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Monthly Archives: June 2009
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Financial Markets and B to B Social Media
[This post is one in a series from Ragan's Social Media Revolution Conference, which took place in Chicago on June 24-26.
Browse my social media conference coverage.]
For two of the best examples of corporate communications and PR on twitter, follow @allanschoenberg and @cmegroup. Allan Schoenberg is director of corporate communications for CME Group, the largest exchange in the world in terms of market cap. To Social Media Club Chicago folks, Allan is a great guy who regularly attends our events [that’s Allan with Ann Knabe @thinkpr and me at the SMC Chicago June event], an event host for us and a speaker who helped define business to business social media for SMC Chicago in a video produced by CME Group.
“If it’s news, it affects us. We have a lot of ground to cover.” Allan Schoenberg, director of corporate communications for CME Group
Allan went through the four stages of CME Group, starting out 150 years ago up to today where 80% of trades are now electronic.
CME owns 3 exchanges: CME, Chicago Board of Trade, NYMEX and is the largest exchange in world in terms of market cap.
Allan’s a huge proponent of P-O-S-T, a systematic approach to social strategy from the book Groundswell.
P People-determine where customers are
O Objectives – decide what we want to achieve
S Strategies – plan for how relationships will change
T Tech – decide what SM platforms to use
Finding Your Audiences
Search => know your customer’s search terms, product names, trends
Listen => choose your platforms
Engage => remember, it’s not about you
70% of what he posts is indirectly about CME Group (via blogs and news stories) and 30% is directly linked to to cmegroup.com
[note above stats edited and clarified by Allan; updated from original version]
He suggests talking about things that matter to customers first, then bring them into the site later.
Goals: Be a leader in financial services social media and influence opinion on what matters to us.
Brand Enthusiasm: Turn customers into “fans” – what teams do you really rally around?
Loyalty: improve customer service – this is their platform, this is where they’re located
Advocacy: Build and maintain support. Post things that matter.
Social Media Guidelines
Managed and approved by corporate marketing communications to remain consistent to our brand and abide by regulators
Remains governed by CMH group’s Code of Conduct and External Communication and Disclosure Policy
CME Group employees are personally responsible for the content they publish, which includes confidential information.
Social Media Sites
Twitter 510,000 people
Most of the people followed are: reporters, traders and bloggers
Integrated with Facebook. 5-12 updates per day – uses www.tweetlater.com to set up tweets and get emails when someone replies to you.
Facebook 210 fans
Number of groups that they track – related to company, but created by others
LinkedIn – 4 groups, 2 run by education
Private group for journalists and bloggers for covering finance and economics – all about social media and the way news is changing. Group is about 100 people; working out really well right now. People do care about this – they’re talking, connecting and communicating.
Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are more forward-facing, just starting on FriendFeed, Delicious, digg and stumbleupon. Uses wordle a lot – uses FB as a marker on twitter.
Six Social Media Lessons Learned
1. Be unique and focus on value to users. What matters to you – as a customer?
2. It’s not a silver bullet [or replacement] for communications.
3. It’s two way communication – 80-90% of messages he replies as soon as he can publicly.
4. Try new things and benchmark – surveys haven’t worked for them, looking at social bookmarking sites.
5. At the very least monitor conversations: Backtweet, BackType, GoogleAlerts – get an idea for what is going on and being talked about your company. Uses Vocus right now.
6. Be social, be good, be curious – ask questions, get to know people. Can build alliances in other places.
What’s next for CME Group?
Measure and evaluate
Educate employees – they want to know what’s going on and how they can help
Further integrate communications – with traditional – should we have @cmegroup in the boilerplate
Develop and integrate SEO [search engine optimization] – never done SEO in terms of paid terms – tie into social bookmarking
Video content – do roughly 80-90 videos live every day, do their own original content every day
We are creating opportunities for customers to feel a part of our brand by listening to them and giving them ideas to talk about.
Questions from the audience . . .
Philosophy on measurement?
Mostly looking at eyeballs, using bit.ly. How do measure media relations and blogger relations? Follow @kdpaine – she is focused on measuring relationships. A lot of it is qualitative research: are we doing the right thing, where can we improve?
How many people on team?
12
Why did you decide to create your own Facebook page versus use the existing one?
