Category: Interviews

Being Bullish About Customer Engagement

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Jay Samit, CEO of SocialVibe, an innovative and rapidly growing digital advertising platform, will be speaking at next week’s Pivot Conference in New York City.  (By the way, last year’s conference was both inspiring and enlightening and was among the best of its kind.) Here’s my brief but informative interview with Jay who is particularly bullish about 2012 and his promise of consumer engagement.

DN: As 2011 winds down, are you thinking “good riddance” or “darn I’ll miss it?”
For SocialVibe, 2011 has been an amazing year. When the economy is tough, brand managers need to justify each and every ad dollar they spend. This has been the year for value-exchange engagements. Hundreds of brands have jumped on the bandwagon increasing our reach to over 600 million consumers per month.

DN: Can you boil down your Pivot presentation to one or two key insights?
Impressions are the least effective way to measure advertising. Measure consumer engagement. Value exchange advertising turns consumers into brand evangelists generating millions in earned media.

DN: Looking back at 2011, what new things did you try?
SocialVibe expanded our value-exchange engagement platform beyond Zynga in 2011, to encompass Facebook credits, premium content, and mobile. With a broader reach of over 150 million American consumers per month, we are now able to pair the product message with their exact audience. The result: millions of consumers opting in to spend over a minute with their favorite brand and sharing that message with dozens of friends online.

DN: Is the current economic uncertainty effecting your plans for 2012?
SocialVibe is expanding globally in 2012. The success of our London office has us now running social media advertising campaigns in dozens of countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. With a reach of over 660 million consumers, Japan and Asia are SocialVibe’s next area of expansion.

DN: Looking ahead to 2012, are there some emerging trends that you hope to capitalize upon?
Providing a rich media solutions for small and medium size businesses is a key growth area for SocialVibe. Today we reach hundreds of millions of consumers for the top 300 brands in the world. In 2012, we want to give smaller businesses access to this targeted, engaged audience of consumers.

DN: Are you particularly proud of something new that you tried or recommended in 2011?
Great topic for another story: SocialVibe is now providing our advertising solution to the Presidential Election of 2012. We have clients from both sides of the aisle. The amazing thing is that political ad campaigns generate results even better than brand campaigns because people love to talk politics.

DN: Finally, among the trends I’m tracking are complexity (for marketers) and data-overload (for consumers). How are you responding to these?
Consumers on the Internet are inundated with marketing messages and have learned to tune them out. The secret is to enter the conversation by finding the “pause moments’ when consumers can and will pay attention. SocialVibe has published over 100 case studies illustrating how brands in virtually any category can achieve great results.

A Look Back at 2012

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Looking to gain some insight prior to the upcoming Pivot Conference in New York City, I interviewed a number of marketers including Gayle Weiswasser, VP, Social Media Communications, Discovery Communications.  Here is what Gayle had to say:

DN: As 2011 winds down, are you thinking “good riddance” or “darn I’ll miss it?”
We’d be thrilled to have another year like 2011. It was a banner year for social media at Discovery – we saw great growth across our social media platforms as well as sustained, strong engagement with fans, thanks to consistent delivery of compelling content that kept our fans happy. We hope that 2012 will be another year of experimentation, growth and success.

DN: Looking back at 2011, what new things did you try that worked or didn’t work?
We experimented with on-air integration of social media (most notably during a marathon for Science’s An Idiot Abroad).  We’d like to expand that capability across all of our networks and do more with on-air integration during premieres. We also tried a number of social media initiatives with our talent that proved to be a great success on social platforms – live chats, Q&As, Facebook/Twitter takeovers.

DN: Is the current economic uncertainty affecting your plans for 2012 and if so how?
Social media outreach and marketing are very cost-effective strategies for driving tune-in and traffic and engaging with fans. We do not expect the economic climate to affect our social media plans; in fact, social media has proven to be indispensable when budgets are tightened.

DN: Looking ahead to 2012, are there some emerging trends that you hope to capitalize upon?
Mobile is a big trend for 2012 (and has been for the last few years). The more that we can engage our fans across a range of devices through compelling content and apps – whether they augment our on-air programming through co-viewing or simply make our brands more accessible and fun – the more successful we will be. Mobile is incredibly important to our business, and Discovery’s commitment to making its sites mobile-friendly and to developing these apps is a testament to that.

