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A Candid Interview with Pauline Ores, Social Media Strategy, Principal Analyst, IBM Market Insights (Part 2)

Pauline shared with us yesterday how IBM is strategically and tactically addressing social media. Today we’ll learn from Pauline why:

• Larger companies might just have an easier time implementing social media;
• Being a talented traffic controller is important;
• Basic training isn’t enough to ensure success; and
• A market researcher can help you take the garbage out.

1. How difficult is it for a company the size of IBM to implement enterprise social media development?

We are a very large firm with nearly 400,000 employees worldwide, but the advantage of a social approach is that size becomes an asset rather than an obstacle―as more members join and help develop the program, we get a more and more valuable contributions. The more teams join the easier it is for our enablement teams to understand how to best support, mentor, and guide their programs.  Having played such a large role in defining the program participants don’t need to be sold and furthermore, help spread the word.  So contrary to what you might expect, getting many different teams to collaborate speeds up the process.

2. What are some of the key challenges?

For us, beyond delivering actionable insights we have to ensure research results flow to all the right teams.  Obviously we share the resulting insights with teams that commission the research but there is potentially even more value to be gained by sharing these same insights with other departments. So our next challenge is to develop communication channels and connections to ensure we inform a variety of roles and teams, which as you can imagine could easily become a major air traffic control issue.  Ideally we can also track the impact these insights help deliver, demonstrating the value of our social media research and execution investments.

Social media has much more to do with who you are, as individual or a company, than what you do― it makes the boundaries around firms translucent if not transparent. IBM has a strong values-based culture and is committed to its clients―so for us, social media tools enable our teams to respond more quickly.  If your firm doesn’t have clarity in terms of brand values and/or doesn’t encourage staff to put customers first, I would suggest social media should be the last, not the first, step of a much longer process.

3. What advice can you give on internal skills development for social media?

Invest in and adopt social media and collaboration tools internally―they enable employees to quickly provide the much larger and more detailed responses external social media interactions often demand, as well as provide an internal sandbox where, assuming they’re new to these tools, they can learn and practice.

Realize that a few quick ‘101’ application tutorials, how to use Twitter, isn’t enough, as it’s not the tools that make it happen, it is what some refer to as ‘social engineering’ or community building practices. Having even a few resources with community building and engagement skills will ensure you have a program that delivers value for both internal and external participants―which again is key to success.

If you don’t have that expertise in-house seek outside help, but make sure any agencies or consultants can walk the walk and provide references of pointing to communities they built vs. pages, sites or applications. I can’t stress strongly enough how critical community building and engagement skills are to success. Locate the resources you have or hire in, then have those people mentor others to grow your corporate skill set.

4. How mature is the market when it comes to research tools (often called “buzz monitoring” or “listening” tools)?  What is the sophistication level of what is out there?

Not sure if you are referring to sophistication of the tools, processes or clients, but all three are evolving.  For clients, I think it’s important to realize social media research tools today are market research tools, and having market research professionals involved in the process provides value. Secondly, clients should realize the tools themselves are not a panacea, it’s very much GIGO― ‘garbage in, garbage out’―process, great results require a lot of upfront work and planning, which again is something a trained market research professional can provide.  IBM’s best-of-breed Market Insights team played a large role in increasing the value we get from these research tools.

Social Media are just tools, right? Wrong. Pauline shares why tomorrow.

In tomorrow’s final post Pauline will share with us why companies need to stay in sync, why social media is more than tools, and why the ‘who’ is more important than the what. HINT: Not all agencies are created equal.

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Tags: B2B Social Media, Enterprise Social Media, IBM, Pauline Ores, social media, Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Research, Social Media Training
Posted in Social Media Conversations, Social Media Strategy, Social Media Tools, Social Media Training | 2 Comments »