Facebook fan pages get lots more in the way of analytics and options. Most customers are on group page, most employees are on the fan page.
Reach out to your customers, if they want to meet you face to face, then meet them.
How do manage the brand versus personal persona?
He is who he is. Follow @scottmonty – good model for business and personal integration.
How do you deal with c-level and company objections to getting started with social media?
Essentially, you have no control. You can correct information that’s wrong. If you’re out there having conversations as a real person, it can be to your benefit.
Update July 9, 2009
Thanks to Allan for sharing his presentation . . . .
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Note: Lightly edited transcript based on Barbara Rozgonyi’s reporting. May contain inaccuracies and typos. Also missing other opinions; please add yours.
Thanks to Ragan Communications for the ticket and to CME Group for hosting!
Social media conference coverage.
Read #ragansocmed, @wiredprworks twitter coverage or browse all #ragansocmed coverage.
Brian Solis PR 2.0 | Social Media Conference Keynotes
This post is one in a series from Ragan’s Social Media Revolution Conference, which took place in Chicago on June 24-26.
Browse my social media conference coverage.
So, what’s with the Clydesdale video? Brian Solis, who keynoted Ragan’s recent social media conference, covered online PR strategies and tactics that work. Towards the end of his talk, Brian mentioned this project he created for his client. Watch the video for a behind-the-scenes look at how Anheuser-Busch’s commercial talent gets trained. Here’s a copy of the press social media news release embedded from DocStoc – the YouTube of documents [Brian's term] and released via PitchEngine.
It’s always great to see Brian – especially when he’s speaking here in Chicago. Brian’s talk was a mix of motivation, reflection, sociology, stats and calls to action. The first time I saw Brian speak was at BlogWorld in November 2007 and I’ve been a fan ever since.
“A press release has no real business in the blog world. It’s about community, ranking, participating. Until you’re engaged at that level, you really have no clue.” Brian Solis at BlogWorld 2007
@briansolis – pr/marketing definitely fusing, pr will be storytelling, search, CRM market analyst, #pr2, #bwe08 – from BlogWorld 2008 Bloggers and PR Strategies Panel
Brian’s new book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relations is a must read for anyone wanting to learn about how we got here, why we need to change and where PR is going.
This was the first time I got to Brian keynote. Given that he finally landed and checked into his hotel after a day of travel delays and a post-midnight arrival, he was amazingly calm, graceful and focused.
Notes from Brian Solis Keynote
Big believer in every single one of us becoming the experts we’re looking to follow.
Is PR Dead?
Yes, it is dead, changing, evolving and going through a Renaissance.
Social media didn’t invent conversations, but there is a fundamental shift in how we communicate and how we perceive people.
You are not in control . . . we pushed more in the attempts to try and steer it. We are in control of going to more places where communities are active.
It all begins with where we start. Problem with PR as it is now: Starts at the top and rolls down.
Social media is forcing the direction going the other way.
Companies are hiring “twinterns” because they believe the younger people get the tools. Sometimes in social media, silence is golden.
Before going in, answer this: What is it about it and about you that makes it that you should absolutely be there?
PR is experiencing a branding crisis. FTC going after bloggers and considering them to be liable.
The industry of PR is yet to hire someone to save us.
The new worlds of “public” relations is about a new generation of influence and being able to match the story to the people it’s connected to. The difference now: PR is now going to be more like empathetic customer service that it’s ever been. It takes us from behind the cloak and brings us to the front line. It’s community management agencies. Everybody is now an expert in the tools.
Qualifications to participate: empathy, market expertise, start to embody all the things that need to be contagious to somebody else. Get a taste of the customer service experience to get genuine, have passion.
Very few of us can profess to be experts – we were handlers, pushers, broadcasters and publishers. Need to expand our role from within.
Are you a publicist or a communications expert?
Led by customer service – not PR or marketing – best two examples: Comcast and Dell.
It’s about fixing the company on the back end.
You should be writing for the people you report to: the customers. This changes how you write a press release and how you approach the process.
Adapt so it’s more meaningful.
Big news for all of us – it’s about going to where they’re already looking for information. Docstoc and Scribd are the YouTube of documents. Search on delicious, you’ll come back with some really useful information. Tag and upload documents – Brian’s had some documents with over 100,000 views. He can trace it all the way through based on links and calls to actions. Same thing with YouTube, had 70,000 views within a week of Brian’s video because it was tagged. YouTube is the number two search engine in the world – more people going to YouTube than to Yahoo.
