November 12th, 2009

What the duck? Aflac gets quackin' on Facebook

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 12:49 pm

Categories: Corporate Social Networking, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Social Business, Social Media, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Aflac Inc., Branding, Benefits, Vertical Industries, Marketing, Human Resources, Jennifer Leggio

Usually in my Fortune 500 series I take a look at a company’s broad social media strategy. But this time I decided to have a little bit more fun with it and dig into one company’s use of Facebook in terms of supporting its brand awareness as well as its charitable giving. That company is Aflac. You know, the insurance company with the endearing little duck.

Whether or not you are an Aflac customer, you’ve at least once tried to mimic the Aflac duck’s quacking of “Aflac” at the end of its commercials. After its commercial success, Aflac has taken to Facebook with a two-fold approach: increase its brand awareness through a fan page for the famous Aflac Duck and through a presence in the “Causes” application on Facebook for the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the same city in which the company is headquartered.

The Aflac “Cause”
With the Causes application, users have created more than 300,000 charitable causes that have benefited 60,000 nonprofits in the United States and Canada, raising more than $14 milliion in total. Aflac was able to raise $1.16 million to benefit the Aflac Cancer Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta during Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, making it the largest sponsored campaign in the history of Causes.

The company donated $1 for every Facebook member who joined its Cause page, as well as matched all monitary donations. As of today, the Aflac Cancer Center Cause has more than 1 million members. According to Laura Kane, Aflac’s vice president of external communications, the Causes application was chosen because it seemed to have potential to reach a wide audience.

“The fundraiser was very much a test of the application to determine whether it would be an effective platform –which it clearly was,” Kane said.

The company is still determining whether or not it will use the Causes application for another fundraiser, though the Aflac Cancer Center is the company’s main charitable focus and fundraising continues year-round through other means.

Just Ducky
From a brand awareness perspective, the Aflac duck has more than 164,000 fans. The company uses this page to interact with users, disseminate company information as well information about its charitable cause, and promote contests for friends of the duck. What I found most endearing about the fan page is how the duck’s “personality” shows through with its individual updates. Some are more serious, of course, but you can get the duck’s thoughts on even mundane daily things such as Halloween candy or even fantasy football.

While the duck’s fanship might be modest in comparison to some other consumer brands, this particular fan page is an example of how using a brand’s character as a cornerstone to a social media program is better than a static corporate presence. In direct comparison, Aflac the company has a page too, but it only has just over 2K fans in comparison to the duck’s 164,000. Aflac was smart about engaging the little duck to create customer loyalty and engagement through its Facebook presence.

Aflac isn’t currently tracking how its Facebook fan interaction is turning into sales of insurance policies, but more tracking it as a brand awareness activity on its own.

“Aflac views social media as an opportunity to generate awareness and a establish an ongoing relationship with users in a way that is relevant to their lives,” Kane said. “We don’t have any numbers that we can provide in terms of how many of the Duck’s ‘fans’ go on to become Aflac policyholders, but we do measure the number of people who become fans as a reflection of our success.”

November 10th, 2009

Creepy elves and disco dancing: A business win for OfficeMax

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 1:58 pm

Categories: Advertising, Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Customer Loyalty, Facebook, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: OfficeMax Inc., Dance, Portals, Web Technology, Internet, Jennifer Leggio

Who knew that weird dancing elves could be good for business?

OfficeMax today announced the return of its Elf Yourself portal, a silly site that allows people to create elf-like images of themselves doing a variety of dances from country to disco and even hip hop. While I’ve been a fan of Elf Yourself for some time but had no idea that it had come back for the 2009 holiday season until ZDNet colleague Jason Perlow posted his (hilarious) personalized elf last night. While all of this is entertaining, I got to wondering about what value this is really driving for OfficeMax. Last year I spoke with OfficeMax vice president of marketing and advertising Bob Thacker about the company’s social media strategy for my Fortune 500 series, and he brought Elf Yourself up as a social media success.

