Social media fitness Archives

One of things I’ve always liked about my business is the diversity of marketing challenges that are out there. For example, it’s hard to imagine two more different situations than those faced by Stacy Braun, SVP of Marketing at AXA Equitable and Evan Greene, CMO of The Recording Academy (better known for The Grammys.) Yet when you drill down a bit, especially in the social media arena, you’ll find that smart marketers share a common commitment to understanding their target, engaging at all the right touch points and establishing metrics for success. Both Braun and Greene were kind enough to answer some of my last minutes questions related to the Social Media Fitness Study. I think you’ll find what they have to say quite interesting.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-disciplined social media team?
Braun: At AXA Equitable, we see the benefits of having a cross-disciplined team in driving the social media strategy and execution for our organization. Because social touches so many areas of our business, it is important to have a coordinated effort that engages all key players in our decisions around this evolving platform. This ensures we are thinking through all of the nuances that can impact our brand image, our PR strategy and how our employees, advisors and customers are engaging with our brand. While a cross-disciplined team may require more check-points along the way, the result of having collaboration and insights from all key areas of the firm ensures that we “own” the experience together.

Greene: It depends on your goal. Rather than simply using social as a tactic, the most effective brands use social as an organic part of everything they do. Therefore, a cross-discipline team, that touches many areas of the company is an effective, collaborative approach.

DN: Can you talk about the benefits of doing a social media audit?
Braun: We conducted a social media audit about a year ago and it proved extremely helpful in understanding the opportunities available to us. By looking at competitors in our industry, as well as companies in other categories, we recognized the potential of social media, which helped us set our priorities for the year ahead. It also helped us refine our social media guidelines for employees, and identify new ways to use social to proactively enhance our brand image.”

DN: What compelled you all to set up a social media training program?
Greene: With social media still being relatively new, and touching everyone either in their personal lives, or at work (and often in both places), there are no standardized rules. In fact, the rules continue to evolve almost daily. Therefore, with so much at stake with brand image and reputation in today’s fracturing marketplace, companies are well served to establish clear parameters that can be consistently applied and followed across their organizations. Otherwise, simple, sometimes innocent mistakes can happen and be disastrous to a company’s brand and reputation. When this happens, it can be very difficult to recover.

DN: What are the advantages of having a real-time dashboard?
Greene: Metrics are crucial. Listening and monitoring are really becoming the new frontier. After all, the better you become at interpreting the data, the more effective conversations you will be able to build with your social ecosystem, and the deeper the engagement you can create.

A lot of people talk about social media. Jenny Weigle does social media. And I might add she does it really well for the socially savvy brand, CareerBuilder.com. I met Jenny at MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit back in January and was delighted to catch up with her afterwards to discuss some of the findings of the soon to be released Social Media Fitness Study. (Thanks for the insights Jenny.)

DN: Can you shed some light on how your organization came to have a disaster plan? Did you have a disaster first?
It’s all about communication. We didn’t have a disaster take place, but if one does, we feel confident in our ability to work through it because of the strong communication across departments in our company. We have social media guidelines and a community management playbook that both outline the steps to take in a crisis. My supervisor and I collaborated with people across departments to create these documents.

DN: Can you speak to the benefits of having a cross-discipline team in place for social media?
In my opinion, it’s not just a benefit for social media to cross departments…it’s a necessity. A tweet or a post on your company’s Facebook wall could pertain to any topic: customer service, job openings, products, services, advice, etc. It’s essential that the person in charge of your social media efforts is in touch with every department so that he/she can provide an answer to the fan/follower as quickly as possible. That’s what makes a company stand out and stay connected to their fans through social media.

DN: How are you developing such effective content at CareerBuilder?
Our team listens to the feedback coming from our fans on social media and looks over a report on that feedback on a regular basis. Also, each person creating our social content is up-to-date and informed on our industry so that we can give our audience the most relevant information.

DN: How have you been able develop to a consistent customer experience across all of your social channels?
Again, it comes back to communication. I stay in touch with our customer service team on a regular basis (at least monthly). They’ve been fully trained on our engagement tool and I keep them updated on major changes to the social platforms. We are a team, and it’s important to know that and do whatever it takes so that all admins feel that they are a part of the team, working together to achieve our social media goals. We also regularly recognize our team members for outstanding performance.

DN: Can you offer any insight to as to why you decided to streamline your accounts and address the benefits of doing so?
If someone wants to connect with us through social media, it should be very easy for them to find us and begin engaging. By having too many accounts, a company can make this harder for a user to find and connect with them. We evaluated which accounts were most important to us, and in some cases we merged them, in others we closed them. We did this with our audience in mind and what would make it easiest for them.

DN: Do you have any thoughts on why large B2C companies scored higher [on the Social Media Fitness Test] than B2B firms and smaller B2C companies?
B2B has been slower to adopt social media overall. In my opinion, it’s easier for a consumer to pick up on social media because he/she can use it and learn it on their own time. For a business to use social media, it must first consider what needs and goals it will fulfill, who will run it, what content will be shared, what metrics will be measured, etc. This takes more time, research and consideration for the business.