But, just because we have access to these tools doesn’t mean we need to go there.
There is a human attention dashboard in social media – your job is to get on the dashboard and get them to click on something.
You have to realize that people believe that they are broadcasters as well. To earn their attention now takes a lot more than it used to.
Social Media is about Sociology NOT Technology
The culture on each platform is different, they all bolster different communities. Twitter is technically not a conversation – the conversations are not threaded.
The Conversation Prism shows that the world is bigger than Facebook and twitter.
Twitter has the worst retention rate of any social network ever, 90% of all tweets come from 10% of people on twitter. Point: your customers are elsewhere as well. Many places are walled gardens. Each has a search box and you can come up with the information necessary to search. Yahoo and Google groups still come up as the number one place to engage conversation.
Social maps will always be unique to the company. Backtype searches blog comments – if you’re only searching blog posts you’re missing out.
Creating the Conversation Index
Create indexes across the platforms with company name, competitor, “your company sucks.”
Establish an index now and update it once a month. Technically, numbers are supposed to go up and sentiment is supposed to be more positive.
The “magic middle” is the most ignored opportunity in the blogosphere. If you get a hit on A-list blog, that’s good for 10-20,000 unique visits. You get a lot of traffic, buzz and then it’s gone. It’s happening so fast on these sites, step aside where it’s slower and more meaningful. “Magic middle” bloggers probably have 10-20,000 readers, but their readers are highly qualified and influential. Your list of targets is endless. Communications pros often overlook these guys, but you can trace the magic middle all the way to sales. You can reach out to them, and work on a story that will be important to their audience.
Point: could talk all day about numbers, but it’s not going to matter if you don’t believe you’re in charge. With every tweet, post, comment it collectively tells who you are. It establishes your credibility online. How do you define yourself? Influence isn’t for the other people. Now, we can become influential. What are you going to do to establish your own authority to build up your own digital profile?
How do I participate on social networks? As me? As the company?
Who do you want to read what? Friends and family versus business connections? Tacos versus conferences.
On the business side of things, you want to establish influence. People believe that you are part of the community. We are bound and connected to people that share the same interests. You are defined by the company you keep. Try establishing a social graph. It’s portable.
You can then become influential because you’ve earned it.
The most effective people are those who can adapt to how it’s been perceived.
You have to become believable to be accepted. Communities want answers and direction, they don’t want to be sold.
Apple did such a great job of building community that they don’t have to be on social media.
You have to ask yourself – what’s the impression you want people to walk away with? Sometimes these conversations take away from the brand. The answer will be different for each one of you. Who are you? What do you stand for? What do you want people to know about you? Are you reinforcing or taking away from the goals? Make sure your company has guidelines and policies.
People trust people more than they trust brands.
Is it about trust and credibility – who has it and who needs to earn it.
Action speaks louder than words. If it’s only avatar relations, you’re not getting any deeper. Who are you going to invest all of this in for the long term? It’s not about today, it’s about tomorrow.
Attention dashboard – the only reason that Motrin Moms is still being discussed is that we’re keeping it alive. Have to establish and define what you want to earn. You can humanize the company a million ways – have to define the actions you take.
When we define influence we look at numbers, we tend to forget how many people actually do something with that information. You’re not hitting the masses like you think you are. the only way to make this scalable is to create an empowered community. And, you, in a sense, are the trusted ringmaster.
The harmony of concentric conversations happens when the conversations start to carry over to different networks.
Influence is the ability to inspire action and measure it.
Guide that experience – have pages created so that when you do send them something you’re in control of what they see at that point. Anheuser-Busch’s instead of releasing commercials, turned the camera around and talked to people behind the scenes and hosted on a site. abextras.com
Brian did it on his own – happened so fast it was beautiful.
Become an expert on your product, service and industry.
Become a resource.
Become the “expert” you sought in the first place, you become the authority and influencer.
Questions
How do you reach teens?
It’s psychographics, not demographics. Just because MySpace is slowing down, it doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable to your company. Twitter is the next MySpace. There’s also ning – one of the biggest goldmines for artists and movies. Dipdive, another new network that’s attracting a lot of teens. Can start to do analysis. The answer is yes, but more as well.
