SocialMedia.org

All the great ideas, tweets, and takeaways from BlogWell Dallas

SocialMedia.org Staff — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:32:47 +0000

Thanks to a ton of amazing people, our 19th BlogWell was a huge success! We had over 100 brands in attendance and heard great case studies from Coldwell Banker Real Estate, AMD, Texas Instruments, Shell, United Airlines, AT&T, Northwestern Mutual, and Level 3.

We couldn’t have done it without the help of all of our sponsors from Jive, Spredfast, Telligent, Vitrue, Radian6, and Sprinklr. Our fantastic partners from Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association and Social Media Club Dallas also helped make this event so successful.

Lastly, a big thanks to our amazing and talented live bloggers Alyssa Gardina, Danielle Glick, Kathy Catoe, and Sean Scogin for keeping the rest of the web in on the BlogWell action.

If you missed the event or just need a recap, check out the great tweets from the day:

How Solo Cup Company is engaging their fans on Facebook — live from BlogWell

SocialMedia.org Staff — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:00:04 +0000

Come to our upcoming BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media conference in San Francisco to hear Farmers Insurance, Rogers Communications, Target, Yahoo!, NVIDIA, Hitachi Data Systems, Verizon, and Autodesk share 8 great case studies on corporate social media.

This event is all about how big brands use social media. No agencies, no startups — just big companies sharing what they’ve learned. You’ll get practical, how-to advice on developing your social strategy, scaling your program, driving sales, engaging internal and external audiences, and measuring it all.

You’ll ask questions, discover new ideas, and learn how to make your social media program phenomenal — all in one fantastic afternoon for just $250.

…and you’ll experience a bunch of great case studies, like this one from our BlogWell in Atlanta:

BlogWell Atlanta Case Study: Solo Cup Company, presented by Angie Gorman & Mark Baxter

View more presentations from GasPedal and SocialMedia.org

Social media case studies from Cisco Systems, LEGO, Papa John’s, and 15 more

SocialMedia.org Staff — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:03:34 +0000

These case studies (along with a bunch of career openings, new hires, and fantastic upcoming events) were featured in today’s edition of SocialMedia.org’s Big List. You can sign yourself up using our handy form on the right.

During the Super Bowl, The Coca-Cola Company will be live-streaming their polar bear characters’ reactions to the game, while simultaneously interacting with game-watchers on Facebook and Twitter. >> Social Fresh
In her BlogWell Atlanta presentation, NCR Corporation’s Director of Design, Digital, & Events, Colleen Swanger, shared how they are launching a social effort for BtoB financial services. >> Vimeo

Cisco Systems became the first company to launch a targeted video campaign by delivering messages to LinkedIn users’ social mailboxes. >> BizReport
Scandinavian Airlines, KLM, and Delta Air Lines are looking to social media applications to put a new twist on their customers’ flight experiences. >> Creativity
Industry leaders like GE, PepsiCo, Ford, IBM, and Allianz are using social media to make their core business more sustainable. >> Ad Age
LEGO has launched their own social network where fans aged 13 and up can upload their own creations and projects, share them, and comment on others they discover. >> PSFK
Lonely Planet’s U.S. Digital Editor, Andy Murdock, shares how they differentiate their content strategies depending on which social media platform they’re using. >> eMarketer
Lands’ End, Condé Nast, Levi’s, and Ford are finding better engagement on niche social media sites such as Empire Avenue, Flipboard, Foodspotting, and more. >> Simply Zesty
Papa John’s is letting their reward members make the “heads or tails” call for this year’s Super Bowl on Facebook and Twitter for a chance to win a large, one-topping pizza. >> Restaurant Magazine

Disclosure: The Coca-Cola Company, NCR Corporation, Colleen Swanger, Cisco Systems, Delta Air Lines, GE, PepsiCo, and Levi’s are SocialMedia.org members (and awesome ones at that!), but even if they weren’t, we’d write about them anyway.

SocialMedia.org’s weekly list of upcoming word of mouth and social media conferences

SocialMedia.org Staff — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:00:47 +0000

Each Tuesday we share a preview of the great upcoming word of mouth and social media events we feature as part of our weekly SocialMedia.org’s Big List newsletter.

If you’re hosting something amazing, let us know about it by emailing us at editor [at] socialmedia [dot] org.

