The C-Suite Digital Handbook

Return to Social Media Camp

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During Social Media Week in NYC recently, the Social Media Club of New York City brought back Social Media Camp.  The last camp was done during Internet Week in June of 2009 and was modeled after the bar camp format made popular in Silicon Valley.  Bar camps are conferences created around a topic where the attendees have the opportunity to add their own sessions to the agenda on the fly.  

I attended Social Media Camp in 2009 and immediately signed up when news of the 2011 Social Media Camp was announced by Howard Greenstein, social media strategist and journalist and President of the Social Media Club of New York City.  The 2011 event did not disappoint.

The 2011 Social Media Camp agenda reflected how much social media has become more more integrated in the US business fabric. The 2011 sessions concentrated on applying social media to business versus the Social Media Camp of 2009 focus on what is social media.  

Indicative of the transformation was the session I attended entitled Some Day Your CEO Will Tweet, co-moderated by Tessa Horehled, Engauge social media strategist and Paul Michaud, SVP of Social Media at Citicorp for their consumer credit card and banking services.

Tessa and Paul co-moderated their session in an informal interview format, focusing on five topics:

1.  Shifting Towards Social Media

Paul bluntly stated that Citicorp realized that social media was "happening whether we are participating or not."  This reality coupled with Citicorp's recognition that social media offered them "a new way to humanize the brand" provided the foundation for the company's own shift toward social media.  

2.  How to Make the Shift

Citicorp's shift started with developing procedures and guidelines as well as the right voice and tone. This shift required collaboration with the legal, compliance, fraud, technology, security, public affairs and finance departments.  To facilitate that collaboration, Citicorp spent time educating internal stakeholders on social media and why they should care.

Externally, Citicorp listened to what was being said about them in the social media universe so that they could develop their voice and tone as well as build a following.  They also employed various tools to help them listen, such as Radian6, Sysomos and Scout Labs.

3.  Lessons Learned

Paul and Tessa both shared lessons learned:

• Social Media is not a replacement for customer service.  Citicorp views social media as another media channel to compliment its customer service activities. The bank leverages its Twitter presence by direct messaging customers tweeting concerns to bring the conversation into a secure communication channel.  In addition, Citicorp's Twitter presence is managed by the same people managing customer service.  
• Create separate Twitter handles for different communication purposes.  At Citicorp, @AskCiti focuses on customer service, while @Citi_Forward is used as a channel for communicating customer features and other marketing information.
• Data is an executive's friend when seeking internal approval for a social media program.  Through Tessa's wide experience, clients that succeed in securing senior management buy-in have been those that use available market data to demonstrate the growing importance of social media.  Tessa presented a number of data examples including this recent eMarketer chart regarding companies integrating social media into marketing efforts:

• Make sure your customer outreach is in line with your customers.  Social media only works if you are communicating with your customers where they are at.  And as Tessa reluctantly admitted, a company should not engage in social media if their customers are not actively engaged in the available social media platforms.
• Social media needs to focus on resolving problems.  Tessa pointed out that it is not enough to just have a social media presence.  Effective social media requires problem resolution.

4.  Guiding Data

Both Paul and Tessa advised taking a portfolio approach to social media data sources.  As there is currently no one data solution for measuring and monitoring social media engagement, using a basket of social media tools can provide companies with a range of important data and indicators. They also both noted that different services provide different benefits.  For example, Radian 6 provides a wide volume of data and sentiment analysis.  Scout Labs, on the other hand, provides a broad social listening platform with easy to pull reports.

5.  What Next?

Paul believes that social media is still in the entrepreneurial phase of its development where experimentation and testing are accepted by senior management.  As more companies begin using and leveraging social media more extensively, both Paul and Tessa see greater corporate emphasis on return on investment as it relates to social media.  And as it relates to when corporate CEO's like Citicorp's Vikram Pandit will start tweeting, there were no predictions!

What do you think is next for social media?  I would love to hear your thoughts.