DN: Are you particularly proud of something new that you tried in 2011?
We’re proud of the fact that, with very few exceptions around individual shows, Discovery does all of its social media in-house. We’ve grown from a team of 2 in 2009 to a team of 10 today, which is a testament to Discovery’s commitment to social media and its importance as part of a larger marketing/communications strategy.

DN: How are the dual trends, complexity (for marketers) and data-overload (for consumers) effecting your plans?
We know that our fans are constantly bombarded with information, and that we are competing with many, many inputs for both their television minutes and their online attention. That puts the burden squarely on us to consistently deliver strong, authentic content that is both relevant and entertaining. It is very easy for a fan to hide a page or unsubscribe from a Twitter account, or just simply to pass by our posts without sharing, commenting or clicking through. We try to meet that challenge by setting a high bar for content on our platforms and using social media to spotlight effectively the amazing programming that airs every day across our networks.

Developing a Social Business Program

Posted on by Drew Neisser

I realize this was a long interview and you may be ready for me to move on BUT this last part contains some really smart advice for other companies looking to develop their own Social Business programs.  Also, this interview produced my latest post on FastCompany.com entitled Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business.

Drew: What advice would you give to a B2B company interested in pursing a similar program?  What three things would you say to them?

Ethan: Probably, don’t use the word, “expert.” There are some cultures that are completely allergic to using that word in reference to themselves.

Drew: Makes sense. How did you get this thing up and running?

Ethan: One of the things we’ve done that’s been really helpful is we made sure that we had people from all around the world working on the project. I’m a member of a team we call the Expertise and Eminence Round Table.  It started with six of us just meeting on Friday morning and talking about the work we were doing.  The group represents some people from our hardware group, some from software and others from Services and the CIO office.  They heard about the work that my team and I were doing and they wanted to be apart of the project. We realized we were all managing lists of experts, so we got our lists together. We started with a base population in the Expertise Locator System that’s very diverse so we can learn a lot from that. From there we hit the ground running.

Drew: What else would you advise?

Ethan: We are trying to apply what’s called “agile development” to this system so we put out a new version or update it just about every two weeks. The idea is we try to learn quickly, and if we need to fail quickly, we’re failing quickly.  When stuff doesn’t work, two weeks later we’re changing it.  With Digital systems like the Expertise Locator,  you can’t spend 10 months planning it and then launch it.  From the point when we wanted to get this on ibm.com to the point we had it on ibm.com was four weeks.  It wasn’t a service at that point; it was this manually coded thing. In the next version we had the database set up, and in the next version we had the API described.

It was very iterative; my advice – you really want to get something up that you can start to have people experience quickly.  It’s complicated because people expect [that because] it’s from IBM, surely it’s done when it’s out the door. It would be quite different if this were a product that we’re putting into market, but this is a cultural program, a communications and marketing program.  In that way we have a bit more flexibility to iterate and learn as we go— that would be a very key lesson for anybody who’s going to try to get into this.  You’re talking about working with lots of people, and you can’t predict how people behave. It would be tremendous hubris to say that you could predict how people are going to behave.

Drew: Is there a component of this where the accessibility of these experts is giving away the very expertise that you sell?

Ethan: The interaction that experts have or that people have with IBMers right now through this is pretty light.  It’s not like a free six-month consulting engagement with a team of our principle consultants. I think it’s more of a means to get to know us, and we can help you build your business through that.

Drew:  What’s in it for the expert?  I mean they’ve got their own job.

Ethan: That’s a great question. First of all, there are some IBMers for whom interaction with the public, clients in particular, or prospective employees or whomever, is a facet of their job.  If you’re going to be one of our most eminent technologists, you’d be called a distinguished engineer or maybe you’d be a member of our academy of technology or a master inventor. These people already have it in their job description to interact with clients and prospects, and they’re supposed to be mentoring people. There are all kinds of things that they’re already supposed to be doing and quite directly participating as someone in our Expertise Locator System or participating in social business at IBM would allow them to do that more effectively.  Soon, they will actually be able to track it. You could say, “Look, I showed up on web pages 350,000 times.”