January

iStrategy — January 31- February 1, San Francisco, CA >> http://www.istrategyconference.com/events/san-francisco/

February

Social Fresh EAST — February 6-7, Tampa, FL >> http://socialfreshconference.com/event/east-2012/
ePharma Summit — February 6-8, New York, NY >> http://www.iirusa.com/epharmasummit/
Online Marketing Summit — February 6-10, San Diego, CA >> http://www.onlinemarketingsummit.com/oms-annual-2012/
Social Media Strategies Summit — February 7-9, Las Vegas, NV >> http://socialmediastrategiessummit.com/
Peer Summit 2012 — February 23, New York, NY >> http://econsultancy.com/us/events/peer-summit-2012-new-york

March

Social Business Summit — March 8, Austin, TX >> http://www.socialbusinesssummit.com/
SXSW — March 9-13, Austin, TX >> http://sxsw.com/interactive
The Corporate Social Commerce Summit — March 13-14, Boston, MA >> http://usefulsocialmedia.com/socialcommerce/
Blogwell San Francisco — March 27, San Francisco, CA >> http://socialmedia.org/blogwell/sanfran3
Social Tech ’12: B2B Social Media Marketing — March 29-30, Seattle, WA >> http://events.marketingprofs.com/SocialTech12Events/

April

PRSA Digital Impact Conference — April 2-3, New York, NY >> http://www.prsa.org/Conferences/DigitalImpact/
Social Media Strategies Summit — April 18-19, Chicago, IL >> http://socialmediastrategiessummit.com/chicago-2012.html
Social Pulse — April 25-26, Las Vegas, NV >> http://www.worldrg.com/showConference

Social media job openings and new hires at Blue Cross Blue Shield, Abercrombie & Fitch, U.S. Department of State, and more

SocialMedia.org Staff — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:01:48 +0000

As a preview for this week’s issue of SocialMedia.org’s Big List, check out some of our favorite career opportunities and new hires we’ll be featuring:

Careers: Job Openings

Zurich Financial Services Group is hiring a Social Media Manager to design and execute their social strategy. >> Zurich Careers
Abercrombie & Fitch is looking for a Manager of Social Media to help lead their growing social media marketing team. >> Abercrombie & Fitch Jobs
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan needs a Social Media Coordinator to help contribute to their online social media presence. >> Blue Cross Blue Shield Jobs
The U.S. Department of State is looking for a Social Media Manager to oversee the day-to-day coordination of their social media platforms. >> USAJOBS
The American Heart Association is hiring a Director of Digital Communications & Social Media to develop an overall external communications strategy utilizing social media. >> American Heart Association Jobs

Careers: New Hires

Jessica Plautz has been named Social Media Editor at Investigative News Network. >> mediabistro
Ant’s Eye View has welcomed Len Devanna as VP of Social Business Strategy and Kristal Ferchau as Director of Social Business Strategy to their team. >> Ant’s Eye View
Tee Twyford has joined Tommy Hilfiger Europe as their new Community Manager to look after their social media platforms. >> Web-Strategy

Social media case studies from Cheerios, Sam Adams, Ticketmaster, and 21 more

SocialMedia.org Staff — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:00:18 +0000

Mercedes-Benz is installing Facebook in their cars using a new in-vehicle telematics system that’s designed to locate friends and businesses for drivers. >> Reuters
Hershey’s Public Relations Manager, Anna Lingeris, shares how they juggle all of their brands on social media by sticking to three key pillars: awareness, content, and agility. >> Ragan
General Mills’ Cheerios brand and Meredith Corp.’s Fitness magazine have teamed up to create an online weight-loss program that’s being promoted across Facebook and Twitter. >> MediaPost
Sam Adams is putting their Facebook fans in charge of brewing their next beer for SXSW. The beer with the most votes will be created and sold in select Austin bars during the festival. >> TNW
GE, Tiffany & Co., Levi’s, Marc Jacobs, and Puma are forging more personal relationships with their customers through photo-sharing on Instagram. >> Ad Age
The Coca-Cola Company’s Senior Integrated Communications Manager, Lisa Roebuck, discusses their new Tumblr designed to share happy content with teen bloggers. >> ClickZ
Ticketmaster is using Facebook’s new Open Graph application to further personalize fans’ online social experience. >> All Things D
Marriott International, Google, Novo Nordisk, Capital One, and Intuit are among the top-rated companies that use social media to keep their employees happy. >> CNN Money
Emily Schildt, Chobani’s Digital Communications Manager, discusses their best practices for engaging fans on Pinterest that has led them to become the top yogurt brand on the social sharing site. >> Fast Company
Wheat Thins is taking their “Do-Minatrix” character to Facebook and Twitter to coach and inspire fans to achieve their life goals. >> MediaPost

