Listen Up: Tips for Social Media Success

Deirdre WalshSocial Media & Community

Program ManagerNational Instruments

My name is Deirdre Walsh and for the last 5 years I’ve managed the social business program at National Instruments.

Agenda

• Brief Introduction

• Social Media Management Overview

• 6 Pillars of Social Media Success

• Discussion and Debate

@deirdrewalsh

During today’s session, I’ll be giving a brief overview of the social media program at NI, share with you some best practices for how to build or improve your current program, and then open it up to some great discussion and debate.

• Established in 1976 in Austin, TX

• Sells to a broad base of more than 30,000 different companies worldwide

• More than 5,200 employees; operations in ~40 countries

• No one customer representing more than 4 percent of revenue and no one industry representing more than 15 percent of revenue.

• $873M Revenue in 2010

• Fortune’s100 Best Companies to Work For 12th Consecutive Year

National Instruments

First, I want to provide a brief overview on National Instruments. Headquartered in Austin, we sell hardware and software into more than 30,000 different companies worldwide. No industry represents more than 15 percent of our revenue. So, it’s essential for us to have a strong community that connects like-minded engineers and scientists so they can provide each other support and share best practices for their specific application.

Developer Community NI Talk Social Media

Engage Employees

• Innovation Acceleration

• Sales & Channel Enablement

• Corporate Communications

• Expertise Location / Corporate Directory

• M&A Integration

• Contact Center Enablement

Engage Customers

• Community-Based Support

• Customer Innovation

• Event Communities

• Account Management

• Social Commerce

• Marketing

Engage the Social Web

• Product Launches

• Community Recruiting

• Social Brand Management

• Service Everywhere

• Social Selling

• Competitive Intelligence

Integrated Social Business Properties

To do this, we utilize Jive Social Business Software, we have integrated tools to engage with customers, employees and all of the conversations on the social Web. The best part is that all of these platforms are integrated and this is unique. Often at enterprises today you have product marketing or support teams in charge of branded communities, HR or employee communications responsible for internal collaboration, and PR or marketing teams driving strategy for platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But with Jive it becomes less about the technologies and more about connecting the right conversations to the right subject area experts.

Our social business efforts have won us two Forrester Groundswell awards for supporting and embracing our customers. For today’s presentation, I’m going to be focusing on the third area - Social Media.

Questions We Want Answer

• Where are our customers online?

• Who should participate in conversations on the social Web?

• What platforms should be participating on?

• What are the digital profiles of our prospects?

• Who are the influencers and who trusts them?

• What is the sentiment of our products and brand?

• How do we measure success?

As a social media manager, there are a number of questions I want answered - where are our customers? who are the key influencers? what is our brand sentiment?

Define IntegrateListen

and Engage

Build Activate Analyze

Set clear goals that align with

overall business objectives

Don’t be an island.

Connect to internal

structure, process,

plans.

Monitor and respond to actionable

conversations

Grow social community

membership & engagement

Reward and amplify key

influencers & evangelists

Track and report impact

across business

6 Pillars of Success

Across the Social Web

To help address all of these areas, I’ve come up with the 6 pillars of social media success. The three in light blue are internally focused. It’s really important to get alignment internally before engaging externally. The other blue rainbow items will three teach you how to best interact with your customers. Today, I’ll be walking through each of these six areas.

1 Define. Set clear goals that align with overall business objectives

Utilize a planning framework (like Forrester’s POST method) to determine audience, goals, strategies, and technologies.

- Support: Ensure Customer Success

- R&D: Obtain Product Feedback

- Sales: Drive New/Repeat Business

- PR: Increase Awareness and Manage Reputation

- Marketing: Increase Loyalty

- Web: Increase Online Engagement

The first step to any social media plan is to set clear goals that align with your overall business objectives. At NI, I’ve developed our social media program to help meet core goals around support, development, sales, and marketing.

1 Define. Set clear goals that align with overall business objectives

Understand one size doesn’t fit all.

SupportMarketingAwareness

- Real-time news updates- Demonstrate thought leadership- Provide help and collaborate

AwarenessTraining

- Create emotional connection through visual storytelling- Provide how-tos

SupportLead Generation

Product Development Marketing

- Product reviews - Sales contact management - Prospect insights - Corporate recruiting

SupportMarketing

Community Building

-Insight into personal interest -High engagement -News dissemination

Marketing Lead Generation

Awareness

-Thought leadership position-Share multiple types of content-Search engine optimization

Community Building Awareness

-Visual aids to increase awareness-Humanize brand

Sample

Additionally, I’ve setup best practices for how to use each social media platform to accomplish these objectives. I’ve found that it’s not a one-size-fits-all model. A site like Twitter is great for real-time customer service and news updates, while a platform like LinkedIn is better for lead generation and even getting product feedback. It’s important to really spend time understanding these ever-changing technologies and how your audience wants to interact with you on them.

