Social Marketing Conversations

The opportunity to speak with the global Director of the Small to Medium Business Division for Dell was a chance to get some insight into how a Global 500 company leverages social media to market their products and services to both the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) and our time with Michael Buck was no disappointment.

Michael is the Director and General Manager for the Global Small and Medium Online Business at Dell, and is responsible for the overall online business and strategy for Dell SMB worldwide.  When he spoke with us from his offices in Stuttgart Germany, Guy Powell and I were able to find out a great deal about how Dell manages and measures their social marketing and their online presence.

In our first episode, we learned about the Four Pillars of the online marketing strategy they employ and in episode 2 we heard about the five Customer Value Drivers and the five key metrics they apply to measure the success of their online efforts.  In our last episode, Michael shared how Dell works hard to present a broad offering of online communities and communications options to support the B2B and B2C initiatives and to give customers a chance to have their voices heard and to drive the innovations in products and services they want to invest in from Dell.

In this episode, we wrap up the conversation with Michael with him sharing how Dell is absolutely committed to social media as a fundamental tactic because they see success in it and they see how well the customer base responds to it.  He also points out that the massive increase in social engagements in other geographies, away from North America, to other regions that including Brazil, Russia, India and elsewhere.

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Andrew Pickup is the Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft Corporation in the Asia Pacific Region.  We were very excited to get the opportunity to speak with Andrew and find out about the work they are doing in Asia Pacific.  Joining Guy Powell and myself for the interview also was our co-author, Jerry Dimos of LiTMUS Group in Singapore.  Good to have you on the call Jerry!

We begin our interview with Andrew as he shares a few bullets from his presentation at the recent ad:tech conference in Singapore on the Windows7 Launch.  The campaign focused on the aspect of the development of Windows7 that leverage consumer input and ideas and with 8 million beta users, the campaign put real users in front of consumer in a way that helped people to see themselves in the role of “I’m a PC and Windows7 was my idea’”.  The campaign was a great success for Microsoft and helped support the worldwide launch very effectively.

Microsoft’s approach to social marketing comes from a perspective that they should be a leader in social media and able to engage very effectively.  With 93 of out every 100 PC’s sold coming with the Microsoft operating systems and the majority of people are buying a PC today to connect to the Internet, most computer systems today present an opportunity to connect consumers with their social media presence.

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Dan Marks and his team place a huge value in being able to measure the ROI of their marketing.  In the evolution of the use of social media in financial services, Dan sees that right now they should just experiment a bit; try new tactics, growing follower counts and listening a lot.  As they find what works and doesn’t however, Dan predicts that as they can put the ROI model around their efforts and see the results, they will likely make larger investments.  Right now they are looking at how or if a Facebook ad might increase / improve click through for search marketing.

FTB has also seen some ‘cross pollination’ between social and traditional too.  In one effort, FTB leveraged unsolicited online testimonials to build proof points in traditional print ads.   In the ads they turned it around and invited other customers into the online conversation.  While sometimes hard to hear, they also took in the less positive comments and recognized that they served a useful purpose on what they need to be paying attention to in terms of operations or service.

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FTB is one of the top 50 largest banks (First Horizon Nat’l is holding company) in the US with a history going back to 1864.  Dan Marks, as the Chief Marketing Officer at First Tennessee Bank (FTB) is moving where bank or financial institutions fear to tread – to the social web to listen to their customers.

FTB is the leading blank in Tennessee and is committed to staying in contact with and listening to their customers.  When Dan noticed that 11% or more of their target audience was already involved in social media, Dan decided that the bank needed to be finding ways to connect with them online where they already were are.

The social presence for FTB includes a Facebook Fan Page (http://www.facebook.com/firsttennessee) where they have 2,687 fans and a new Twitter ID (@firsttennessee) where they post the question to others who comment on FTB, “I work for First Tennessee Bank, is there anything we can do to assist you with any issues you may be having?”

The path to this point has not always been easy for the FTB team though.  In this episode, Dan cites the biggest obstacle for the use of social media as a financial institution. 

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We’re doing well (we think) with the edits on the book and the publisher has the first version of the manuscript. While all that is being thrashed out, we’re looking a some of the branding and marketing.
Here are three (3) ideas we’ve come up with and we’re interested in what you think!

Trying out the PollDaddy app from Automattic i this post, so we are only collecting 100 votes – When it fills up, just leave your comments below – thanks!

Yesterday we were able to deliver to our publisher the initial manuscript for book, ‘ROI of Social Media’ (which is the working title, we should have the final title here any day) and all we can say is ‘whew’!

The process of working with Guy Powell and Jerry Dimos has been a tremendous experience and I cannot begin to tell you how much I’ve learned in the process, but I do understand how it will impact the level of service I can deliver to my clients.  The association with these two men allowed me, as primarily a social media guy, to really grasp the scope of what social marketing does and what it will mean to marketers wanting to honestly connect with the audience of influencers, consumers, and individuals.