Disclosure: Hershey’s, Anna Lingeris, General Mills, GE, The Coca-Cola Company, and Marriott International are SocialMedia.org members (and awesome ones at that!), but even if they weren’t, we’d write about them anyway.

Level 3: How We Took the “Blah” Out of Corporate Blogging — Live from BlogWell

SocialMedia.org Staff — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:46:53 +0000

Coverage of this session by DGdesign’s Danielle Glick. Connect with her by following her on Twitter at @SocialMediaDFW and at @Dallas_Foodie.

4:30 — SocialMedia.org’s Erin McDaniel introduces Level 3‘s Digital & Social Media Manager, Ben Bacon.

4:31 – Ben: This presentation is for B2B companies, people new to starting a blog, or those who are new to social media.

4:32 – Ben: A year ago Level 3 had no social media channels. When people Googled “Level 3” they got level 3 sex offender results. This wasn’t good for our company!

4:34 – Ben: First we asked ourselves, “What are we going to talk about, what tone are we going to use, and how are we going to say it?”

4:35 – Ben: Step 1: You have to think about your business and how you compete. We work with big brands, Internet access, VPNs, phone service companies, B2B Telecom, and the royal wedding.

4:36 – Ben: We are winning deals because we are creating a more intimate customer experience. We are more personal, more approachable. “It’s not your job to figure out how to work with us, it’s our job to figure out how to work with your company.”

4:37 – Ben: We sell to people in IT organizations, like network engineers, telecom managers, solution architects. These people are “a little bit different.”

4:38 – Ben: We follow people on Twitter with the job titles that we are targeting. We learned that these people are super-opinionated about how they do what they do at work. These people are good BS-detectors. This knowledge is a good roadmap for what tone to use and what content to create for this target audience.

4:39 – Ben: When choosing who will blog for your company, search for storytellers, not job titles. Look for people who write long, articulate emails and tell great stories at happy hours, or people talk to customers the most and do what the customers do more than anyone else at your company.

4:39 – Ben: Train and empower these storytellers to blog. Send them articles about best practices and good and bad example blogs from other companies.

4:40 – Ben: Tips: Avoid brochure-speak or “adjective vomit.” Read it out loud; if it sounds funny, it’s not right.

4:41 – Ben: Analogies work really well with a very technical audience. It helps them understand the concept and to frame up these concepts to other non-technical people, like for their boss who makes the purchasing decisions.

4:42 – Ben: Engineers like to write about what they know, like product features. Instead, blog about big news that is affecting everyone, then tie it back to what you do. This casts a bigger net of interest.

4:43 – Ben: Do group posts. Send out a question to your blogger pool and you’ll get different responses. Combine these into one blog and this will showcase your company’s diverse thinking and talent.

4:44 – Ben: “Look in the mirror posts”—how are we going to be really transparent, what have we done wrong, and how can we share these learnings with customers in our blog?

4:45 – Ben: Talk about the taboo: death, taxes… and fiber cuts. A single blog tweet got picked up by Telecom News and got them lots of hits. “The 10 Most Bizarre and Annoying Causes of Fiber Cuts”— number 1 reason was squirrels. People loved this, and it showed that not all outages are their fault.

4:47 – Ben: Once you have fun with the blog, it spreads across social media. Examples: we tweeted geeky blog stickers on employees’ cars, asked if anyone was going as cloud computing for Halloween and someone read the tweet and actually made the costume.

4:49 – Ben: Results: Blog had 100K page views by the third month. We gained readers from 178 countries. On YouTube we became the #1 organic result for “data center networking.” On Twitter we went from 0-8K followers and our Klout score went from 0 to 50+. Our Google results improved too.