• To be successful on the social Web, you must first align internal roles, processes, policies and stakeholders.

• Organizational Structure and Business Planning

2 Integrate. Don’t be an island. Connect to internal structure, process, plans.

Marke-ng  Communica-ons  -­‐  Regional,  Sales

Product  Marke-ng Web  and  IT Business  Intelligence

Support  and  R&D

NI Executive Social Business Council

Virtual Social Media Team(off domain - ie Facebook)

- Includes each one of the marketing functions (Ad, PR, DM, Events, etc)- Regional Representation- Connection to Sales

Community Team(NI Communities)

- Internal and external collaboration

The next step is to integrate social business. You must align with internal roles, processes, policies, and stakeholders. In 2006, I setup a cross-functional, social business steering team that is still working today. This group of executives helps finalize the plans, metrics and targets for our overall program. And really this group helps our entire company evolve and embrace collaboration technologies.

We also have two working groups that are in charge of the day-to-day execution. One is the Virtual Social Media Team. It includes representatives from across marketing communications in areas like advertising, PR, events, etc. It also is our connection to the branches globally and to our sales organization. This group focuses on platforms off our domain like Facebook and YouTube and their purpose is two fold 1) integrate social into traditional outlets and 2) work on social media specific projects. So for example a writer who sits on our content team and writes articles for our e-newsletter also is repurposing that content for Twitter.

On the other side I have the Community Team - a great group of folks that are responsible for the NI Communities both internal and external.

2 Integrate. Don’t be an island. Connect to internal structure, process, plans.

• Policies and Process - ie. social media guidelines, listening process

• Training - enable employees and build core competencies for social

Once I had the organizational structure setup, I started working over the last few years to set clear policies. The center of this is good social media guidelines. And this isn’t an easy process. It took me several months to get the guidelines written and approved by the various stakeholders from HR, legal, etc.

I’ve also created several training options. It ranges from formal programs like NI Blog College, which take a few hours to complete, to simple how-to tutorials on getting started on Twitter. Of course, all of these things are stored on our employee community and really enable the entire workforce to successfully join in the conversation.

3 Listen and Engage. Monitor and respond to actionable conversations

The social web provides insight into what is being said about your company, products, markets, and the competition. Social media management is more than just mass media. It’s about building valuable relationships.

Re-active monitoring - tracking important wikis, forums, blogs, and other Web content for customer sentiment, service problems, leads, market trends, and competitive insights.

Critical notion of Service Everywhere - we can now engage customers and prospects to quickly identify opportunities and threats, broadly share them in real-time, and collaboratively respond.

Once you have defined your plan and integrated it into the business, you’re ready to start listening and engaging on the social Web. Beyond your corporate Website, there is a vast amount of information about your company brand, products, markets and even your competition. Often times people see social media management as just another mass media marketing tool, but if used correctly it can give you great insight and allow you to build meaningful relationships that impact the business.

You can see by the example on the left that the first step is to listen. On a daily basis, my team is using Jive to monitor for both opportunities and threats on the social Web, share them with key stakeholders in real-time and collaboratively respond. In this case, we heard what the customer was saying, invited them to participate on our support community, and changed their perception of our company. Not bad for 140 characters!

Ethics and Standards

• FTC Guidelines for Social Media Outreach

1. Create social media policies and training programs.

2. Require disclosure and truthfulness in social media outreach.

3.Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements.

http://www.socialmedia.org/disclosure/

Listening is no longer just a nice to have. The FTC now has 3 main guidelines for social media outreach - like we discussed you should create social media policies and training programs (if this is done well the company will not be held liable for social media mishaps), like our mother’s taught us we must be truthful in our outreach and finally we must monitor the conversation and correct mistakes.

Now, for some companies, this is extremely difficult. As I mentioned in the beginning, no industry represents more than 15 percent of NI’s revenue. Therefore, on any given day our customers our talking about topics that range from robotics, to medical device design to aerospace. So, I had to create a process to manage all of these conversations on the social Web and engage with key stakeholders internally who could help with the response. There was no way that one person or even a team of people could know that answers to all of these topics.