“Social media embraced the ‘Elf Yourself’ concept, endorsed it and readily shared it among online communities, which turned this campaign into a digital phenomenon that attracted millions, set a new viral marketing record and landed a considerable ‘win’ for OfficeMax,” he said.

I reached out to OfficeMax again today given the launch of the new site, which is now chock full of Twitter and Facebook connectivity. As a matter of fact, users of Elf Yourself can just connect to the site with Facebook Connect and select a picture from any album, saving hassle and upload time. And later today, the feature will launch that allows users to automatically post these elves to their own walls or their friends’ walls, spreading the Elf Yourself chaos even further than before. An OfficeMax spokesperson said the company selected to leverage Facebook this year to enable a deeper social media experience.

But, beyond creating giggles, what is this really doing for Office Max? The stats I received from OfficeMax are surprising:

• The Elf Yourself site has had 284 million site visits each holiday season since the tool’s launch in 2006. These site visits were measured over only a two-month period each year when the site was live.
• Of these 284 site visits, 256 million elves were created
• A study in 2007 showed that more than 1/3 of Elf Yourself users said the visit to the elf portal influenced their decisions to visit OfficeMax

What’s so great about Elf Yourself is that while it’s clearly an OfficeMax deal (powered by JibJab, of course) it’s not so in-your-face with its marketing that you grow tired of the brand. Yet, somehow it gets engrained in its users that OfficeMax is behind the whole thing.

What do you think of OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself? Oh, and here’s my terrifying Elf:

November 9th, 2009

American Express OPEN keeps 'pulse' on small business with social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:44 am

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

Tags: Social Media, American Express Co., Small Business, Small Business Owner, Business Owner, IQ, OPEN Forum, Jennifer Leggio

The Fortune 500 series has historically focused on how large companies are using social media to help to further their own businesses. One company, American Express, has a division called OPEN that is exclusively dedicated to the success of small business owners and their companies. The growth of these businesses in turn means that OPEN will succeed, and the company has realized that social media has become a priority for small business owners and is putting a great deal of focus there with its social media activities and its new Pulse offering.

I spoke with Jason Rudman, director of strategy and marketing for American Express OPEN, about the company’s social media strategy and delivery, as well as benefits to its small business customers.

Q. [Jennifer] How exactly is American Express OPEN is leveraging social media to grow the business of its customers?

A. [Jason] Business owners tell us every day that their business resiliency and growth depends in part on their ability to connect with others for advice, support and networking. At the same time, many business owners have what we call a “high relationship IQ” but a “low social media IQ.” Beginning in 2007, OPEN Forum established itself as a leading source of business insight and advice. We have evolved the experience to be both an online resource and networking site created to meet the needs of small business owners, to help them solve problems and to start to bring relationship IQ and social media IQ into equilibrium, thereby helping our customers through the social media learning curve.

Q. How did OPEN’s social program begin?

A. Originally launched in 2007, OPENForum.com initially served as the on-line companion to a live event-driven platform created with the goal of providing key networking opportunities for small business owners to grow their businesses.

Q. What are the most important objectives that American Express OPEN is trying to meet with social media?

A. Engage business owners in a new set of experiences that increase loyalty, value perception, and relevance of our brand and continue to lead in the online engagement space to attract partners, so as to ultimately create additional compelling benefits for Cardmembers and convert prospects.

Q. How are you measuring the success of these programs?

A. For OPEN Forum, we keep a pulse on how we are doing by measuring engagement and soliciting feedback. The level of engagement in both our content and the business interaction among our Cardmembers is the best indicator of our success.

There are a set of metrics that we focus on monthly, such as unique visitors (UVM), repeat visits, time spent on the site, enrollments in Connectodex^SM [our proprietary networking tool for OPEN Cardmembers], etc., that form the basis for how we are resonating with business owners.

