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.

An Unusual Pursuit: Social Media at IBM – Part 2 is a post from: Social Conversations

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What is success?  What is failure?

When it comes to social media marketing, unless you have a plan to measure what your are doing how will you know?  There’s a lot to be said about planning your social media strategy, knowing where your audience is, understanding how they talk about you, getting something to go “viral”, accepting the negative with the positive, throwing up social media tactics like darts to a bulls-eye.  It’s subjects we’ve talked about here on Social Conversations, but unless you have a plan to measure what you are doing, you’ll never know if what you are doing is worth the investment you are putting into it.

While there’s a lot of numbers counting, and those numbers can be very subjective, you still need to have a social media measurement plan.  For example, counting the number of Twitter followers you have, isn’t really a great measure if you want to measure the quality of your reach. However if you are just starting up a Twitter account, monitoring and counting how many followers you are attaining on a daily or weekly basis can be decent way of gauging how you are progressing in the beginning.  Once you reach a certain threshold, counting the number of followers can be and overwhelming task to keep up with and weed out the spammers.  It’s the same for counting the number of fans you have, or friends on other social networking sites.  It can be a good “check” but it can’t be the be all end all to your measurement plan.

A social media marketing measurement plan needs to include a lot of checks and balances.  For example, how do you know if the content you are creating is really valuable to your audience?  Do you count the number of retweets you get?  Or is it the number of retweets from those “quality” followers that you’ve predefined on a list.  Maybe it’s the number of times your content has been embedded?  Perhaps the amount of traffic that is being driven to your page, or maybe even adding in how much time on site do the visitors coming into the content are averaging.

Then there’s the whole integration with “offline”, if you have those types of measurement.  Even if you are an online business, you likely still need to track something offline.  How are people hearing about you?  Did someone tell them to come to your Facebook page while they talked on a flight to San Diego?  Maybe they sat next to someone at a Coyotes hockey game and it was suggested they check out your video.  How do you account for and measure those aspects of your social media marketing efforts?

When it comes down to it, if you can’t measure it, you need to ask yourself if you should be really implementing that particular social media tactic?

Putting together a social media measurement plan should be an integral part of your social media strategy.  It makes sure your entire team is on the same page when it comes to what and how things are going to be measured.  It also gives your team the ammunition they need to prove or disprove that something is working to help or harm your brand or company.  How you are measuring is just as important as what you are measuring as well.  This is why it’s important that everyone from the C-Suite executives to your data analytics teams understand what the end goals are and what & how you are measuring to see if your efforts are helping you meet those goals.

At the end of the day do you want to really be answering the question from your CMO “Well why are we still doing this?” with “Well because Oprah’s on Twitter now!” ?

Child With Measuring Book Photo Credit:  Flickr User Goldberg

Archeology Team Measuring Photo Credit:  Flickr User Wessex Archeology

Do You Have a Plan for Measuring Your Social Media Marketing? is a post from: Social Conversations

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With all the hype around so many different types of social media marketing tactics, from Twitter to Friend Feed, it’s tough not to automatically fall into the trap of the “ooooh, we need that too!” Unfortunately for a lot of companies, that lure is too strong and they slap up a Facebook page or a Twitter account without thinking about forming a strategy around it.

Just because the media is hyping how Oprah is using the latest, greatest social media site, doesn’t mean that every business should be doing the same. If your competition has a blog that doesn’t mean that you need to have a blog.

Understanding that marketing in social media is unique to each and every company is a giant step in the right direction of success. No two audiences are the same even if they are competitors. The philosophy of the company, the way employees interact with customers and even the look and feel of a product can all affect who is in your audience. Not only that, audiences online are different than those offline and its likely that you and your competition appeal to two entirely different audiences within the different social media sites.

All of this means that there’s no cookie cutter approach to creating a Social Media Strategy. For every company the approach is unique. Taking the time to do research will help point you in the right direction of where the conversations are, who are the influencers you need to connect with and what should be your success/failure measurements. There’s no out of the box solution for this, every company will have different results and different ways to implement common social media tools and sites.

Don’t fall for the hype of the shiny new social media objects, in the end it actually cost you a lot more than it would to take the time to formulate your own successful social media marketing strategy.

Every Business is Different with Social Media Marketing is a post from: Social Conversations

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