AT&T Social Media Strategy: AT&T Social Circle employees as Social Advocates

AT&T social media strategy included utilizing the company’s employees who are already active on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Twitter and encourage them to share their opinions on the social media platforms and create awareness about the company’s products and services and also promote the marketing and other promotional campaigns. It all started in 2009 with a small group of employees and currently the group grew into strong 1500 employees who actively share updates and posts on Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. For eligibility into this program employees should be active on the above mentioned social networks for more than 90 days and they have to go through a training program to avoid any potential issues and problems. The company initially identified some 500 employees who were active in social networks and started a pilot project with them.

In a presentation at SocialMedia.org‘s BlogWell conference in Dallas, AT&T’s Senior Manager of Emerging Communications, Lee Diaz highlighted Nielsen survey facts that 92 % of consumers worldwide trust recommendations from friends and family more than any form of advertising and 77% of consumers are more likely to buy a product when they hear about it from someone they trust, which also encouraged AT&T to encourage their employees as social advocates. Employees are an excellent resource of knowledge and information about company’s products and services, actively participate on various social networking sites and with training, necessary tools and platforms and encouragement from company allowed employees to actively engage with consumers on social networking sites. AT&T also monitors and measures the activity and engagement of the employees so as to analyze the effectiveness of their content.

Lee Diaz also highlighted AT&T added a hub to centralize the content and the employee advocates. It allowed their advocates to explore all of the content in total and decide, for themselves, when and how they would share. The centralized hub allows AT&T to share content immediately, make announcements, etc. It was important that the employees can access the hub from any device. They used SocialChorus for the hub, which includes the embedded hashtag. One of the main components of AT&T’s social advocate program was a simple hashtag, #ATTemployee. This let their employees share content from AT&T while being transparent and staying legal. It is also important for AT&T employee advocates to engage with one another, too so as to further improve the content efficacy and AT&T has an internal platform called tSpace based on IBM Connections platform, which is available only to employee advocates. The program has seen some good results as there have been more than 20,000 influencer activities, more than 410,000 audience engagements, and estimated media value of more than US$ 1 million. AT&T is now encouraging all its 250,000 employees to participate in this program voluntarily and company is actively sharing the content that they want the employees to promote in all the internal platforms and it is up to the employees whether to share or reshare the AT&T news, information, announcements, etc. on their preferred social networking site. AT&T realizes the fact that employee engagement will have significant influence on the reputation & brand image of the company.

Case Study: Enterprise Social Network @ Pfizer – Pfizer World intranet & My World

Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies in terms of revenues, with employees of around 1, 00,000 and operations across 150 countries in the world had implemented an enterprise social network styled intranet within the company for their employees to communicate and collaborate across the globe. Pfizer World intranet is built on Microsoft SharePoint platform and the company prior to this had more than 400 intranet sites. Bob Libbey, Head of Digital and Social Communications at Pfizer, Inc., likes to think of PfizerWorld – the company’s singular internal channel - as an online town square. “People come to get their news and information about the enterprise - about the various pieces of Pfizer - that’s a big part of what’s made the project a success. Obviously we use email a lot; we distribute a promotional newsletter twice a week to show what’s upcoming in PfizerWorld. We need to be careful not to overload people. We’re always looking for ways to help people sort their information. That to me is the biggest challenge right now - helping people prioritize all the news and information that we’re sending to them,” Libbey explains.

In 2008, the site had 1.4 million article views; in 2009, the number jumped to 3 million article views, along with 10 million site visits on the whole. For 2010, article views topped 5.2 million and visits reached 55 million. In its third year, PfizerWorld generated 5.3 million article views and 61 million page views, up 279 percent and more than 1,000 percent respectively over the predecessor site. And the project yielded $20 million in maintenance, support, and development savings over the four years. The news crawl runs along the bottom of people’s desktops and includes the top stories of the day from PfizerWorld, top news clips of the day disseminated by the Media Relations team and breaking news as needed.  Pfizer also launched a social networking hub called My World,  a personalized intranet page to increase employee engagement, enable information sharing and facilitate collaboration; and a colleague message board called Moving Pfizer Forward to encourage candid discussion about company issues and employee engagement  and introduced as part of our PfizerWorld intranet platform back in 2010. That first year this internal networking hub drew 41,000 unique users who generated 800,000 page views. The second year it rose to approximately 60,000 users driving 1.6 million page views. Pfizer expanded its Social Media Policy to reflect the rise in usage of internal and external social media channels across the company. 