We are also starting to measure the brand impact that OPEN Forum is having for OPEN – it has been extremely positive since we started measuring our impact in Q4 2008, as well as amplification effect of our content and the “buzz” quotient of all that we do. Finally, there are some emerging stats that are peaking our interest – for example, how many times and how frequently is OPEN Forum being retweeted; this again shows a level of engagement and interest in what we are providing business owners.

Q. Marcy Shinder of American Express OPEN said during her presentation at the Conversation Marketing Summit that social media was invented by business owners. Why do you think this is true?

A. Small business owners are successful by building individual relationships – for example, with customers, prospects, vendors – based on an innate ability to talk to everyone, to get to know people. You might say this is “social IQ” and that many entrepreneurs possess this in droves. You see it frequently when a small business owner engages their customers or reaches out to new ones through a very personal style of marketing. Social media as we know it today is just an extension of this in the digital universe.

Next: Introducing Pulse –>

October 8th, 2009

Sears Holdings Corporation: A silent giant in social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:23 am

Categories: Branding, Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Reputation and Privacy, Social Business, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Sears Roebuck & Co., Social Media, Customer, Q., Jennifer Leggio

Sears Holdings Corporation (SHC) has been a silent giant in social media for some time. Its online community now boasts more than 300,000 users and it was one of the first major retailers to adopt OpenID to connect MySears.com directly from major social networks. The company has been injecting social into most of its brands, which, in addition to well-known Sears, include KMart, Lands End and Orchard Supply Hardware. It hasn’t always been a pretty story, as Sears has suffered some online woes as well, most recently a defaced group of product pages on the Sears Web site. However, the company credits an existing social media presence with helping them deal with that crisis swiftly by allowing immediate engagement with its customer community. I spoke with Rob Harles, vice president of community for Sears Holdings Corporation, about this and more.

Q. [Jennifer] How is SHC using social media?

A. [Rob] We are one of the only retailers – and the only one of our size – that’s created online communities specifically for our customers (MySears.com, MyKmart.com, MyVoice.com for our MyGopher concept). The goal of these communities is to connect with our customers. We offer discussion forums to facilitate questions and answers between customers and associates, an ideas platform to hear what new innovations are most important and product reviews written by customers. The communities also offer an opportunity to address customer service issues. We offer members information about sales, deals, discounts and access to unique coupons and specials for their participation.

Q. How did the use of social media start?

A. We started our first version of our customer community about two years ago. It was primarily intended for research; we used it as a platform for surveys and online focus groups. We realized the greater potential in this forum and quickly moved to expand our community offerings. We launched MySears.com and MyKmart.com in the spring of 2009 with product reviews, discussion forums, member profiles, a company blog, the ideas platform and a number of options for members to find and connect with one another around similar interests. MyVoice followed in July.

Our marketing initiatives have included a social, online interaction, component for some time now on platforms like Facebook. We are becoming more and more purposeful about engaging with customers on those platforms. One example is the recent Sears Back to Campus campaign where we utilized Facebook, Twitter and blogs to let consumers know about the product offering from Sears. We also created several online interactions like the Facebook application that allows college roommates to plan the lay out of their dorm room together, online. They can then buy what they design, creating a link to social commerce.

Q. For which brands, and how?

A. All SHC brands have a social component to them. All brands are represented in our customer communities and have their unique platforms and programs on the greater Web that meet their customers where they are.

One example is our Kmart Design brand. This initiative has introduced our Kmart designers and their design process through blogs, videos and Twitter to customers. Being transparent and upfront about what goes into our design process has proven to be successful; we’ve seen great response in customer engagement and in sales.

Q. What are your social media objectives:

A. Being present in a variety of social media outlets is part of our “Shop Your Way” concept. Shop Your Way is about letting customers choose what works best for their schedule, their shopping preferences and their budget and providing for them through our SHC properties. Our social media efforts offer a choice of online forums for customers to learn more about our products, to share their thoughts with us and to have their concerns or service questions addressed and answered. All within the course of their current online habits.