The problem was most social media listening tools from both a technology and a pricing standpoint were built for small team use and not integration across the enterprise. But Jive was different.

Social Media MonitoringFinds content online about company, products, or key

topics of interest

Employee Listening Networksupplements monitoring tool

Social Media Coordinator

- Business Objectives Alignment- Network Activator- Historical Relationship- Valuable Linking (SEO)

Checklist

Post “Actionable Conversations” in Employee Community- Coordinator responds or alerts internal experts of relevant, new posting and includes direct link- Employees collaborate on most valuable response using content evaluation flowchart- Member of “core team” or topic expert responds on original platform and links to valuable content- Conversation is tracked and recorded

Objectives: Support, Product Feedback, Sales, Awareness, Loyalty, Reputation

Management, Community Building

Social Media Monitoring Process

Tadah. So, here is our formal social media monitoring process. I have a social media coordinator who acts like a old school telephone operator. He uses the monitoring tool in Jive as well as collects information from our 5,000 employees about they key conversations about our brand, products, etc. He then applies a filter. He looks to see if the conversation helps us meet one of our core social business objectives, which I shared earlier, he looks at the source to see if they are influential or if we have a historic relationship with them or if it would be good from an SEO standpoint.

If it meets one of the items on the checklist, he posts the link to the “actionable conversation” directly into our employee community. We can then have a private conversation about the best response and pull in topic experts.

Response Workflow

Can you add value?

Evaluate the purpose

Respond in kind & share

Thank the person

Unhappy Customer?

Dedicated Complainer?

Comedian?

Negative Positive

Yes

No

Do you want to respond?

No Response

No

Yes

Take reasonable action to fix issue and let customer know action taken

Are the facts correct?

Gently correct the facts

No

No

No

Yes

Are the facts correct?

Does customer need/deserve more info?

Yes

Explain what is being done to correct the

issue.

Yes

Is the problem

being fixed?

Yes

No Yes

No Yes

Yes

Assess the message

Encourage Post in Idea Exchange Let post stand and

monitor.

Is it a support issue?

Inquiry

Yes

No

Can you answer in <2

mins?

Yes No Answer or

point to resource link

Direct to Forums *Modified from Altimeter

Presentation

Since I work at an engineering company, we’ve even modified a common response flowchart from Altimeter to determine next steps.

Then, all of these conversations are tracked, recorded and searchable for inclusion in metrics reports as well as future reference.

Sentiment Scoring

NegativeSomewhat Negative Neutral

Somewhat Positive Positive

a high level influencer and/or a member of

a high ranking medium makes a

positive post

a low level influencer and/or a member of

a low ranking medium makes a

positive post

posts that carry no emotional

connotation

a low level influencer and/or a member of

a low ranking medium makes a

negative post

widespread complaints, a high

level influencer and/or a member of a

high ranking medium makes a negative

post

The final step is to assign a sentiment score. This helps us keep track of our overall brand perception on the social Web. Now, sentiment is subjective, but we have developed ways to use sentiment to help track the online attitude, opinion or intended meaning of a writer and their message. I first created a 5 level approach that we can use with Jive.

Sentiment Analysis

• Subjectively aims to determine the online attitude, opinion, or intended meaning of a writer and their message.

• In evaluating sentiment, you must take several things into consideration: - Context, Location, Keyword, Degree of Emotion, Author vs. Disseminator

• There are also a few different types of influence to consider: - User in our community - General trust rank - The medium/outlet- Content of the mention

• Exclude certain types of postings, as they add little to no value to the conversation:

- Job postings, Torrents, Press releases, Spam sites

To dig a bit deeper, I wanted to share with you some of the things we consider and omit.

Sample Analysis

It also helps identify potential crisis situations if we see huge dips in a given timeframe.According to Visible Technologies, which manually scored more than 8 million social web mentions, 80% of the conversation is neutral. Therefore, it’s really important to take action on the outliers.

Proactive Conversations

Source: Corporate Executive Board

But the social Web isn’t just about being reactive. Since you have unlimited keyword searches in Jive, you are able to join in on the conversations you really want to be a part of. Here is an example. Emilie Kopp is our internal subject area expert on robotics - a market that we are fairly new to and still trying to establish credibility in. She was listening to a blogger talk about robotics, and even though it didn’t mention NI and was able to add value to the conversation and even link back to her own blog and targeted discussion space on our community. This simple task opened up dialogue and helped us build a relationship with one of the topic subject area experts in the world.