Internally, Pfizer created new employee channels, including the only pharmaceutical-company sponsored blog for Pfizer scientists, Think Science Now, on Pfizer.com; a personalized intranet page for employees; and a colleague message board. Pfizer also made content easier for visitors to share through Facebook, RSS etc. Many of the blog postings from Think Science Now appear on Pfizer’s Facebook page, for instance. Pfizer had been able to implement and integrate social network styled tools and platform internally so that employees can actively use it, collaborate and communicate with colleagues across the globe and work together to achieve the organization goals.

Case Study: Enterprise Social Networks @ Toyota – Knowledge Sharing & Collaboration

Toyota uses Salesforce.com enterprise social network platform called Chatter that facilitates internal communication between hundreds of thousands of Toyota employees across the world to interact, share and collaborate with each other on a day to day basis and work for the organizational growth. Employees have to login to access the intranet, join groups and participated in discussions of their interests and can post updates, comments, opinions, questions and get answers and suggestions from coworkers based in 170 countries around the world.  With Chatter platform allowing collaboration and sharing of information and documents employees can actively collaborate and work together to resolve critical issues. “People have only 24 hours a day,” says Toyoda. “But through social we can connect with many people at once.” Enterprise social networking platforms are critical tools for knowledge management as organizations need to document and share the knowledge within the organizations effectively for growth. "Most of the knowledge is tacit. It is walking around in the heads of our employees," said Steve Kang, social enterprise manager for Toyota. "The question is how do you get that knowledge? How do you extract that knowledge? Because it's not written down anywhere. This provides us with a way to do that."

Toyota started using the Chatter based intranet since 2012 and employees can access the intranet not only through desktops but also using the mobile devices like iPad, Android and BlackBerry applications. Employees can create topic centered groups and engage with others on this platform and interactions should be mostly work related and one of the popular group is the "ask all Toyota" for employees to pose questions to other Toyota workers around the globe. Another important usage of Chatter in Toyota is the cross-departmental task forces that collaborate across different departments located across the globe and they prefer chatter rather than the traditional email as Chatter allows easy flow of information between collaborators.  Even the senior management in Toyota actively use intranet to communicate with employees and employees keep track of the posts by the senior management. Toyota even implemented a translation service within the chatter so as there will be seamless interaction between Japanese and Non-Japanese employees that enhanced communication among Toyota employees around the world, leading to quicker decision-making and information-sharing as enhanced communication ultimately help to make products and services best suited to consumers. Along with digital modes of communications Toyota also uses face-to-face contact where in Senior management regularly walk around and talk to employees and also regularly hold roundtable discussions. Employees are critical part of organizational success and organizations need to implement platforms that allow communication, collaboration and sharing of information and knowledge between employees and also with senior management so that they can also work together for achieving the organization goals and objectives. Enterprise Social Networks also allow employee engagement with customers and also allow engagement on external social networking platforms too. 

Enterprise Social Networks Case Study – Nestlé created Facebook styled intranet NestChatter

Nestlé has more than 330,00 employees worldwide and manages some 2,000 brands like Nescafe instant coffee, Kit Kat, Maggie, Nespresso coffee, Pure Life bottled water, etc. and each day sells 1.2 billion items. Nestle has a very active presence on various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, etc. The company successfully manages 1,500 pieces of content being posted every day on social media, 50 percent of all Nespresso capsules being sold online, 180 million Facebook “likes” (with growth of 5-7 percent every month) and 200,000 employees on an internal social media platform. The company has more than 170 million fans across over 750 brand pages on Facebook alone. Company planned to embrace the social media both externally for customer engagement and internally for employee engagement. For social media strategy to be successful a well-planned and developed content strategy is a must. Content developed by professional media agencies, content generated by customers and also the content generated by employees is essential for any social media strategy to work. Enterprise Social Networking software developed by IBM, Saleforce.com, etc. play an essential role as the companies can create their own Facebook styled intranets within the company for active employee engagements.

Nestlé embraced social media inside the organization successfully and it implemented one of the largest internal social networks with more than 200,000 users using enterprise social network platform developed by Salesforce.com’s Chatter platform. Facebook styled intranet which Nestlé created is called NestChatter that significantly increased the level of sharing and collaboration by employees in the company located worldwide. Employee communities were formed with an agenda to promote online listening best practices and another strategy “Winning with Mobile” that is mobile apps and mobile friendly sites. Company went further and also used it to recruit talent with relationship-building skills and such employees were identified based on the way they collaborated and participated on the intranet platforms. Nestlé has been on focusing on finding ways to encourage and spread virally digital communication among employees across the globe. Employees are asked to blog and are scored on likes, viral share and post clicks. There is an internal version of YouTube and Facebook (similar to Chatter) with employee-generated content.