Support and crisis response –>

September 28th, 2009

10 Fortune 500 companies doing social media right

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:53 am

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

Tags: Social Media, Jennifer Leggio

Throughout the last year I’ve highlighted several Fortune 500 companies who have a smart approach to social media. Writing about the large companies demonstrates that even giants with hundreds of thousands of employees can successfully flex to run solid social programs. I get approached by a lot of different companies for this series but I only select the ones I think are really onto something. Here are excerpts from the top 10:

Office Max: “Marketing is all about change. There’s a saying that ‘if you don’t create change, change will create you.’ It’s a great thought. I’m continually open to new ideas and new media and new approaches and new methodologies. At OfficeMax, we’ve embraced social media and incorporated it into our marketing strategy to reach today’s digital consumer through humor, entertainment and personalization.” — Bob Thacker, senior vice president of marketing and advertising

Newell Rubbermaid: “The more we engage with our consumers, they more we learn and the more we can expand our social media efforts. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to start small, be flexible and be willing to pull back and change if something does not work.” — Bert Dumars, vice president of e-business and interactive marketing

Cisco: “We see social media, such as blogs, as a great way to build your business and tap into the ideas and input of people using your products.” — Carlos Dominguez, senior vice president in Cisco’s Office of the Chairman of the Board and CEO

Texas Instruments: “First move is to always understand who we are trying to serve. What problem are we trying to solve? We want to create a customer support strategy, not a Twitter strategy! Once we understand the need we are trying to fill, we look at benchmarking against best practices. We have no shame in learning from what other companies are doing.” — Devashish Saxena, director of global Internet marketing

Continued –>

September 22nd, 2009

Fortune 500 Series: FedEx delivers success through social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:04 am

Categories: Branding, Corporate Social Networking, Fortune 500 Series, Marketing, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Blog, Social Media, Federal Express, Multimedia Center, Jennifer Leggio

When I first started sourcing my Fortune 500 Series I put out a query on Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to seek out interesting companies and found a bunch. However, one public relations person sent me a nasty email saying that I was “negating the nature of social media” by highlighting large companies instead of small ones. I disagreed.

The importance, and purpose, of this series is to show that even goliaths are flexing to social media. Even if their programs might be raw, they are moving to embrace the model. And if a large company with hundreds of thousands of employees can flex, so can a smaller business. Sometimes, it also helps to know how they did it.

One such goliath is FedEx, a household name worldwide. The company began its trip down the social media path two years ago and has begun a phase of rapid growth. From multiple blogs to multiple service-oriented Twitter feeds and even community sponsorship, FedEx has made social media a priority.

I spoke with Matthew Ceniceros of FedEx’s media relations team to find out more about how the giant is reaping the benefits - and staying competitive - with social media.

Q. [Jennifer] How is FedEx using social media? How is your strategy defined?

A. [Matthew] Our general strategy is to form positive perceptions among key audiences by encouraging meaningful conversations about FedEx around the globe. This is done in a variety of ways by different groups at FedEx.  While I sit inside the Corporate Communications organization, my colleagues in Marketing and IT have also used social networks to communicate to both internal and external audiences.

Our specific strategy for the FedEx Citizenship blog is to:

• Engage in a conversation with key audiences about citizenship
• Introduce transparency into how, why and what FedEx does in citizenship areas
• Empower stakeholders to help tell our story for us
• Build equity and association for FedEx against citizenship platforms

The Citizenship blog (blog.fedex.com) covers the areas where we focus our corporate citizenship efforts: Community & Disaster Relief , Economics & Access, Environment & Efficiency and  People & Workplace.

Q. What tactics are you using? Where are your digital properties?

A. The FedEx Citizenship blog provides insights from our people into FedEx global citizenship programs and the The FedEx Cares Week blog is an internal blog that chronicles the annual global philanthropy event by having team members share their stories about the community service projects. We have an official FedEx Facebook page that allows us to post news and information about the company and for fans and team members to post photos and comments on the world of FedEx. Our advertising group created the wildly popular FedEx Launch A Package app. The week of launch it was one of the most popular apps on Facebook.