Competitive Advantage

• Real-time insight into competitors

• Brand sentiment, media distribution, key influencers, news

You can also proactively get great real-time insight into your competitors. You can score their brand sentiment, look at where they are being discussed, who their key influencers are and even just stay updated on their news all in one place.

4 Build. Grow social community membership & engagement

• Pro-active marketing - value-added content creation and syndication for social networks, blogs, ads on social outlets, etc. Creating special incentives, activities, and information just for community members.

• Sometimes this means joining a strong community or centralizing a presence (does 1000 Facebook groups ring a bell?).

• More about “actionable conversations,” activity, and engagement (RTs) than just fans and followers.

Beyond monitoring, the next step in any social media program is to build or joining a strong community on these platforms.

By creating and syndicating specialized content for social networks, you move from becoming just another marketer on Facebook to a trusted advisor. To be successful, at least 50 percent of your content should be things written by others and conversations you are having with your audiences. You’re metrics become more about the value you are adding to conversation and less about the number of fans or followers.

But this takes work. You can see a screenshot here of our content editorial calendar. Just like we would with other marketing communications tactics, we have a strategic plan and track performance of our messages as well as high-level themes.

e-newsletter Facebook Community

Integrating messages across all community platforms

But these messages don’t have to come from thin air. While it is good to create some content just for social outlets. We also make sure that our messages don’t live in a silo.

JUST TALK TO THIS: For example, we are playing off March Madness right now and created a coding competition for our users. This relevant Facebook content links directly to our robust developer community, where we have greater platform capabilities as well as control over the data.

5 Activate. Reward and amplify key influencers & evangelists

• Utilize knowledge gained from your listening activities to amplify the voices of key influencers.

• Beyond spreading positive information about your brand, educated evangelists can be your frontline of defense. It’s very important to reward and recognize them.

The next step is to activate your audience by rewarding and amplifying key influencers and evangelists. For example, in our bi-monthly print and e-newsletter, we feature content directly from our community and social media outlets. We showcase individuals through things like our “member of the month” program as well as content like their top 5 product ideas from the community. In fact, our top story last year was “Why Should Engineers Care about Social Media.” So we are even using this as an opportunity to educate them about social business.

Beyond spreading positive information about your brand, educated evangelists can be your frontline defense on the Web - often doing a better job than marketing or PR in responding to negative comments.

6 Analyze. Track and report impact across business

• Metrics should align to business objectives - support, marketing, sales, etc.

• Sample Metrics: Reach, Activity, Engagement, Content, Actionable Conversations, Net Promoter Score, Customer Loyalty Survey, Sentiment

Not at all Satisfied / Likely

Extremely Satisfied /Likely

1

10

OVERALL  satisfaction                                                                                                Recommend                      Repeat  purchase Purchase  new  products

7.27.27.88.0

7.67.78.28.2 8.28.28.68.5 8.48.5

9.08.8

Satisfaction  and  Loyalty  Metrics  by  NI  Community  Usage

Daily  /  Weekly Monthly Few  Times  a  Year Never

The final step is to analyze. It’s so important to track and report metrics across the business. I know this is a key topic and there are lots of debates on what are the important KPIs. And really it depends on your business goals. It’s also really easy to get stuck in the weeds. I have evolved my dashboard dramatically over the last several years. I used to track everything under the sun. Now, I have a comprehensive social business dashboard that combines social media and community metrics at a high-level like audience reach and community health. Really high-level, impactful numbers. We use these numbers along with loyalty data to report to our Board.

So, today 41 percent of our domestic customer base engages with NI communities on a monthly basis. And it’s not just our longstanding users. Last year, 72 percent of new customers utilized our community. But what’s cool is that the more actively engaged with us they are, the more likely they are to recommend our products, repeat purchase and purchase new products.

Define IntegrateListen

and Engage

Build Activate Analyze

Set clear goals that align with

overall business objectives

Don’t be an island.

Connect to internal

structure, process,

plans.

Monitor and respond to actionable

conversations

Grow social community

membership & engagement

Reward and amplify key

influencers & evangelists

Track and report impact

across business

6 Pillars of Success

Across the Social Web

To summarize, there are 6 pillars of social media success. You must really internally prepare for the best way to engage on the social web and continuously analyze your efforts.

For More Information...

Deirdre WalshJive: deirdrewalsh

deirdre.walsh@ni.com@deirdrewalsh

/in/deirdrewalsh

Now, I’ll hand it back over to Candice for the questions and comments.