NestChatter streamlines the passions and experience of employees to create content, and use it as internal currency and also encourages creating new ideas and recognizing innovative staff members. The intranet too also improved the efficiency of employees through sharing information, collaborating on projects across geographical regions and time zones, efficiency of marketing teams that using the information created new innovative campaigns for various products and also helped in testing and interacting with customers in innovating new products and improve existing products. Active engagement by customers has reduced significantly the time to market and product failures too. Another case that significantly highlights the need for Facebook styled intranets within the organization that not only promotes employee engagement but also generates content that is very critical component of social media strategy.

Social Media Strategy Case Study @ Nestlé – Digital Acceleration Team key to success

Nestle faced a severe back lash on various social media platforms from customers in 2010 when Greenpeace boycotted and posted a viral video which highlighted the company’s use of palm oil produced from unsustainable practices which destroyed rainforests major  habitats of orangutans. Nestle strategy of forcefully removing the viral video and improper handling of Facebook pages protests failed which forced the company to relook at its social media strategy as a whole. Nestlé embraced a new social media strategy based on principle of open engagement to rebuild its reputation and an ethical code implemented that promoted open, honest engagement and this strategy was communicated to employees worldwide. Company developed a new framework using data and insights gained from social media activities on various platforms and used it to develop new successful and innovative campaigns. Social Media monitoring and engagement on various social media platforms by a dedicated team has enabled the company to engage with consumers and public and avoid negative sentiment and social crisis.

Nestlé created the Digital Acceleration Team (DAT) which continuously tracks consumer sentiments in real-time and instantly responds to any negative trends they identify on various social networking sites. The DAT team is responsible for listening and monitoring worldwide social media conversations and identifies early warnings about negative sentiments. The DAT team is also responsible to strategize and determine which the best approaches to social marketing both in terms of driving reach and engagement. DAT also produces training videos for Nestlé operating units worldwide, and also manages an internal social networking system that enables employees to find and work with others sharing similar interests. Blogging is encouraged, and the firm has its own YouTube-like, internal video-sharing system called DigiTube. DAT also conducts a program for company executives working at different parts of the world to the company’s headquarters for eight months of intensive training in digital trends and the skills learned there are taken to regional offices worldwide. DAT members have ‘hack-a-thons’ to solve problems, anticipate trends and search for ideas.

Nestlé’s social media strategy has been successful as the company successfully manages 1,500 pieces of content being posted every day on social media, 50 percent of all Nespresso capsules being sold online, 180 million Facebook “likes” (with growth of 5-7 percent every month) and 200,000 employees on an internal social media platform. The company has more than 170 million fans across over 750 brand pages on Facebook alone. Post the DAT model success company scaled it worldwide and launched in India, China, and Italy with plans for 12 other locations. Company has been focusing on active employee engagement on various social networking sites as content is critical and employees are the best source of the content as the company do not want to totally rely on professionals and media agencies for social content. Nestlé sells 1.2 billion products a day across the globe and significant numbers of customers are active on various social networking sites and company has to engage with them on such platforms and respond to their opinions and interests.

Social Media Strategy Coca-Cola – Employee Engagement & Active Monitoring

Coca-Cola understands the importance and value of direct brand conversation facilitated by social media platforms. Company has expanded its marketing strategy and included social media marketing into it as customers are looking to engage with the company on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Coca-Cole went even further encouraging their employees to actively participate and engage with customers on various social media platforms. Employees actively engage in millions of conversations that take place on various social networking sites and share the optimistic and positive spirits of Coca-Cola brands.  Social Media Principles guide the employees in terms of how to participate both at the personal level and official capacity and mostly surround on the principle of “Have fun, but be smart.  Use sound judgment and common sense, adhere to the Company’s values, and follow the same Company policies that you follow in the offline world.” The company also provides the relevant training to employees and agency partners through internal online learning portals and also evaluates them and update accordingly. Company expects the employees and agency partners use blogs and other social media tools not only as a form of self-expression, but also as a means to further the Company’s business, aware of the implications of engaging in social media and online conversations that reference the Company, its brands, or its business, and that they recognize when the Company might be held responsible for their behavior. 

