Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Social Media Conversation with 1to1 Media - Part I

July was social media month at 1to1 Media and I was asked to participate in an interview along with Tac Anderson of HP and Michael Brito of Intel. Why us? Well we all have jobs at Fortune 500 companies and our roles are focused on internal and external social media initiatives (and we all blog at Conversations Matter). The interview which is also available as a podcast (sorry, buzzing due to technical difficulties) was broken into two parts. The first part focuses on the challenges we faced when it comes to implementing social media.

Because the three of us have been practicing social media for sometime now and because we are all in positions where social media is valued in the organization, the challenges lie in the execution. How do you match the right strategy and tools to the people you are trying to reach and how do you ensure that your team is choosing to go down the social media path for the right reasons. For that Cisco has adopted Forrester's People-Objective-Strategy-Tools (POST) methodology (perhaps with an extra look at the Strategy).

However for the folks who aren't lucky enough to be at the next phase of adoption, I am commonly asked how I was able to get management on board to execute social media campaigns (like the ASR launch). And although that wasn't addressed in this podcast, I thought I'd address it here. For me the journey began with education to my team on social media and how it can benefit us to participate in 'conversation marketing.' The next phase involved testing the waters with small projects, successes of those projects led to the support of social media as a standard marketing practice with a team to support it. It's been almost a year since my team has been chartered with finding the right opportunities to engage in 'conversational marketing' through social media with our customers and we constantly live this cycle of adoption as we get deeper into social media.

Stay tuned for part two next week...

No comments: