Category Archives: social media

An interview with @telecomnz

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I recently had the opportunity to talk to Richard Irvine, Online Community Communication Manager at Telecom about how they engage with consumers on Social Media. Telecom have a strong presence on Twitter and Facebook and from personal experience respond rapidly to queries and tweets involving them, as well as promoting new products and services. I was interested to understand a bit more about how they manage the different networks.

How long has the social media team been operational for?

The team has existed since 2008, and my role has been in place for just over a year.

What is the make-up of the team?
We have people from all across Telecom participating in our Online Response Team, i.e. Retail, Gen-i, Technology and Shared Services, and corporate. The wide, cross functional spread of our personnel is one of the team’s strengths.

The team currently numbers 11, with five or six currently actively participating, and the others playing more of an advisory role.

ORT members are chosen because they are experienced online and comfortable operating in that sphere. They know the protocol, acronyms and expectations of behaviour etc, both as individuals and are aware of the risks and responsibilities of speaking for Telecom online.

Do you have dedicated resource or do they all have ‘day-jobs’ too?

The sole dedicated resource is me, I’m Telecom’s Online Community Communication Manager, and I sit in the corporate media relations team. The other ORT members all have ‘day jobs’ too, and this balance is working for us at the moment.

Do you have people that just monitor Twitter and people just working FB or do they sit across all platforms?

Twitter, Facebook and Geekzone are the big three for us, and the team tend to keep an eye on one or two of those platforms each, depending on their preference, but there’s no formal allocation of platform monitoring duties.

What tools do you use to aid in the monitoring? I am aware of sites such as Social Mention, Ice Rocket, Trackur and Radian6 – do you use any of these?

We use CoTweet to manage Twitter, and Facebook and Geekzone themselves to monitor those sites, if you get me. Google alerts and RSS helps us keep across anything further. I’m not prepared to invest in anything that claims to measure sentiment, I don’t think they work just yet without human intervention. If I need to track sentiment on any campaign or issue, I do it myself.

Do you have ROI goals or targets to meet, and if so how do you define them?

No formal ROI targets have been set yet. We feel our level of investment has paid off so far in reputation and issue management terms, everything else is a bonus. That’s not to say this won’t change in the future.

For me there are a couple of interesting points out of this interview.

Firstly they have a cross-functional team working part-time on the ORT. This is a really good idea as it allows internal experts to answer questions that are in their sphere of knowledge directly, meaning faster responses back to the customer.

They focus on the key platforms that their customers use and then let technology alert them to anything else that may be happening. A focussed approach again allows prompt attention to queries. And they are where their customers are!

No ROI targets. In my mind is the biggy. It would appear as though they have succeeded in getting their heads around the fact it isn’t just about revenue, that brand reputation and customer satisfaction is just as, if not more so, important.

Enterprise 2.0 – Beam me up Scotty!

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So in the last few posts we have looked at (primarily) externally facing social media tools that businesses can use. Now I would like to explore internal social media platforms, that is software that is behind the corporate firewall. As we journey through these internal applications I will relate them back to the 4Cs that Niall Cook describes in his book ‘Enterprise 2.0‘ – Communication, Connection, Cooperation and Collaboration. Before we begin though, I came across an interesting pyramid description of  social media and Enterprise 2.0 in a book called ‘The Executives Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy“:

Social networking: Humans sharing knowledge with other humans outside of their immediate pair-bond families

Social computing: Systems of hardware, software and firmware that enable social networking in a digital environment

Social media: Platforms specifically designed to make social computing available to anyone with a device capable of connecting to the Internet

Enterprise 2.0: A term coined by Andrew McAfee, a professor at the Harvard School of Business, to describe the impact of social networking, social computing, and social media on business organisations

For me this really highlights how the underlying process of humans communicating is still there in the digital age, only now it is done over the medium of the Internet.

In this post we will focus on the category of ‘Communication’. On Cooks technology framework communication software sits in the lower left quadrant – low interaction and low formality. Platforms such as social presence, blogs, Instant Messaging (IM), virtual worlds and discussion forums all sit here. So what value can these different software platforms add? There are as many answers as there are organisations. For some social presence or the ability to see if your colleagues are free or busy will add no value at all, for others it will be a game-changer. Same applies to blogs, to IM, to forums and virtual worlds.

In a previous post I commented on Virtual Worlds and their application in business so I will not re-hash it here. In my opinion, the key platforms are blogs and discussion forums for the majority of organisations and can offer the biggest bang for your buck. Social presence and IM is useful if you operate in a business with multiple offices and/or across time zones as it can be a real time-saver (who hasn’t played phone tag with a colleague!)

