent beliefs, I do say nice things about social campaigns. But lately I’ve mostly heard noise. Where are all of the other good ideas at? Please share them.

*No friends were injured or unfollowed in the writing of this blog post

June 8th, 2009

Facebook social ad overload, courtesy of Turner Broadcasting

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 11:49 pm

Categories: Advertising, Facebook, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Advertisement, Turner Broadcasting, Jennifer Leggio

Facebook social ads are a good idea, depending on your business. Facebook social ads can, depending on your business, help you garner more page views and perhaps grow your customer base. However, not used wisely, Facebook social ads, no matter what your business, could annoy a lot of people.

Case in point? Turner Broadcasting’s TNT. Apparently the network is really excited about its summer line-up of shows, because all day today, most people only saw… ads for TNT shows. As my pal Rebecca Besbris said, “One of my friends said she didn’t watch because the ads drove her nuts all day long.” I don’t know if this was part of Turner’s failed strategy or if this is a Facebook flub. Either way, it’s bad.

A quick lesson in pictures — How not to use Facebook social ads:

11:15 p.m. - Profile Page

11:18 p.m. - Viewing a video

11:21 p.m. - Commenting on wall discussion

11:23 p.m. - Return to profile page

OK, TNT. I GET IT. “The Closer” and “Raising The Bar” were on tonight. I asked several friends (I likely became more annoying than the ads were) if they were getting bombarded and I was hardpressed to find a person to say no. The only person who said no, actually, just didn’t log into Facebook today.

Facebook social ads are cool but this is absolutely a case of “too much of a good thing.” I don’t need to watch either of these shows anymore — I’ve already burnt out on seeing the characters.

Do you think this is too much?

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June 8th, 2009

Happy birthday, Social Business: A look back

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:05 am

Categories: Marketing, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Blog, Social Media, September Pandora, November Mumbai Attack, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Public Relations, Blogging, Security, Online Communications

This week marks the one year since the editors at ZDNet took a chance on the “Social Business” blog. While I had a name change along the way, the content has been pretty consistent. And, if you ask me, I’ve come into my own. I like the voice this blog has and I’m pretty content with the way that it’s gone.

Happy birthday, baby.

I thought I would recap my 12 favorite posts — one for each month.

June
Q&A with Twitter’s Biz Stone

July
Firefox 3 and community - How Mozilla used social networking to set a world record

August
Facebook’s (futile) malware exorcism: can social networks fight back?

September
Pandora opens up: Q&A with Tim Westergren

October
Social media consultants: Snake oil or value add?

November
Mumbai attack demonstrates (good and bad) maturation point of social media

December
Twitter popularity does not equal business acumen

January
Naivete: Web 2.0’s biggest security threat

February
Research report: Is ’social PR’ real? Which agencies get it?

March
Q&A with Jeremiah Owyang: Social business economy

April
Is it time for a Chief Social Media Officer?

May
Nine social media fails of 2009… thus far

Tell me what you think. Any favorites? Any failures. Please leave it in the comments.