Speakers:
Lisa Hoffmann (@lisahoffmann) of Duke Energy
Brian Dresher (@bdresher) of USA Today
Chris Moody (@cnmoody) of Bandwidth.com/Phonebooth.com
Jennifer Ecclestone (@jenecclestone) of General Motors
4:20 Moderator David Thomas of SAS is moderating and session is about to begin.
Moderator: We all have different experiences but hope to talk about: assessing your company’s readiness; winning over skeptics and getting people on board; making the most of what you have; creating effective strategies with limited resource.
Panel member by panel member will give short responses to each topic.
Lisa: More than how to assess readiness, I want to talk about the importance of assessing readiness. Every department wants to be involved (in social media), and the best way to not be stretched so thin is to provide a framework that will help you understand if they’re ready. Put responsibility back on them. It can’t be completely up to us to determine if you should (be on Facebook), how you’ll grow it. We give them framework and they go back and assess – we act as consultants to help them get it off the ground. In order to do that effectively, you need to give them something to work with — a document, a PowerPoint, something to help in assessment.
Moderator: And to train others?
Lisa: What we discovered is we need to teach people to monitor on their own to watch their issues and understand their specific sensitivities — we couldn’t possibly know every nuance in every area of our company. It’s the “teach them to fish” thing. So assess what they need then give them the tools to do it themselves.
Moderator: Being a coach is important. There are people who want to do it but don’t know how. How do you deal with that?
Lisa: Being a coach is not doing it for them. It’s not the best way to manage with limited resource. Remember your role. If you’re a coach, you encourage them, you guide them, you help them, but then you stand back and let them make the sausage. It will help free up a lot of your time. It sounds so simple but it’s really hard to do. Give yourself permission to step back and let them learn as they just as we do.
Moderator: How does your legal department feel about i?
Lisa: Our legal department, one lawyer in particular, understands what we’re trying to and there’s not a lot of precedent for it. They give us latitude, and if we take their good advice into consideration and are smart about it, then they’re OK with it. Hearing them and making sure they hear you.
Lisa: The truth is it gives us a degree of comfort, too. There are things that they point out that we wouldn’t have considered. It’s important to listen. And it’s a two-way street.
Moderator (to audience): Start thinking of best practices that work for you because at the end we’d like to invite you to the mics to share your learnings.
Moderator: Brian, tell us about yourself and USA Today.
Brian: My role is essentially in customer acquisition and retention. Understanding the business model and using that in the social world. Think of ‘breaking news.’ What do you think of? Haiti? Plane lands in Hudson? What if I said Carnival Cruise Ship? Is that breaking news? In social media, it is. Because in social media there are communities for everything. For the first ones, it’s breaking news on a macro level. But by empowering our journalists to have their own personalities they represent the brand – we call this macro to micro.
Brian: We need to teach them how to use this information. Let’s face it, we don’t want marketing folks to tweet about editorial nor editorial folks to tweet about marketing. One example, travel journalist tweeted about her delayed flight in a snow storm and tracked other tweets and turned it into story of price gouging. This falls under: demonstrate social media as way to increase productivity, efficiency and fun factor.
Brian: For us, one of the favorite tools is backtweets.com – a great way to understand who has tweeted about your link if they haven’t given credit for it. It shows you every person who has tweeted a link, so journalists delve deeper and can lead reader to a similar story, or use as competitive analysis to see how other newspapers covered an event.
Brian: A lot of social media, just being a realist, doesn’t do the sell at C-level as we’d like them to. We look beyond fans and followers, which we love, but we look at 2 key things: 1 is our onsite analytics – we use Omniture – and see what engagement is like for content, and second we use Hitwise to see where traffic goes to other sites. We can see where traffic goes to USA Today or NY times or CNN. We can see that traffic is not that different. If we look at friends or followers, not so good. But looking at traffic, it’s a good story.
Moderator: Jenny Ecclestone. Tell us who you are.
Jenny: I am with GM for the southeast region. This is one of many hats I wear but very important one. We do a lot of grassroots. For this role, trying to gain influencers and community leaders.
Jenny: I am the only one doing grassroots communications from FB and Twitter for southeast region, but I know those that we do have are active, are engaged, are telling their friends and families. In fact, one attendee here that I will call out and embarrass (points to conference attendee) came to our event in Jacksonville. (Attendee comments: I love my GM. I never owned one, now I love it.) I knew I had the brand asset.
Jenny: You need to leverage your assets – people, skills outreach, branding – to accomplish your goals. I knew my assets.
Jenny: When there’s negativity, you just have to be as transparent as possible. the conversations are going to happen no matter what, it just depends if you’re going to be part of it. It’s better if you’re part of the conversation than to let it happen without you. I think fans on FB are there to say positive things, and on twitter you’ll hear more negativity.