The video podcast posted here (after the break) is one that Guy and I recorded as an introduction of us to others – we’ll be pulling Jerry into one here soon.  In this episode, Guy and I talk about our backgrounds and how we came to meet.  The process of connecting with one another and the work we’ve undertaken so far has been a fantastic case study in the power of social media (we met via Linkedin) and the ROI for a personal brand in social media.

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Our conversation with Aneta Hall / Emerging Media Manager for Pitney Bowes (PB) has been very informative to say the least.

If you would have told me a year ago that a 90 year old company would be an innovator in enterprise social media, I’m pretty sure I would not have believed you.  After the time spent with Aneta, I can tell you that a 90 year old company is being really innovative in the enterprise deployment of social media and they’re showing a measureable ROI.

In the last two episodes we’ve covered elements of how PB has done it too.  First, they approached it from an understanding that social media is not a set-and-forget proposition; they recognized a need for needed a sustainable program that at the same time, did not inhibit individual participation.  They also understood that they needed to put some tools in place, watch key performance indicators (KPIs) and apply metrics, looking for the ROI; those efforts have led to a $300K saving in call-center deflections in a 3 month period.

I know that Guy and I are looking forward to connecting with her at the MeasureUp event in Chicago next month and to put a live presence with the enthusiastic personality she has  shown in the podcast series here.

In this episode Aneta lets us know that while they do set certain measures and metrics in place, they are certainly open to evaluating them and updating policy as PB learns what actually makes a difference to their customers and to the bottom line.   We open the discussion referring to the Twitter, Facebook and online forums that PB maintains, but Aneta tells us that social media at PB is not about an overarching corporate social presence. At the end of the day social media is about people connecting to people, and it needs to be a sustainable level of one-on-one social media interactions with PB employees taking the lead.

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In episode 1 of the interview with Aneta Hall / Emerging Media Manage at Pitney Bowes (PB) and a presenter at the 2010 MeasureUp Conference in Chicago in March, we talked about the need to develop a sustainable effort and a need to provide guidance to the staff that supports the interaction with customers, prospects and stakeholders.

In this episode, Aneta talks with Guy Powell and myself about how the elements of a relevant online strategy for PB includes traditional elements, like before social media came to onto the scene, but now it has changed many of the ways PB structures campaigns to their audience.

In 2010 a major goal for PB is to bring structure to their investment in social media.  The investment includes technology, and organizational structure and people.  Aneta shares how PB now makes the effort to evaluate interactions relative to the ROI of the time and resources it takes to connect to the audience, ‘No more free lunch’ says Aneta.

She shares the 3 tiered model for measuring social media that PB uses, each have several Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) beneath them.  The major categories are -

• Attention,
• Engagement, and
• Influence.

All these help understand the contribution to the leads, sales, and brand awareness for PB and it’s business units.

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Social media in the enterprise is creating a huge shift in many companies, but what happens when a 90 year old company decides to invest in a process of listening to their customers and actually letting them talk to one another?

As part of the series around the ROI of Social Media, and leading up to the 2010 MeasureUp Conference in Chicago next month, we interview Aneta Hall, the Emerging Media Manager at Pitney Bowes.  She is a presenter at the 2010 MeasureUp Conference in Chicago, where her topic is “From Fear to Trust – Employee Engagement in Social Media”.

Aneta introduces us to the processes Pitney Bowes (PB), as a 90 year old company, has adopted using social media to connect with prospects, customers, employees and stakeholders around their mail and information needs.  The changes have driven real change in the various business units, particularly as in the last 10 years they have acquired a variety of businesses.  PB now provides a broad range of solutions to the market, not only in mail instruments and document management, but also location intelligence, traffic pattern analysis, predictive intelligence, and relationship marketing.  Aneta shares how sees social media technology supporting the ability to tell the PB story to the market.

The role of the Emerging Media Manger at Pitney Bowes is to help the organization understand and constantly analyze the evolving landscape of social media.  In her role, Aneta teaches other how to use the technology and she often presents the model outlined in Chris Brogans’ awesome book, ‘Trust Agents’.  She also maintains the strategic roadmap for PB and is often glued to the PB Radian6 console, because of the value she places on listening to the conversation in social media versus trying to use social media as just another channel to broadcast the same messages used in traditional media.

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In this episode Lewis Goldman of 1800Flowers.com shares some of the successes 1800Flowers.com has had along with some of the lessons learned.

The first is the booming growth in the adoption of mobile, their application for placing orders on a variety of mobile platforms is growing rapidly.  Today you can use your Blackberry, Android, or iPhone to place an order from the 1800Flowers.com Mobile Gift Center in several categories for personal or business.

1800Flowers.com has not been afraid to try out new ideas has often been a first mover in many areas to stay connected to their audience and they try a lot of things, sometime uncertain of the outcome; case in point was the effort in creating a 1800Flowers.com store in the 3D social platform of Second Life, which they discovered was not the right platform at the time to connect them to their audience.

A success is the development of the ideal customer model, which they have named ‘Tina’. Tina is the aggregate persona of the ideal 1800Flowers.com customer, which embodies the characteristics of the buying behavior they see in the market overall.  Lewis shows us how they referenced Tina in the ‘Spot-a-Mom’ campaign leading up to Mothers Day in 2009.

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