Month: February 2008

Connecting With Your Audience Using Social Networking

J.C. Bouvier of the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Kevin Reid of Issue Dynamics presented this case study. In his previous career, J.C. started Avid’s podcast series.

He took the job with IFAW, a more pragmatic organization than PETA, to  promote the Stop the Seal Hunt campaign, aimed at getting the Canadian government to take action.

Goals:

  • Recruit thousands of new users into IFAW’s existing
  • Generate 10,000s of new messages to the government of Canada
  • Increase fundraising
  • Provide a range of engaging, meaningful activities for new and old users

Campaign Components

Goal was to get 300,000 actions taken.

Evoca is a way to upload and share audio…like YouTube for audio.

Results:

  • Community Members: 98,000+
  • Subscriber List: 5 percent increase
  • Actions taken: 346 percent increase
  • Donations: 56 percent up over previous year
  • MySpace: Doubled number of Friends
  • YouTube: Over 60,000 views

IFAW also has the Stop Whaling campaign, with similar elements.

Lessons Learned from Toyota’s Internal Blog

Dan Miller from Toyota presented on “The Clandestine Birth, Untimely Death and Hopeful Resurrection of Toyota’s Internal Blog.”

Dan started its blog, called “Sound Off” without review/approval by HR or Legal.

His Ground Rules:

  • Consistent Host/Author
  • Post one entry per week
  • Clear feedback guidelines
  • Low-key promotion

They didn’t use real blogging software, but copied and pasted feedback e-mails into the comments.

“Sound Off” was done in by a sexual harassment suit. Dan did a post about this and didn’t express an opinion, but asked for readers to share their opinions. Then he went on vacation to Scotland, and there were lots of opinions that had been shared by the time he got back. HR and Legal called IS and got the plug pulled. The concern about “discoverability” in pending litigation trumped everything else.

On the external side, Media Relations got support from Legal, giving Legal right to approve all posts before they go up. In return, Legal promised quick turnaround on review.

Dan says there is some light on the horizon, in that Town Hall meetings have capacity crowds. On the negative side, internal opinion surveys reveal that many associates are afraid to speak up.

Now he’s trying to get the internal blog going again.

They have engaged with Legal, and while they haven’t gotten a “yes” it hasn’t been “no” either. They are working through all sorts of “what if” scenarios. HR has become an ally. IS also wants to align with them as a way to get support for Sharepoint, which they likely will use for blogging.

Michael Rudnick says his company has focused on training and awareness. As to the discoverability issue, that’s really a red herring.  Blogging may generate more content that’s discoverable, but e-mail already is discoverable.

CDC Connects

Kay Sessions Golan (PDF file), Director of Employee Communicaitons for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), presented her case study on CDC Connects, the CDC’s On-Line Newspaper and Intranet Portal.

Note: one of the downsides of internal communications is it’s usually hard to benchmark against other organizations. You can’t see their intranets. So Kay showed screen shots from the CDC Connects project.

CDC started its internal blog after having attended a conference like this one. It took about 9 months to get started. They’re using WordPress installed on their servers. It’s “real” blogging software.

Why a blog?

  • These conversation are happening anyway.
  • It allows for respectful, open conversations vs. the water cooler talk
  • It demonstrates trust in employees, and they expect it can lead to problem-solving across the organization.

If you think you’re “controlling” the message now, without a blog, you’re deluded. A blog let you introduce the subject and engage the conversation, instead of having it happen without you.

CDC’s intranet blog is a moderated blog that allows anonymous comments. They did have some trust issues, so they wanted to encourage honest feedback. They were concerned they would get just the “suck ups” – the virtual Eddie Haskells – if they required people to give their names.

This is a little bit risky. Michael Rudnick, our conference chairperson, says the CDC policy is the exception, more than the rule. If employees know that IT can trace comments back to the source, it may diminish trust.

CDC has developed and refined its blog rules over a few months. One of the rules is that the comments need to be “on topic.” They engage in conversations with the negative commenters, asking them to provide specific suggestions for improvement.

They do one new post a week. Categories have included: Business Services, CDC History, CDC Now/Futures, CDC Stays Healthy, Facilities/Scenes, General (the catch-all) and Public Health in Action.

What they’ve learned after 51 posts and 2,400 comments:

  • Most active discussions: on topics that affect daily work life
  • Least active discussions: on scientific or programmatic topics
  • Many managers are reluctant participants
  • Discussions easily wander off topic
  • Appreciated by bloggers
  • Let it evolve and mature.

Kay says they’ve thought about using WordPress for crisis communications. That’s a great idea. I’ve blogged about that previously here. You could do that in WordPress, or in Facebook, or both. If you have WordPress on your intranet already, it takes about 15 minutes to start a new blog to handle this.

Sun Microsystems Embracing Social Media

Sheira Ariel and Carrie Motamedi from Sun Microsystems presented Embracing Social Media: Why, When & How?

Sheira asked whether social media are “just for fun” or also for business.

I actually think social media can make business more fun. And if your goal is more engaged employees, wouldn’t having more fun lead to more productivity?

She gave the example of IBM using instant messaging to put together a proposal for a client really quickly. Likewise, I’ve suggested using Twitter to quickly activate a crisis-response team.

On any given day, half of Sun’s 35,000 employees are working remotely. This makes a stronger case for using the collaborative power of social media.

A year ago they were using traditional communication vehicles: Town Hall meetings, E-mail, Static Web content, Newsletters, Conference Calls. Now they’re adding Global Town Halls, blogs, IM, Facebook, Wikis, Video/Podcasts, WebEx, SecondLife.

The Sun culture supports social media. Then-COO Jonathan Schwartz launched his external blog in 2004. As CEO, he challenged the employee communications group in 2007 to focus on “building communities” instead of just “doing communications.” They renamed their group to include the “communities” element: Global Employee Communications and Communities (GECCO)

Schwartz’s mantra is “Everything always in beta.” This enables them to experiment.

Sheira’s Guiding Principles & Tips:

  • Focus – pick a couple of manageable projects to get some quick wins
  • Start Small
  • Know Your End Goal
  • It’s a Journey

Five Common Social Media Goals

  1. Connect with friends and co-workers quickly
  2. Collaborate
  3. Build communities
  4. Get what you want (not what someone else wants you to have)
  5. Share

Matching Tools to Goals

  1. Wikis for collaboration/knowledge sharing
  2. Blogs to build reputation/share information
  3. Text messaging/IM for quick connections
  4. Forums and message boards to get employee feedback, solve mutual problems
  5. Facebook, MySpace, Ning to build relationships, share

Sun has about 5,000 people on Facebook. Socializing that happens in Facebook builds relationships that help create collaboration. It’s pleasure that leads to better business.

Sun has a PR group focused on social media. They also have experimented with events as ways to “slip in” new technologies on a pilot basis.

I created an event on Facebook within Social Media University, Global. I hope everyone who is attending the conference will indicate their attendance at this event by:

  1. Joining Facebook if you’re not there already.
  2. Enrolling in SMUG
  3. Indicating your attendance at the event.
  4. Continuing the conversation and networking, either around the event or by discussing here.

Following Super Tuesday on Twitter

Sallie Boorman from APCO Worldwide mentioned in this morning’s session that her company has created a SuperTuesday account in Twitter to follow today’s electoral festivities. It’s also connected to their Virtual Vantage Points blog. Since I’m missing the Minnesota precinct caucuses, I’m going to check it out. You should too.