4:50 – Ben: Takeaways: Send monthly recaps in the form of a blog. He is not a fan of editorial calendars because he feels it zaps the juice out of topics. Find self-motivated bloggers.

Q&A:

Q: Can you share more about how you got buy-in from employees and their bosses? Their bosses will want them to stay doing their official jobs, not blogging.

A: Ben: It gets old when you have to track people down to turn in their blog post, so they try to use people who really want to write the blogs. Maybe they want to move up in their careers. They have about 20 bloggers who write one blog per month each. To convince the bosses, they use the results they got on Google and other social channels. Having some early wins with getting picked up in PR provides the proof that good things happen if they keep people blogging.

Q: Was it tough to get the buy-in to write with a friendly tone? What did you do to get over that? Also, what platform do you blog on?

A: Ben: We did one blog in 2 formats. One version was straightforward. The other was more fun and customer friendly. The latter got double the hits, so we knew this was the style we needed to use. We use the WordPress platform. We started with Worpdress.com and then once our IT department got involved, we were able to move it over to our own domain. He thinks you should start blogging even if your IT isn’t ready to help you set it up.

Q: How do you prevent issues?

A: Ben: Early on, everyone wanted to blog. He submits every post to one lawyer before he posts to make sure there are no intellectual property issues, etc.

Q: What was your business goal?

A: Ben: Brand awareness. We are very mindful of measuring with Google analytics and the keywords getting people to their site. We make sure to align these keywords with the things we are selling. We also use Klout topics to check if they are on-target.

Q: How did you decide to do blogs versus other channels? Why not something else? What are you going to do next?

A: Ben: We wanted to humanize the company and do that on our own property (web site) instead of Facebook or Twitter. We still use these other channels to promote the blogs though. We are only 7 months in. Step 1 was building an audience. Step 2 is getting more sophisticated with tying it into campaigns. We are still working on step 2 for 2012.

Q: Can you describe what your most recent position was before you became a blog manager?

A: Ben: “I was the stupid one who signed up to do it.” He was in product marketing and other forms of marketing before doing social media marketing. He was meeting with customers on the road in his previous job. He sees social media as the future, so he wanted to figure it out to round out his marketing skillset.

AMD: Contesting to Drive Awareness, Advocacy, and Revenue — Live from BlogWell

SocialMedia.org Staff — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:36:08 +0000

Coverage of this session by Chesapeake Energy’s Sean Scogin. Say hello and connect with him on Twitter at @seanscogin.

4:30 — SocialMedia.org’s Kurt Vanderah introduces AMD‘s Mobile & Social Media Strategy, Online Marketing, Jon Peters.

4:31 — Jon: Over cyber Monday, we ran a Twitter contest for a week. Since we weren’t able to measure engagement, we did a campaign on Facebook.

4:32 — Jon: We currently have a massive amount of gamers and enthusiasts. Our social presence is 500K: 90% gamers/enthusiasts.

5 business goals:

Drive brand awareness to “technology oriented females and mainstream consumers”
Grow mainstream consumer fan base
Increase advocate base and increase purchase intent through contests
Identify enthusiasts and gaming advocates for revenue in 2012
Increase enthusiasts and gaming fan engagement with brand

Targets:

96K tab viewers
6K new fans
6K potential advocates
24K shares
36K submissions

4:34 — Jon: Our creative theme: softer, more consumer-focused toward technology oriented female. Battlefield 3′s creative targeted gaming enthusiasts. We used Facebook gated pages (two pages on the screen, one for each of the audiences targeted). One side offered female oriented products, and the other side was focused on gamers/enthusiasts.

4:36 — Jon: The structure of the sequence of steps similarly, only changed the language. We made it simple to enter, with only 4 steps to submission.

After hitting submit, we encouraged people to share on their Newsfeed, used the language we provided for sharing.

When a post is submitted on Facebook, only 5% of the audience actually sees it (though 17% was a number recently quoted – AMD on the low side)

We made sure to include the theme: Share, share, share! – looking for virality.

4:37 — Jon: AMD set the default to the public for the best chances.

4:38 — Jon: The contest ran starting November 21, for six weeks. We reiterated the links to the contests by using short links to both tabs (depending upon audience). In the end, audience rules – contests go through legal department.