Lets start by looking at blogs.  Simply put, a blog is, well this. It is an online log of thoughts, ideas and suggestions. You are reading my blog because (hopefully) you are interested in what I have to say and have the opportunity to comment on it. In an enterprise setting it means I can communicate with those that are interested, and those that aren’t interested are not spammed. It also allows two-way conversations to take place based on the message/s being sent. To give a real-world example the company I work for has a fortnightly internal email newsletter that is sent to around 900 staff. It is created by one person (the Communications Manager) and has brief articles about things that have been happening in the business. Starting last week there is now a CEO’s report section where he gives a top-level view of what he has been up to over the past couple of weeks. This is all good stuff but I wonder if more value can be added by allowing two-way communication about some of the points he raised. If it were a blog posting instead of a static email message then staff would at least have an opportunity to contribute directly and interact on another level with both him and other colleagues.

Forums are similar to blogs insofar as they actively promote users to comment on and discuss the topic at hand. It creates a virtual water cooler if you like, a place where people can do what people to best, communicate. The key difference being on a forum a single point of view or discussion topic is raised by anyone and the ensuing dialog is generally about that alone. This from Wikipedia – A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum’s topic, each new discussion started is called a thread, and can be replied to by as many people as so wish.

So which is the better tool in the Enterprise? The answer is which ever suits your needs best. Probably both maybe? Has anyone had first-hand experience in a business environment with either or both and would like to share those experiences? Drop me a note below, love to hear your experiences. And as always, if you like this post, please take a quick moment to share it with your network.

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Virtually there

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So I was pondering the realm of the 3D Web, virtual worlds and the like the other day and wondering how far they had come over the last 10 years or so. I remember when Second Life (SL) was first launched in 1999, and how it magically transformed the humble text chat sessions into something akin to being in your own movie. I was working in the Market Research industry and was curious to see what options were up and coming for consumer engagement and if there were smarter ways to conduct research – to put it in context I am talking about a time before web surveys were mainstream and 99% of research was done on the telephone or face-to-face. For me, having a virtual world where consumers and brands could connect from anywhere on the planet was amazing and opened up new opportunities to find out what consumers thought of products before they were created in real life.

There were two European market research agencies at the time experimenting with surveys in this medium. I vividly recall in one instance being interviewed by a rock that came to life to talk about my in-world experiences! Novelty factor aside, the ability to show 3D models and mock-ups of new products or see an ad concept on the screen allowed a researcher new avenues to explore. From a learning perspective having the ability to join in a seminar where there was a ‘real’ person on screen showing a new software package or piece of hardware was (almost) priceless, again you have to remember this was before video conferencing and webinars were widely used.

Having this experience over 10 years ago I was fascinated to see how far things had progressed and what new opportunities were available. Surely the worlds would be almost photo-realistic, more engaging and it would be easy to pull in external files to share & collaborate on.

What a disappointment.

Yes it was still impressive and you could talk to people but it seemed to be stuck in a time loop. The quality of the environment doesn’t appear to have changed much, maybe Linden Labs were so far ahead of the game when they made it that this is as good as it gets with current technology. Movement is still keyboard & mouse driven with predefined avatar motions used that are, to be honest, clunky at best.  I am hoping that with the release of Kinect for Windows that we will see more realistic movements and the interface will become well,  ourselves.

When this happens I think the purpose and functionality will change and we may see it adopted more. There is fortunately some research already being conducted into interfacing the Kinect sensor with SL (examples here and here) which can only lead to more immersive and collaborative platforms right? One business-focussed virtual world that I have recently discovered is the Avaya webalive platform. For me this seems a nice mix of Second Life & other virtual worlds and business necessities such as file sharing. It can be easily customised to fit the corporate brand and uses VoIP and text chat. I do wonder though the value of using something like that as opposed to say, Microsoft Lync, Cisco Telepresence or Citrix Goto Meeting.

I am not a gamer, never have been and not likely to be in the foreseeable future which is why I think I struggle to see how this medium adds more value than the aforementioned web collaboration tools, or even the humble wiki or document sharing sites. Saying that, the Gen Y generation who grew up with this type of gaming environment would probably adopt it more readily and find value where I can’t. There is no doubt that virtual worlds can support collaboration. My question though is it more gimmick than genuine business tool? Would you use it in your daily business life to collaborate and communicate with a customer or supplier?

Let me know your thoughts.

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