Secondly, these days employees are sort of global capitalists in a way. You’re a citizen of a digitally interconnected globe at this point, and your reputation is everything.  If you cannot manage your reputation— your digital professional reputation— you’re in real trouble. One of the things that we’re building out in social business at IBM is a personal dashboard that starts to show things like how many times you were surfaced and how many times people connect with you. We’re helping to establish each IBMers digital reputation with these tool, and a digital reputation is becoming vital in today’s business world.

A Deeper Look at Social Business

Posted on by Drew Neisser

In this part of the interview, Ethan McCarty IBM’s Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy, goes into more specifics about their social business initiatives. Of particular interest to me is the Expertise Locator, a nascent Marketing as Service program that connects prospects/customers with experts IBMers.

Drew: Walk me through your various social business initiatives at IBM.

Ethan: IBM’s social business initiatives run deep – from the products and services we sell to clients to our own use of the technology and implementation of social business processes throughout the organization. IBM Connections is our social software platform for businesses designed for workers to network both inside and outside of the firewall. It’s basically the backbone for an organization to transform into a social business. It provides all the necessary social tools – wikis, blogs, communities, instant messaging, etc. – and social analytics features to allow employees to really expand their professional network, to find and contribute content, to identify expertise within their organization and ultimately drive the bottom line for the organization. We’re using this technology at IBM and reaping huge benefits.

Beyond drinking our own champagne, a huge priority for IBM, in order to really become a social business, has been education. We offer a huge catalogue of educational modules all around how to get involved in social computing. Back in 2007, we used a Wiki and about 250 IBMers wrote our Social Computing Guidelines collaboratively. We offer modules around why IBMers need social computing, we provide examples of how IBMers have used social digital experiences to improve customer interaction, sales, business value, various business process – these examples are impactful. We offer a Social Computing Demystified course and then we have a course about IBM’s digital strategy in general. This is all available to every IBMer on an internal site, Social Business @ IBM. It’s a one stop educational resource for the IBMer who wants to establish their digital reputation and two-fold, help to enhance IBM’s brand.

Drew: How have IBMers embraced these initiatives?

Ethan: IBMers are ready to go out there and be the brand. A great example of this is our Centennial Celebration of Service. This year is IBM’s 100th anniversary, and it’s a big deal. In honor of the accomplishment, we asked every IBMer [to] take a full day and dedicate it to skills-based service. This event was about IBMers going out and teaching the thing they’re great at or going to a non-profit and helping them to optimize their IT systems or doing consulting in the industry that they’re expert in. You can go to look at our IBM 100 website and you’ll see some of the visualization’s from the day of service. IBMers uploaded almost 2,000 photos of themselves doing these celebrations of service, they tweeted using the hashtag we created to trend on twitter. The event was all about giving back and celebrating our organization’s expertise and talent, but being the social business that we are, it incorporated so many digital and social experiences as well.

Drew: Tell me about the Expertise Locator.

Ethan: A new social business initiative we’re rolling out is the Expertise Locator, which is also situated in the context of that training material we talked about earlier. IBM no longer sells consumer products; the brand experience for IBM is an experience with an IBMer. If your brand is experienced through its people— not through the products— then you’d want to make sure that your very best people are well equipped to interact with the important audiences and constituencies. That’s what the Expertise Locator is about. It’s incredibly nascent; we’ve just been working on this for a year and a half, but we already have several thousand IBMers who have enrolled internally and we’re starting to help those IBMers prepare for being surfaced in digital experiences all over the place— not just on our Intranet.

The next phase of this project is to really describe our experts and do the hard work of figuring out what the policies will be for accessing them – how will we give them enough controls that it’s not invasive to them or they don’t get overwhelmed or how do we make sure the right experts show up on which page so they’re connected with the right people. There are kinks to work out, but we’re really excited about the impact its going to have on the IBM brand experience.

Drew: Is there a risk here of over-promising this one-to-one interaction between this expert and the visitor?

Ethan: I think there is that risk. But, there are a few things that are helping to mitigate that. One is we’re not promising a one-to-one interaction. There are interaction modes on IBM.com where that it is promised, but the Expertise Locator is not that kind of immediate interaction, its offering the opportunity to connect with these IBMers over LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, by phone, etc. The interaction with voices from IBM can be extremely multi-modal and very satisfying. I think we can actually deliver on that, particularly because a lot of the social systems that are emergent that we’re taking advantage of. We could get to that point where, depending on who you are, we would match you with, and what you’re trying to accomplish, we could match you with the right person who has the right modality of interaction.

