Tag: Social Media

Super Tuesday and Corporate Internal Communications

Sheryl Lewis from ROI Communications, one of the sponsors of today’s event, talked about how Web 2.0 has influenced the election. Barack Obama’s campaign has been particularly empowered by the grassroots democratization of media production. Sen. George Allen’s campaign was killed before it even started by the macaca incident on You Tube.

The application for internal communications in businesses, Sheryl says, is that the millions of people who have been part of the political campaign networking online and that had such an impact on Super Tuesday, are going to work this morning in our businesses. The technology that is changing politics needs to make its way behind the corporate firewall to enable these employees to network and connect as effectively on behalf of our businesses as they have in the political world.

Starting Day Two of ALI Conference

Day Two of the ALI Conference is about to start. Today’s agenda includes case studies from Cisco Systems, Rolls Royce, Best Buy, IBM and American Express. Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club and The Conversation Group will be leading a group exercise. And our conference chairperson, Michael Rudnick, will tie it all together.

I’ll be blogging again as an embedded report from the front lines. Look for dispatches throughout the day here and on Twitter.

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.

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.