4:39 — Jon: The contest was specific to North America. We created two blogs, one for our gaming audience and one for our consumers (15K views, 166 shares).

We also had an additional event created for the female bloggers that work on AMD’s behalf — unpaid, incentivized (35K reached, 22 comments, 6 shares). The event was a tweet up and happy hour, “Population Proliferation,” on November 22.

4:40 — Jon: We update our Facebook status to continually target the Newsfeed – target the 5% that actually see it. Updates include: Calling out prizes, using short links, and every Friday we gave out a popular prize.

We posted the pictures of prizes, and interesting comments came through that showed engagement. For example, one humorous comment: “Is it wrong to be turned on by this?”

We also included imagery for our mainstream audience to make sure it wasn’t just focused on gaming.

4:41 — Jon: Some additional status updates included people expressing that they want. One best practice we learned can be overlooked: By simply @tagging Dr. Dre’s Facebook page, we accessed a new audience.

4:42 — Jon: We started tweeting just to have other mechanisms to get the message out to our fans. We started our Twitter account with 1 – 3 tweets per day, and posted through January 3^rd. We realized we needed to have a lot of tweets and content to create any type of scale.

4:43 — Jon: We gave daily prizes away for six weeks. In the first week, all winners were female, so we knew our goal was hit.

4:44 — Jon: We announced winners every 7 – 10 days, and were able to grab positive sentiments by our followers by improving the quality of the prizes.

4:45 — Jon: The winners engaged and helped drive the messaging throughout, and it went viral.

4:46 — Jon: Our targets:

96K tab views
6K new fans
6K advocates

Results on the consumer side:

97K tab views
45K submissions
35K shares
People were sharing the items that they won

Results on the gamer side:

110K tab views
53K
51K shares

Overall great results from 41,000 users in North America

4:47 — Jon: We weren’t able to do this alone: socialmedia180.com and shortstack.com helped.

Q&A

Q: Did interactions drop after the contest; how many migrated to become ambassadors?

A: Jon: Twitter makes it easy for spam. Peaks and valleys are updates — we started the contest the week before to not fight that

Q: Started on Facebook, then went to Twitter and blogging – Did you track conversion rates?

A: Jon: We looked at it holistically, not concerned with clicks from other places. Additional outreach to major publications to drive traffic – getting eyeballs and people on the tab. Basically we were just worried about the end results.

Q: Was the Twitter channel created for the audience?

A: Jon: No, we had too many Twitter handles already, so we tried to find the best handle, and used better channels to retweet.

Q: Were people mad about the influx of posts?

A: Jon: There was a passionate, enthusiastic crowd that was a bit angry, but we knew they were going to see that. We redirected to the gamer/enthusiast page (Battlefield 3).

Q: How were the objectives set to be stretched enough and reasonable enough? (Encourage to move far enough, but not impossible)

A: Jon: We knew our audience, because we looked at engagement in the past. Our goals needed to be realistic to show the management team that there was a value. We used initial numerical reference of likes and retweets.

United Airlines: The Art of the “Tweet” Chat — Live from BlogWell

SocialMedia.org Staff — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:49:49 +0000

Coverage of this session by Huawei Enterprise USA‘s Kathy Catoe. Connect with her by following her on Twitter at @kfcatoe.

3:53 — SocialMedia.org’s Kurt Vanderah introduces United Airlines‘ Manager of Social Media Programs, Lora O’Riordan.

3:54 – Lora: The art of the “Tweet” Chat. United and Continental Airlines decided to get married. We started the social media sites over from scratch, partially because of inability to merge the two accounts. These two airlines have lots of fans that are brand loyal.

3:57 — Lora: Decided to launch the new brand, the New United. Tweetchats are a way to engage the followers. We created a monthly calendar, and a hashtag #UnitedPlaneChat. First chat was with twin pilots, one from United and one from Continental.

3:59 – Lora: During our first TweetChat there was so much engagement, we had to extend the time and had three Twitter “Fail Whales.”

4:00 – Lora: The Twitter volunteer team attends all the events and they sit with the participants. Community relations, PR and Marketing also participate. We have a hub director and the chat is up on the screen. It is a monthly event.

4:01 — Lora: Wifi is coming on flights, just want you to know!