Moderator: How do you deal with negative comments on FB fan page?
Jenny: We leave them up there as long as they’re not negative comments toward a person or crude, vulgar things. We have a policy (about why we take posts down). We will respond, ‘we’re sorry you feel that way, can we change your mind, can I talk to you offline. . .’ We want to have the conversation because that opinion was developed somewhere.
Moderator: A company needs a good plan. Think of Kit Kat with attack by Greenpeace, by the time they answered it was too late, and some PR people suggest you take it down and start all over.
Moderator: What else?
Jenny: Bring online relationships offline and vice versa. If you’re coming from brand perspective, my end goal is to make someone want to consider the brand. So if I can be face of brand, that’s good for me. You have to humanize the brand, humanize the company. If you’re working to keep those relationships true and honest people will begin to trust your brand.
Moderator: Chris Moody, tell us about Phonebooth.
Chris: I come from a product management background. I’ve always dabbled in social media. We use user voice. If you believe in your product, you have to know people are saying about it. Whether you can use it or not, you have to use a user voice. We listen to them, we talk to them. If you’re not using it, it’s a mistake.
Chris: We may not be an industry expert or a product expert, but eventually you have to become a lightening rod to distribute information to the proper person and respond. If something pops up on twitter, we say let us look into it, and we’ll give them a call. Now we are a phone company, but still, that’s huge. When you can talk to them on the phone, you can build report and get strong user group feedback.
Moderator: I understand it’s important to understand where your customers are and engage with them.
Chris: They may not be on Facebook, they may not be on Twitter. My last company, we sold blood pressure monitoring device. It was really huge on twitter. (Laugh.) You have to know where your audience is. For us now, twitter and blog is great for us.
Chris: This is another no brainer. We were at South By Southwest this year and we had five or six phone booths. But, when you do an event, it’s easy to disassociate yourself from the event. So you need to make it more social. So we added a local Tweet Up, we leaked what we were doing, we said we care about our community, we took that risk.
Moderator: We have reached the end of the prepared remarks and want to combine QA and sharing of best practices.
Audience QT: Do you actually think that limited resource makes you more creative?
Jenny: Yes.
(laughter)
Moderator: Would you like to elaborate?
Jenny: It definitely makes you more creative. Last year, we knew we had no money but we still had to sell cars. We had to use creativeness and genuine conversations, figure out community leaders.
Brian: For USA Today, it is what can do externally to relieve some of stress for what you can’t do internally. So we form partnerships. . .last week with Mashable. It creates new opportunities.
Chris: When you have limit ed resource, you are forced to grow in smart manner. You want to find people who are smarter than you, bring in subject matter experts, people that can really contribute.
Moderator: That’s a great point. Corporations do a lot of things to cover the bases and consider any eventuality, so there are people who are doing things that may or may not be necessary. In what we’re seeing, this panel here, none of us have a giant team. It makes you focus, it makes you all that much more vital.
Moderator: Another question, best practice?
Audience QT: In a regulated industry how do you deal with compliance and audit trails.
Lisa: I haven’t had to deal with audit trails so can’t address that, but compliance – the things we’ve had to tend to are not the things that require compliance. We’re started at a comfort level, so my advice is to start slow and move forward into things that are a little bit more risky.
Audience QT: Brian, for news, does USA Today do anything to measure or monitor comments, and for GM, there are so many. Do you get any value from them?
Brian: At USA Today, we leave it to the community to self police because the sheer numbers – hundreds of thousands – does not allow that. On Facebook, we have guidelines that say when we will remove a comment, but on Facebook and Twitter there’s more dialog. On Twitter, it’s hard to be negative in 140 characters.
Jenny: From GM perspective, last year during the crisis, we were all given topics to watch, but now there are more needs for our resources. It’s exhausting to try to look at all that information constantly and not the best use of our time. It is self policed, and people will call those who are really negative. We let that be in the community now. I guarantee there are designers and engineers that are so tied to what they do that they comment more than communications and marketing staff do.
Lisa: But still, the intelligence can be valuable. We read everything, but don’t necessarily reply.
Audience QT: How do you define success — is it increase in fans, is it sales, is it leads?
Lisa: What we use to manage success right now is sentiment. We measure positive sentiment.
Brian: Our content is our product, so we want to see increased traffic back to our site, whether its Twitter, FB or Mashable.
Jenny: Selling cars.
Chris: Users of the product.
David: Creating unique URL and lateral page campaign by campaign to track traffic specifically. We can say this many people came from twitter, this many people signed up for the webinar.
Moderator: Thank you very much!
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