How can you maximize the use of social media and social software with employees, customers, and partners? The BrainYard decided to seek out and highlight companies that are well on the road to becoming truly social businesses.
Ford is getting there. The automaker has embraced social media for marketing and customer support and encourages employees to share company content in social media--not as official spokespeople, but as proud employees. Ford is only at the beginning of bringing these things together in a true social business strategy, says Scott Monty, global director of social media. "A lot of people are talking about social business transformation, but to actually execute it at the enterprise level is really, really hard," Monty says.
One milestone: When Ford introduced a redesigned edition of the Ford Explorer in 2010, it skipped the conventional auto show unveiling to auto journalists in favor of simultaneous announcements in eight cities--and on Facebook. The Facebook campaign, created using tools from Buddy Media (now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud), featured videos about the vehicle from the product managers and engineers. The Explorer "reveal" campaign attracted 99 million social media impressions and became the No. 1 trending term and the No. 2 search term for the day on Google.
"We took that as an indicator we could be successful in social at the scale we were used to in traditional media," Monty says.
Some companies point to a hard return on investment on social collaboration--building materials manufacturer Cemex, for example, says it's saving between $500,000 and $1 million a year through reduced travel and phone expense--but often the returns are softer. The Red Robin restaurant chain's CIO looks for the true ROI from the business initiatives themselves with social collaboration as an accelerator.
Part of the reason Red Robin adopted social collaboration software Yammer was it needed a tool that will let it "get out a message and get feedback immediately if assumptions aren't playing out right, and we need to make modifications," says Chris Laping, CIO and senior VP of business transformation. Yammer has been an important tool in assessing product introductions (see
"Red Robin CIO Named Social Business Technology Leader").
The BrainYard chose seven companies as examples of social business leaders:
- Bonobos
- Cemex
- Ford
- McKesson
- Red Robin Gourmet Burgers
- TD Bank
- Unisys.
Here are seven lessons that emerged from these companies' experiences.
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Red Robin CIO Named Social Business Technology LeaderFor best articulating the value of social business in the context of business transformation, The BrainYard named Chris Laping of Red Robin restaurants its Social Business Technology Leader of the year.
Social Business Leader Cemex Keeps Ideas FlowingUnder pressure to operate more efficiently after the housing bust, Cemex used social collaboration to connect its worldwide employees. One result: Products get to market faster.
Unisys Lets Employees Drive Face Of Social BusinessThis BrainYard Social Business Leader listens to employees about how they can use social business tools in their jobs.
Ford Seeks Social Business StrategyFord Motor Co. is a pioneer in social media marketing and a proponent of enterprise social networking. But its plan for a unified social business strategy is still a work in progress.
Instagram Web Profiles: 5 Key FactsInstagram is staking out its own Facebook-like spot on the Web. Here's what you should know--and one big reason why you should care.
Allstate Shares Hard Lessons In Driving InnovationCreating an innovation group was a small step. Learning from rejection and winning over skeptics was the real challenge.
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The unfortunate and difficult problem is that other programs/topics are doing much of the above to sell themselves as well. Executives remain dubious - and with good reason - as to the actual return on "better collaboration," especially when it's a technology-wrapped, expensive approach (granted, the "freemium" approach as discussed above can help; but in larger enterprises these tend to quickly face scale and feature issues and sudden dead ends occur that can lead to abandonment or isolation/limitation of the free/low cost solution).
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