Tools that graph out images?
Whole movement called infographics – go to www.crowdSpring.com .
How do we manage content across all the platforms?
If you can pile in a couple of 12 hour days of participating, you’ll start to realize that spending your time there is much more valuable than what you’re doing now. It’s going this way – the point is how do we adapt to it. You don’t have to be everywhere – you only have to be where your communities are highly active. A lot of us are spending way too much time tweeting.
Classis case studies?
Brian’s written about what they did and what they didn’t do right at www.briansolis.com and www.sncr.org has case studies for download
Note: Lightly edited transcript based on Barbara Rozgonyi’s reporting. May include inaccuracies and typos – missing other opinions. Please add yours.
Thanks to Ragan Communications for the ticket and to CME Group for hosting!
Read #ragansocmed, @wiredprworks twitter coverage or browse all #ragansocmed coverage.
Twitter and Public Utilities | Social Media Conference Coverage
Martin Murray, senior corporate news representative for Public Service of New Hampshire started out by talking about how social media is changing news coverage. When a transformer caught on fire, and Martin got there every other person in the crowd had a phone and was updating their own personal networks. His job is to respond to the media, but the media wasn’t looking for the utility reps – they were covering it on their own.
[This post is one in a series from Ragan's Social Media Revolution Conference, which took place in Chicago on June 24-26.
Browse my social media conference coverage.]
Why and how @psnh used twitter.
In May 2007, Martin couldn’t imagine why anyone would use twitter. Started in April 2008.
The first followers they had were from the media, New Hampshire Public Radio and The Nashua Telegraph.
First tweets were about significant outages: July 2008 tornado.
The December 11, 2008 ice storm gave them an opportunity to give updates and answers about the 320,000 customers without power. Although they couldn’t tell people when they’d get their power back, they were providing information. Set up an online newsroom to link to a new section that they’d created to quickly and easily update Ice Storm 08. Made tremendous progress, given the damage, but it took almost two weeks to get full power back to everyone on Christmas Eve.
Twitter followers went from about 100 to 1900 followers after the storm hit.
The National Telegraph took a report they were producing and posting on the newsroom and posted it as well, including the numbers before and after.
PSNH doesn’t have a social media department – two people each took 12 hour shifts. They developed relationships with their twitter followers. It was okay for people to vent, being without power for that long is a lot to ask.
Twitter is an easy way to save material and to create Twitter data with tools like TweetStats. They really do assist you in creating and maintaining fairly positive relationships.
Other social media tools used in the state’s worst natural disaster . . .
It was tougher and tougher as they got into it to make people understand how bad it was. One of the ways they felt they could communicate with their customers was to get pictures of the physical damage. Worked with a videographer to do a professional interview and get it up on YouTube the same day. Turned out to be invaluable. Showed president, Gary Long, onsite talking about the damage and what they were doing to get the power back on.
On Flickr, they set up a group for image uploads. PSNH is on Facebook, but only using the tool because they can. They’re still grappling with it and trying to figure out what to do. Set up FriendFeed, online newsroom – interesting in a number of ways. Still have a bit of gap between IT and communications as a regulated company with a firewall. Basically as a work around, they set up a completely offsite newsroom that’s on outside servers so they can populate and modify from anytime, anywhere.
One of the things they knew was coming was an investigation from the regulators. PSNH produced a report called “Record Outage: Record Recovery” that told the story from the utility’s perspective. Martin took the pdf and posted it in the newsroom and shortened the link to bit.ly/4dsYq8. After posting the link on twitter, they got 1,000 views the first day and 11,000 the next – huge for them. Several of the media that followed them used their own link – so there’s no way to know the total number of downloads.
Traditional outreach included emailing news releases. Press conferences were conference calls.
Because of the report and twitter ,they were able to blunt criticism. There are four other utilities in New Hampshire – another one was creamed in terms of not having any social media tools, communications, customer service response and web updates. Because they were having that conversation, that was a positive thing. Same damage, same situation, PSNH came through with some begrudging admiration. At least two towns have cited PSHN as giving them the idea to be on twitter.
Being on twitter should be about helping with business objectives, like linking to images of a mock oil spill drill.