There are lots of risks and we’re going to have to figure out how to address them and we’re trying to apply some of our best thinkers to that. We also think there’s a big risk to circling the wagons and ignoring this new mode of doing business. Becoming a truly holistic social business is not without its risks, but ultimately taking these risks is what sets you apart from the pack.

Drew: How do you measure the value of a program like this?

Ethan: There’s the operational measures like, Are we getting people to enroll? Are they going through the training? The company does some internal research periodically about a lot of different issues, but one of them is awareness of our guidelines. I would like to see that one of the results of this would be more IBMers really feel like they’re familiar with the social computing guidelines and feel empowered by that. We ask those kinds of questions internally, so those are sort of operational metrics.

When we were first testing how we would show experts on external web pages, we did an AB test. We found that the page performed better when we put experts on it. It’s not that surprising; everybody who’s been doing web stuff for a while knows that your confidence and trust in the page is going to go up when you see real humans on it. We did focus group analysis and asked for feedback. [The participants] looked at the expert: It showed whatever the expert’s latest blog entry or tweet was, so they got the sense that there’s another person there. Their confidence in the page went up; their trust in IBM went up. Overall they were feeling better about being there.

Part 3 of this interview will be posted tomorrow.


A Deeper Look at Social Business Part I

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Here is the first part of my interview with Ethan McCarty IBM’s Senior Manager of Digital and Social Strategy.  Its hard not to be impressed with IBM’s approach to social, elevating the discussion from a “nice to have” media component to a “must have” means of doing business.

 

Drew: Most businesses are trying to get their mind’s wrapped around social media, and you folks are now talking about social business. What’s the difference between those two terms?

Ethan: I think there’s a variety of interpretations for these terms : social media and social business. Social media is typically about mediated experiences with content, and sometimes it’s about dis-inter-mediating the experience. Social media is about media and people, which is one dimension of the overall world of business. With social business you start to look at the way people are interacting in digital experiences and how you can apply the insights derived from all the data and apply them to business processes that may not necessarily be about dissemination of information.

Drew: Tell me about the various dimensions of Social Business, and how companies can deploy it.

Ethan: Social business is about looking at  business processes differently;  from how you are listening to your customers, to how you are engaging with a wide-variety of constituencies. It could be your employees, or it could be potential investors; it could be current investors; it could be prospects for your business.

One of the main dimensions of social business is about managing relationships through these new business processes. Social media is more about disseminating information in new ways, using people as the medium rather than broadcast systems as the medium.  In social business you might be managing community relationships or relationships with individuals; you might be identifying and activating experts or rewarding and recognizing certain kinds of behaviors. And then of course another really important dimension of social business is collaboration. I think that is beyond the thought of social media because it’s not always about creating an information document.  It could be things like collaborative editing, but it could also be file sharing or expertise location.

There are things in the realm of social business that are more about working to improve the efficiency of teams as opposed to just getting a message out there, which I think a lot of the initial social media really were about. Social business is sort of a super-set of social media. Social media is one component of social business.

Drew: Is social business a mind set or a skill set? Or is it a product?

Ethan: All of the above. There are certainly products that enhance an organization’s ability to become a social business. For example, IBM offers a platform of products that enable social business – wikis, blogs, communities, instant messaging, etc. Beyond these products, and really in order to implement and adopt them successfully, social business has to be move than just a mindset, it has to be an organization’s cultural priority. Leaders have to be committed to making significant business process changes in order to actually make work getting done easier and more efficient. We have at IBM a social business management council that  includes some very high-ranking IBM executives, IBMers in the CIO office, in HR, etc., [and] we perform risk analyses and opportunities analyses to help us establish new modes of work. One of the efforts that I’m leading with an IBM HR leader is to look at how we’re going to formalize these new modes of work into our skills at IBM. Social business at IBM is a priority, we’re constantly fine tuning our processes to better serve our customers, partners and ourselves.