Coca-Cola also has made certain commitments as highlighted on the company’s website for the customer engagement on various social networking sites like transparency in the social media engagements, protection of consumers’ privacy and comply with applicable privacy policies, IT security policies, and laws, rules, and regulations, respect copyrights, trademarks, rights of publicity, and other third-party rights, responsible use of technology by not aligning with any organizations or Web sites that use excessive tracking software, adware, malware or spyware and judicially monitor behavior of employees and consumers in the social media space, establish appropriate protocols for monitoring social media presence, and keep appropriate records of our participation as required by law. Coca-Cola Social Media Monitoring strategy is first monitoring and reviewing what conversations related to Coke are going on the social media world, second respond to the chatter quickly and with accurate, fully transparent answers, third record short video pieces that respond to the chatter in an entertaining, but informative manner and finally redirect social media users to other content on other social media sites. Coca-Cola also gives more importance to the fans and customers on the social media platforms and encourages them to post and share most of the content on the social networks and also aligned its marketing strategy accordingly. Coca-Cola social media strategy has been to influence purchase decisions and loyalty by leveraging the emotional ties people have with their products. This strategy has been hugely successful for the company as the statistics of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube highlight but the company feels that there still long way to go where social media generates hard sales so that company can increase revenues and profitability. 

Social Media Marketing Strategy @ IBM – Active Listening & Employee driven

IBM had restructured its Marketing Teams with a focus of increased presence and engagement with customers on various social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google hangouts, etc. Social Media will supplement traditional marketing channels in improving further its product, brand and channel marketing strategy in future, according to Ed Abrams, IBM Midmarket Business Vice President. Marketing Teams were retrained to use social media channels, understand the company guidelines that need to follow while on various social media platforms and drive demand for IBM’s products and services along with actively listening and engaging with customers and prospective customers. The success of the IBM social media marketing strategy can be attributed to the training that was given to the marketing teams as it is very essential for the marketing managers to have right skills to actively engage with customers on various social media platforms and any mistakes or wrong moves will out rightly affect the brand image of IBM. IBM employees are trained and validated before allowing them to engage with customers on social media platforms.

IBM social media training for employees includes how to get started on various social media platforms and improve their skills blogging, tweeting and using other social media to share their expertise and connect with IBM customers. IBM’s social media marketing strategy is based on fundamental of   “active listening” on social media channels, understand the customer concerns, gather details, in case of prospective customers initiate the fist contact and providing content that is relevant. “In that context, we’ll deliver proof points, access to experts and expertise to solve IT problems of our audience,” Abrams said. “IBM wants to be responsive to our customers,” Abrams said. “We’re out there with our own tools listening to conversations going on in social stratosphere. We’re building a library of influencers who in real time can get involved in those conversations to provide content.” With social media, IBM’s positioning and market direction can be altered quickly: “You have options for the 8-minute, 8-hour or 8-day reaction,” Abrams said in an interview with The VAR Guy.

IBM has decentralized its social media and content marketing by relying on the employees particularly the specialists and subject matter experts related to various technologies and products from across the company and including their personal blogs, tweets and posts into the company’s marketing mix, crucial success factor. Employee engagement is at the heart of how IBM creates great experiences for its customers, explained Ethan McCarty, IBM’s director of enterprise social programs. “We want to create the most innovative, leading-edge experiences” for customers with employees actively engaged in the process. IBM’s social team that includes the HR and legal teams too have been working develop a program to encourage employees to actively participate and proactively manage their digital footprint. It all started in 2005 when the company internally crowd sourced “blogging guidelines” which were necessitated by the fact that employees then were actively engaged on both internal and external blogs and over period of time these guidelines ultimately became the social media policy of IBM that included various other platforms along with blogs and wikis. IBM is having positive returns by allowing the employees discuss and link to IBM products on their blogs and social media posts. 