4:02 — Lora: We measured to determine if Tweetchats builds followers. First chat gained 2,000 new followers in one hour. We measured unique chatters and saw how many tweets we captured. Lots of questions were asked with the hashtag #UnitedPlaneChat. We also watched the growth of participation.

4:04 — Lora: Now there is a two year waiting list of the New United internal departments that want to participate in the Tweetchat. It shows that United wants to chat. We want people to ask us questions — direct, open, and honest communication is the backbone of the company. Tweetchat gives us insight to provide more in-depth answers on other social media channels as well.

4:06 — Lora: The Tweetchats provide direct feedback to the internal teams. We can create new internal conversations as a result of the chats.

4:06 — Lora: Is channel 9 going to be part of the new airline? Channel 9 is the communication between the tower and the air traffic controllers. This was important to the social community so they made sure to include it in the New United.

4:07 – Lora: Aircraft schedulers participated in a Tweetchat to talk about why certain airplanes show up at certain airports — how we schedule them, why we do, etc.

4:09 – Lora: Tweetchats are wildly popular – the sky is the limit. It can go beyond Twitter to other social platforms.

4:10 — Lora: The public needs to know what is happening from us, the airplane industry. We want to make sure that they have accurate information.

Q&A:

Q: How are you advertising the chats?

A: Lora: We promote it on Twitter at different times of the day.

Q: How have you built your Tweetchats into your crisis management plan?

A: Giving out information and appropriate information is very important during a crisis. We have never discussed including Tweetchats as part of plan, but will consider it going forward. We must take airline regulations into account for emergency situation (FAA).

Q: How can you demonstrate ROI with this program?

A: Lora: The Tweetchats lead to more customer understanding and the ROI we are looking for is how many people are following us and are coming back to engage with us. We will be looking at their influence going forward.

Q: How many people are tweeting from the @united account?

A: Lora: Most we have ever had are six as SME’s.

Q: Do you currently track with Google Analytics to see if participants buy flights?

A: Lora: We still have two websites, so we can’t track right now, but when we integrate systems we will be able to track.

Q: Do you have a written guidance on how to respond to questions that are challenges?

A: Lora: Marketing and PR Managers follow the conversation and try to take conversation offline. They try to see what they can do to help diffuse the situation.

Northwestern Mutual: Building Engagement and Measuring Results — Live from BlogWell

SocialMedia.org Staff — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:35:45 +0000

Coverage of this session by Weber Shandwick’s Alyssa Gardina. Connect with her by following her on Twitter at @agardina and by checking out her blog.

3:50 — SocialMedia.org’s Erin McDaniel introduces Northwestern Mutual‘s Assistant Director of Internet Marketing, Neal Linkon.

3:51 – Neal: Gauging audience interest in life insurance…none! Life insurance is a product that is sold, not bought.

3:52 – Neal: There are 6,500 field marketing professionals who do all the selling. This presentation will focus on home office, which focuses on brand building.

3:52 – Neal: Initially, social media was shouting from the mountaintop, all push marketing, no comments. We needed to build an audience and engagement.

3:53 – Neal: We partnered with Northwestern Mutual Foundation to create a campaign called Click for Kids. 3 nonprofits did videos (about them, not Northwestern). Users picked their favorite video and Northwestern Mutual donated $10 on their behalf.

3:54 – Neal: There was an argument over like-gating – should we or shouldn’t we? Neal argued they should, many other argued against. Northwestern Mutual posted, asking if users would leave the page if there was a like-gate.

3:54 – Neal: We saw the need for brand-relevant content to keep users on the page when we implemented a like-gate.

3:55 – Neal: Next question, do we allow users to vote more than once? And, if so, how do we prevent users from doing so?

3:55 – Neal: To limit duplicate voting, Facebook application had to have an allow access scree.

3:56 – Neal: Last decision to make was how much money to donate per vote – $5? $10? They took a vote of how long the money would last, ranging from 36 hours to 4 weeks.

3:56 – Neal: The campaign was supplemented with Facebook Ads and engagement from participating nonprofits.

3:57 – Neal: We gave away over $46,000 in the first day. A week later, crossed $50,000. A few months later, they reached $75,000.

3:57 – Neal: Our goal: 2x Facebook fans; results: 3x Facebook fans. Goal: grow referrals back to website; results: 2x growth in referrals.