Social business is a pretty broad thing, and it includes skills that aren’t necessarily obvious to every employee.  Also there’s a broad area of policy development that we, as an industry, need to do. If you think about how many relationships between an enterprise’s employee base and those with whom they are supposed to be working have been mediated and controlled by processes that are not necessarily enabled by the most contemporary social business approaches, you’ll see the world has a lot of work to do in this area. That is, to me, very promising.

Drew: How is Social Business being integrated into IBM’s business model?

Ethan: There are a couple major concepts that we’re currently working on. One is acknowledging that social, digital activity is moving from the periphery to the center of business. And to me, that’s a big part of what social business is. It’s the transition of all the interesting and fun social activity that’s taken place in the commercial domain is becoming increasingly applicable to enterprises, and how enterprises get work done; how enterprises manage relationships with their clients; how employees work together. That’s a significant change in business.  Social, digital activity and experiences are no longer a frivolous, nebbishy thing for teenagers and college students. Enterprises are realizing the power of these tools to transform there business.

IBM’s a great example of this social business transformation; a lot of our work is done using digital, collaborative means. Consider this, I’ve got eight people on my core team, and, not one of us lives in the same city, and many of us are in different time zones.  I work with IBMers in Australia and California and Michigan and all around the Tri-State area, and we’re doing all kinds of great work together, every day. It’s asynchronous; it’s collaborative. The way we work together is digital and a lot of it this work and collaboration is not happening over email.  Email is a very limited tool, and in some ways completely antisocial.  It does a lot of things to silo the work efforts. Instead of email, we’re using social tools – file sharing, video conferencing, wikis, communities, instant messaging, etc – to get our jobs done.

FYI, you can follow Ethan on Twitter @ethanmcc.

The Building of Social Media Programs

Posted on by Drew Neisser

I had a chance to catch up with Trish Nettleship, the Social Media Lead at AT&T Business Marketing prior to her presentation at the upcoming B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in Philadelphia.  Trish discusses their newest social media program and the internal training required to make it happen.  

DN: Tell me about the social media program(s) you’ll be presenting at the conference.
We launched a B2B focused blog, the first for AT&T, earlier this year called Networking Exchange Blog. The idea was to bring forth our wealth of expertise, our people, directly to businesses in the industries we serve. We have some of the brightest minds at AT&T, so providing a platform for them to share their thoughts and perspectives on technologies directly to businesses seemed like a great approach to showcasing our thought leadership. We quickly learned that our subject matter experts knew their technologies well, but weren’t as experienced in the ways of social media. We created the Networking Leaders Academy to create an active corps of expert ambassadors who create social proof and digital “trust” in AT&T, it’s people and their points of view on technology. The Academy provides the experts with the incentives, tools, training and support to enable the open and ongoing dialogue with businesses, large and small across the social atmosphere.

DN: What were your goals for this program?
Our initial goal for the blog is about building awareness and credibility in technology spaces not typically associated with AT&T. (i.e. Cloud and Security.)  The goal of the Networking Leaders Academy is to build on the foundation of the blog and empower our experts to do more than just create blog posts, but truly engage with businesses whether it be on blog or in external communities, social networks, blogs or forums.

DN: And how did the program(s) achieve these goals?
We have seen growth in overall awareness of the brand across these technologies. We’ve also seen our experts own credibility and awareness increase through their personal networks, guest blog requests and speaking engagement requests.

DN: Do you see any major differences between B2B and B2C approaches to social media?
The buying life cycle for B2B is typically longer and more engaged. The social media strategy in the B2B space has to take this into consideration. We focus a lot of our efforts on engaging with businesses early in the buying lifecycle. So providing content that is more research oriented in nature is key. If the business doesn’t engaged with us early in the buying lifecycle we may never get a chance to be placed in the consideration set of vendors. Timing, relevant content and the right platform are key to success in the B2B environment.

DN: Has social media become a significant part of your marketing mix?
Yes, our customers want to engage with us on their terms and not be forced into an experience solely created by us. So whether they are on social networks or blogs, or any other digital environment, there is an appreciation of that AT&T is coming to them.

DN: Is there a risk that social media could trivialize your product/service in the eyes of your B2B customers?
No, it’s an evolution of how we engage with our customers or prospects. As more and more businesses are becoming more comfortable in social media, it is expected that we will be there to engage with them.