Next: Digital properties and Brown Bailout –>

September 1st, 2009

Fortune 500 Series: DirecTV strengthens customer channel with social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 10:33 am

Categories: Customer Loyalty, Fortune 500 Series, Social Business, Social Media

Tags: Social Media, Customer, DirecTV, Jennifer Leggio

Most social media strategies are created by marketing departments and then grow to touch other internal groups, such as customer service, product development, and so on. However one large company, DirecTV, created a significant social media presence within its customer care organization, the result of which is stronger customer connection. While most people know Comcast as the digital darling, its social media presence is no longer a differentiator as companies like DirecTV grow their programs and put stronger emphasis on customer service. I’ve spoken with Charles E. Miller, director of inbound email operations and social media strategy for DirecTV about his company’s program and how this program will continue to grow moving forward.

Q. [Jennifer] How is DIRECTV using social media? How is your strategy defined?

A. [Charles] We primarily use social media to listen to our customers.  Our strategy is to listen and act on issues, then share what we learn with the organization as a whole so we can work together to adapt the business to synch up with our customers’ ideal view of a TV service.

Q. What tactics are you using?

A. Our tactics run across various contact points both external and internal.  Externally we collaborate with online customer-run communities to listen and refine our receiver software. We also created a peer-to-peer customer community to share set-up tips they have learned on their own and their experience with our more advanced features. Twitter and Facebook are both sites where our customers are actively sharing - which is common for entertainment brands. Our customers engage with us via @DIRECTV and with each other and our Facebook Fan interactions continue to grow — expect more from us this year.  Internally, we use social media tools within our contact centers to facilitate communications within teams as just one example.

Q. How are you measuring the success of this program?

A. Generally we have the ability to scale and scope the feedback we receive and measure the impact over time. Post reads, author engagement, subject proliferation and sentiment are all important to understanding where you are making a difference and where to improve.

Next: What about Comcast? –>

August 11th, 2009

Fortune 500 Series: How EMC used social media to recruit, re-brand, rebuild

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 9:36 am

Categories: Branding, Career Development, Corporate Social Networking, EMC, Fortune 500 Series, Social Business, Social Business Case Studies, Social Media, Social Media Best Practices

Tags: Social Networking, Brand, Social Media, EMC Corp., Storage, Hardware, Jennifer Leggio

EMC can best be described as an entity. Not only in the Fortune 500, the infrastructure information provider was recognized by Fortune as one of the 10 most admired companies for product and service quality. This success didn’t come easy to the giant, which needed to significantly rebuild its business after the 2001/2002 recesssion. Part of that rebuild included acquiring more than 40 companies over a handful of years. The other critical part of the rebuild included attracting top talent to help drive a more successful business. To achieve the latter, EMC turned to social media for its recruiting efforts. The below interview with Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy at EMC, details how the company acquired talented employees through social media, how career fairs via Second Life can actually work, and how the company measures success.

Q. [Jennifer] How is EMC using social media as part of its HR efforts?

A. [Polly] We are using social media to build awareness and relationships between EMC and the talent market.  We see social media as an ideal resource to further our employment brand in a meaningful, high-reach and low-cost manner.  For example, externally EMC is using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and employee blogs and tweets to build awareness and affinity with the talent market.  We use these tools to provide a genuine, testimonial-based look at EMC’s culture, careers and capabilities, as well as to bring awareness to certain job openings, company developments and general career tips.

Internally, we have a global social media platform for community building, collaboration and knowledge-sharing.  This internal platform has resulted in the serendipitous development of organic EMC brand ambassadors who have taken their new found voices and confidence as spokespeople to the external social network airwaves. This has, in effect, multiplied EMC’s external efforts to build genuine relationships with the talent market.