Enterprise Social Networks 2012 – Increasing adoption in near future

The success of consumer social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc have forced the businesses to provide enterprise social networking within the organizations as employees are asking for such platforms and if not provided employees are using free social networks which is risky for the businesses as they lack control. Enterprise social networks are social networks deployed internally within the business organizations where access is limited to their employees and limited number of stakeholders like consumers, etc and are tightly controlled through strict policies by company management. Enterprise social networks have seen good adoption since past few years and these networks include Facebook styled profile pages that highlight employee expertise, interest, hobbies, activity streams and updates, blogs, wikis, communities, forums, RSS feeds, bookmarks, video/photo sharing and other tools that help employees within the organization spread across the world to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge and information and break barriers erected in multi national companies. Business to Business and Business to Consumers communities can also be built on the enterprise social networking platforms that allow sharing, collaborating and participate in the business related conversation and projects. Mostly IT and Internet Companies are at the forefront of enterprise social network adoption and traditional companies like manufacturing, etc have yet to adopt these platforms.

Forrester predicts explosive growth for the enterprise social software from 2011 revenues of US$ 600 million to US$ 6.4 billion by 2016 which is a CAGR of 61%. It also predicted that new social enterprise applications that allow systematic grouping of employees, information and processes will deliver good return on investment when compared to previous generation of collaboration apps like email, instant messaging, and videoconferencing that are called Unified Communications & Collaboration.  According to Gartner Research, the worldwide market for enterprise social software will top $769 million in 2011, up 15.7% from the $664 million spent in 2010; $578 million spent in 2009 and predicts revenues will reach US$ 1 billion by 2012. IDC forecasts that enterprise social software market will generate revenues of nearly $2 billion by 2014, which is a CAGR of 38.2% over the 2009-2014 forecast periods. Research firms predict a significant growth in enterprise social network revenues in the near future as more and more business organizations start adopting these platforms internally for their employees. Surveys by Forrester and Altimeter Research have highlighted that despite having attention of the management, adoption is slow but increasing and management’s have yet to be convinced of the potential of enterprise social networks in terms of productivity and profitability.

Similar to email that changed the way employees communicate within the organization; enterprise social networks will change the way employees interact, collaborate, and share information and knowledge that is critical for their performance improvement and organizational profitability. These platforms bring a personal touch to communication, sharing and collaboration process and motivate employees who are geographically dispersed and with different socio-cultural backgrounds by creating a sense of empowerment, also through employee profile pages employees and management can know about the expertise, interests and collaborate in key projects and transfer knowledge and finally play a critical role in organizational innovation and development as employees share their knowledge, best practices, streamline processes by avoiding duplication, wastages and provide ideas for the development of the products and services. This will finally lead to improved products and services, improved communication and collaboration with customers which will help in improving their satisfaction and improved organization reputation and profitability. Engaging employees in the innovation and idea generating process is one of the crucial activities being done by most of the businesses today be it large or small and the enterprise social networks will act as a backbone for such initiatives. Along with enterprise social networks, consumer social networks presence is also critical for the businesses and businesses have to find a way to securely integrate the consumer and enterprise social networks for better results.

Businesses are just looking at enterprise social networking as a collaboration and communication tool for employees but not as a tool that will help in faster decision making, business process improving, employee retention and a tool that help in reducing the email volumes and meetings costs. Businesses too are not convinced about the return on investment or business value that these platforms generate and because of this the spending is very low on these tools, after initial euphoria there has been reduction in focus and there is not serious effort from the management to measure the impact of these platforms. Lack of active participation of the employees and lack of proper training, understanding of the significance of the enterprise social networking in terms of improving their performance, productivity and organizational performance is also slowing down the adoption of enterprise social networks. Some of the businesses are offering gifts and other incentives to encourage employee participation but with limited success. There also need to be an organization policy and guidelines for employees for avoiding the misuse and other problems. Businesses also need champions, responsible for monitoring, controlling and initiating the various activities on the enterprise social networks and champions should be selected from all the levels of organization including the management executives and they should be active.

Enterprise Social Networks is a major trend and the businesses have to change their approach in implementing this platform by looking at it a source of business value creation and formulate policies & strategies for increased participation of employees and use it a transformational tool for overall organization development. They are just looking at it as a mere technology without having any performance metrics for measuring the impact. The constant communication and collaboration will generate knowledge, streamline processes and increase the flow of information across hierarchical levels within the organization. Management can interact with employees at all the levels and the two way communication will be a major advantage for management to understand employee concerns and for employees to understand management plans and strategies. For the success of enterprise social networks, top management and executive sponsorship is a must and their regular participation is also necessary. Like the way consumer social networks changed the way people communicate with family and friends, voice their opinions and share information and knowledge, enterprise social networks too have the potential to change the organization communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing processes by removing  communication barriers between the employees and the management and together work for attaining the organizational goals.