3:58 – Neal: Like-gating proved not to be a problem, but the “allow access” box was. Users would like the page, and then click to vote and not allow the application to access their information.

3:59 – Neal: 3 months in, we decided to allow users to not share their information when they voted. This allowed users to vote multiple times. It took 90 minutes to churn through the remaining $100K+ donation money.

3:59 – Neal: This campaign may have been inherently flawed, but it achieved its goals.

4:00 – Neal: After this campaign, we went looking for a DIY application builder to be able to focus on engagement with fans. Northwestern Mutual selected Webtrends, which came with a suite of prepackaged applications, which could be used to build applications without inherent development knowledge.

4:01 – Neal: Campaign examples are brand-relevant (disability insurance, savings, financial services) and link back to the Northwestern Mutual website. Applications are culturally-relevant as well – Northwestern Mutual developed a New Years resolution application, where users could post their resolutions to their Wall/Timeline.

4:02 – Neal: Sometimes we work with designers to create streamlined brand-relevant applications, and sometimes we did the creative internally on the Internet Marketing team.

4:03 – Neal: The results from internally-created applications are highly variable based on content and promotion. Engagement rates were as high as 50% of fans. Share rates of users sharing content from the application on their personal profiles were as high as 22%. Click-through rates to the Northwestern Mutual site from the applications were as high as 11%.

4:03 – Neal: “If you’re not promoting it, you’re not going to get very many people to it.”

4:05 – Neal: We’re getting to the point where there are too many social media metrics. We use a tool/spreadsheet from Klurig Analytics to take individual metrics from different channels to create one final number to include in reports.

4:06 – Neal: We use this composite social media score to measure social media efforts from year to year in a social network-neutral way.

4:07 – Neal: Wherever we find success, it raises the social media score. Executives have bought in to this number, which is now a part of regular reporting.

4:07 – Neal: The spreadsheet provides a dollar figure for ROI based on spend, but the dollar amount isn’t taken into account by Northwestern Mutual. More important metrics are the comparables to the previous month/year.

4:08 – Neal: Dog people versus cat people? Neal prefers dog people. Cat people worry him.

Q&A:

Q: Have you noticed a downside in engagement because apps can’t be accessed from mobile devices?

A: Neal: No, they haven’t been concerned with that. The tool also builds applications that can be embedded on the Northwestern Mutual website, which can be accessed from mobile devices.

Q: How many staff report directly to you?

A: Neal: It’s just me. A colleague in communications helps with messaging and content development.

Q: Do you think you could get this campaign approved by senior management again?

A: Despite the decrease in engagement on the major application, the bottom line was the results of the initial campaign were good. We’re now doing 2 Webtrends apps every month for the rest of the year.

Q: Was there any data caching for lead generation, or do you see that ability coming in the future?

A: Neal: We added a “find a rep” application to the Facebook tab, which gets some use. In this industry (versus one like healthcare), there aren’t a lot of people out there looking for Northwestern Mutual’s products on a regular basis. Lead generation is nice to have, but not critical to what Northwestern Mutual is doing from the home office for brand building.

Q: What was the name of the analytics company?

A: Klurig Analytics – the spreadsheet allows you to change the value of metrics as needed. It’s a versatile tool.

Q: Can you talk about if you chose some of the KPIs from Klurig or are working with all of them?

A: Neal: We did determine that some of the things that tool measures aren’t relevant to Northwestern Mutual, e.g. service requests. Some of the assumptions you build into it can help show what metrics are most important to you.

Q: Can you speak to how you moderate users on the Wall?

A: Neal: It’s a shared responsibility, 2 people in communications and Neal in marketing. They’ll see at most a couple comments per day that need to be addressed. People aren’t tweeting at 4 AM with urgent questions for Northwestern Mutual. Being heavily regulated, everything has to be pre-reviewed. Northwestern Mutual has a decision tree they follow to determine how to respond and what to say.

Q: Can you talk a little about the engagement differences for Click for Kids and the other applications?

A: Other applications are out there for a shorter period of time. Click for Kids got more engagement, but also involved a charitable donation. Northwestern Mutual is now the official financial services sponsor for NCAA, with the potential to do some “un-Northwestern Mutual” campaigns down the road.