Lindt chocolate factory will be producing chocolate in the US and came to PSNH to talk about how to burn one ton of cocoa bean shells in place of burning coal. They released a press release, posted on twitter to watch a test burn: two people showed up, but two other significant stories appeared that included the photos they had posted on flickr. “It was the kind of story you dream about – the home run.” If you provide the material to the media, there’s a good chance they’ll use it.
What’s next . . . build more internal support for twitter to demonstrate and educate, enable and empower other employees, continue to engage customers’ conversations and utilize tools to monitor and engage in conversations.
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Note: Lightly edited transcript based on Barbara Rozgonyi’s reporting. May contain inaccuracies and typos. Also missing other opinions; please add yours.
Thanks to Ragan Communications for the ticket and to CME Group for hosting!
Social media conference coverage.
Read #ragansocmed, @wiredprworks twitter coverage or browse all #ragansocmed coverage.
Technorati Tags: social media conferences,twitter and public utilities
General Motors Crisis and Reinvention |Social Media Conference
Wendy Clark, a member of GM’s social media team, talked about how they managed bankruptcy crisis coverage from May 31 to June 5, 2009 and took us behind the scenes to see how GM drives their social media vehicles.
[This post is one in a series from Ragan's Social Media Revolution Conference, which took place in Chicago on June 24-26.
Browse my social media conference coverage.]
Before we dive into the notes, this is a big week for GM with the opening of the movie Transformers.
USA Today says GM cars are the stars of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
And now, back to the notes . . .
Posted live updates of bankruptcy coverage via @GMBlogs
They probably send out between 10 and 20 tweets/day and most of those are answering people. New product news gets tweeted – like Chevy Equinox. Interesting things like EPA rated Equinox with 32 mgp. Some tweets about personal and mix in business, some business only.
Concentrated on twitter to reach consumers who might have lost faith in the company – they have 30,000 followers collectively among all employee twitter accounts.
When she started they had 400 in communications, by the fall they will have 100.
General Motors YouTube Channel: GMBlogs
Use YouTube to post videos, but they turn off comments because they’re not constructive.
FastLane Blog carries coverage. They use Cover it Live as a way to save money.
General Motors on Facebook results since June 1
750 + comments on videos and comments posted to the page since June 1
1,511 fans made use of new Facebook interaction tools by “liking” the posts
Bloggers who reacted brought attention and interest as they told their take.
Chris Brogan “Pay Attention to GM this Week”
Geoff Livingston’s interview with Chris Barger, GM’s head of social media
Opened GM Reinvention Social Media Sharing Portal
Start of a listening portal – link to flickr with over 3,000 photos, click to follow twitter and Facebook. Live chats promoted here as well.
[Take a careful look at this – really good example of how to consolidate, package and direct social media interactions from one central site.]
GM Social Media History
January 2005: Fast Lane blog launched
June 2006: FYI blog
Early 2007: Blogger relations functions directed to different types of bloggers: automotive, mommy, green with appropriate and relevant messages
July 2007: Facebook – work with them directly
January 2008: @gmblogs on twitter.com – follow back bloggers always
Conversion is their new measurement tool.
Social media team
Main things: reach new bloggers, education with a social media 101 – try to reach marketing and communications.
Intense sense of urgency: there is no tomorrow
Let nothing factually inaccurate go unchallenged
Be humble and acknowledge mistakes and past sense, without simply falling on sword
Remember the goal: win affinity, not just self-defense
Be humans in our interactions, not just messengers
Never misrepresent yourself – say who you are and who you represent.
Being on social media all day can be draining – it’s tough if you see negative comments all day.
Questions
How do you reach bloggers?
Work with BlogHer. Use twellow.com – you can find out who’s in your city on twitter.
How do manage the legal review process?
Getting more noticed now, especially with the FTC monitoring blogs. Policy is, if you want to review a vehicle you get a one week loan. Because it’s earned media, the legal guidelines are different than they are for marketing.
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Note: Lightly edited transcript based on Barbara Rozgonyi’s reporting. May contain inaccuracies and typos. Also missing other opinions; please add yours.
Thanks to Ragan Communications for the ticket and to CME Group for hosting!
Social media conference coverage.
Read #ragansocmed, @wiredprworks twitter coverage or browse all #ragansocmed coverage.
