Working on Setting Your Social Media Strategy? Then this video, from salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2009 (the “Global Gathering” of nearly 16,000 people in San Francisco – http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/), is a must
The presenters are Jamie Grenney (Sr. Director of Social Media at salesforce.com), and Vida Killian (Social Media and Community Technology Manager at Dell – with some 10 years experience of Social Media at Dell). Dell are a salesforce.com user
In the video Jamie presents a slide showing some quite astronomic growth in Social Media usage. This includes:
- Facebook: 124 million “actual users” with 202% growth rate year on year
- Twitter: 26 million “actual users” with 660% growth rate year on year
(source: complete.com 2009, growth rate Oct. 2008- Oct. 2009)
Where “actual users” is defined as using Facebook / Twitter on a daily / weekly basis. If these figures are reliable, and came be projected, this would give some 172 million regular users of Twitter, and and an astronomic 250 million users of Facebook by year end 2010. For comparison the 2006 mid-year estimated population of Greater London was 7.5 million (source Wikipedia) !
Jamie then highlighted the pace of this change:
- 1995: email – monthly/weekly
- 2000: blogs – weekly/daily
- 2005: Twitter – daily/hourly
Agreed not all the chatter on Twitter directly relates to “brands” – but, then if only a tiny percentage of these posts prompt a Google search to your site … (Jamie: “If people are talk about your brand … do you want to be part of it?”)
Salesforce.com are also very active in video (Jamie: “YouTube has more searches than Yahoo”). They now post all their videos (which includes their salesforce.com CRM “how to” video’s) on YouTube, as well as to their own site (http://salesforce.com/video). With this approach salesforce.com have seen a growth from 250 views/day to a current 4,000 views/day, and consider it a great success
Vida, a member of Dell’s Social Media Team, stated that Dell’s engagement with Social Media has significantly exceeded all their expectations. That they now participate in some 2 billion conversations, and have over 1.4 million followers on Twitter (@DellOutlet – a top 50 Twitter accounts. Also see my earlier post Powered by Dell …). Dell estimate this engagement generates $3 million revenue
Internally, salesforce.com support two channels of Social Media a) branded (or, official): for company news, major announcements, and key messages, and b) personalised: to encourage staff to blog, post, and tweet …
Salesforce.com have produced “Social Media Guidelines for their staff in acknowledgement of the inherent risks of this open approach:
These guidelines, supported by training with regular updates, include:
- Stick to writing about what you know
- Quality matters
- Don’t tell secrets
- Think about the consequence
- Be honest, and Transparent (learnt from Dell’s experience, no doubt – see below)
Other notes from the video include:
- think about your audience – pick the right tools. If they’re not on Twitter then this is probably not the best tool
- you cannot learn, if you don’t listen – you must create a engaging model = Listen, Learn, and Engage
- start small – evolve your Social Media team
- make good use of Google Alerts
- you must be Transparent and Authentic – see Mack Collier (a social media consultant) The Viral Garden Blog Post “Dell does good, then bad, then apologizes” (June, 2007)
- have clear objectives, and not be driven by fashion
- measure ROI in terms of both financials and sentiment
- Outsource anything that’s not customer facing
Finally, Radian6 where mentioned (“Businesses need to measure. Analyse. Report on their social media efforts”) in the video. See their White Papers at http://www.radian6.com/