Q. How did that start? Why did you want to add social media into the program?

A. Following the recession of 2001/2002, EMC experienced a multi-year turnaround. We rebuilt our business by entering adjacent markets, altering our business model and acquiring more than 40 companies.  This evolution was a remarkable success. It, however, left some employees with a mild identity crisis.  By late 2006, roughly half of our company was made up of employees who were new to EMC within the prior 18 months. On top of that, by 2007 we were looking at thousands of jobs to fill, a major college hiring program, and the sizable growth of EMC’s emerging global operations in markets such as India, Russia and China.  As we looked at ways to elevate EMC’s brand with our target talent market, we realized we could not out spend our competition.  We wanted to build EMC’s brand at the lowest possible cost, do it on a global basis and reinforce EMC’s core brand attribute as a leading innovation company.

Enter social media. The first tool we used was, interestingly enough, the least mainstream yet came with high buzz and superior results: Second Life.  We held a series of highly effective recruiting fairs in Second Life that showed us the undeniable power of social platforms for business.  The scale was infinite and the cost was low. The connections and relationships happened with a type of immediacy we had never experienced before on a business platform.  In the summer of 2007, we launched behind our firewall EMC’s first customized internal social network.  We named this platform EMC|ONE and today the majority of our employees worldwide are connecting on it and sharing information regularly in a 2.0 manner.

Next: Measuring for success –>

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 –>

May 4th, 2009

Fortune 500 Series: Duke Energy drives green initiatives with social media

Posted by Jennifer Leggio @ 8:02 am

Categories: Community Management, Corporate Social Networking, Fortune 500 Series, Green Initiatives, Social Business

Tags: Social Media, Customer, Duke Energy Corp., Q., Jennifer Leggio

In the Fortune 500 series I have profiled a range of companies from consumer to enterprise tech (Cisco, Office Max, Texas Instruments, Newell Rubbermaid and Intel) about how they are flexing to use social media to drive their business. This time I’m taking a slightly different spin with a focus on Duke Energy, one of the largest electric power companies in the United States. The Charlotte, N.C.-headquartered company delivers energy to approximately 4 million U.S. customers in the midwest and the Carolinas.

Why would an energy company need social media? Simple. Scott Pacer, director of marketing communications for Duke Energy, explains in this Q&A how the company is using its young social media program to educate its customers on how they can use less energy, save money and help the environment.

Q. [Jennifer] At a high level, please tell me about Duke Energy’s social media strategies:

A. [Scott] We’re new to social media, so we’re spending most of our time listening, observing and trying to identify for our internal clients the right opportunities where we can use social media to contribute to a community and drive Duke Energy’s initiatives. For us, research has been key to understanding the tools - how they work, who they reach and the value they can bring. We are very sensitive to the zeitgeists that drive different social media outlets. We want to make sure we offer something of value - be it information, access to a product, or customer service - that enhances that outlet. We want to make sure we are developing relationships and partnerships, and not just creating another series of one-way communications.

Q. When considering new social media strategies, what is your first move…To hire? To invest? To seek out market data?

A. Definitely, seeking out market data. Many organizations are playing in this space, so we need to understand how Duke Energy can use the tools to provide timely and relevant information to our customers and other stakeholders.

Q. Has a social strategy been a larger or smaller priority with the economic shifts over the last six months?

A. It has definitely gotten larger. With potential climate change legislation and smart grid stimulus funds now available, there is a huge opportunity for us to connect with customers, regulators and other decision makers in new and transparent ways to get our messages out. We have a responsibility to inform, educate and ultimately generate meaningful conversation about initiatives that can help Duke Energy work collaboratively with our customers to use less energy, save money and help the environment. If we can move our customers to use less energy or at least use energy during times of the day when it’s not in high demand, then we can begin to leverage energy efficiency as part of our generation mix. In simple terms - more energy efficiency will reduce the need to build additional power plants… and that’s good for everyone.

Next: ROI and real world success –>