The Home Depot: Bringing Our Culture to Life in Social Media — Live from BlogWell

Coverage of this session by Daddy Mojo’s Trey Burley. Connect with him by following him on Twitter at @Daddymojo and @TreyBurley.

1:30 — SocialMedia.org’s Erin McDaniel introduces The Home Depot’s Social Media Community Manager, Tia Robinson.

1:31 — Tia: We’ve taken everything from the store and put it in a social platform.

1:32 – She talks about how they launched the How-to community in October 2010 to be one central DIY location.

1:34 — Tia: It’s also an area for associates and members — a place to reinforce buying decisions. The site covers topics such as DIY, paint, lawn & garden, and flooring.

1:35 — Tia introduces the store associates that help brand the new store associates.

1:36 — Tia: They didn’t start with the intent of social media folks, they wanted DIY first and foremost.  The Community associates balance their time by working on the site two days a week, and working three days in the store to keep their DIY skills fresh. Their average tenure is 11 years.

1:37 — She says that the associates have cameras with them to upload videos from the store too.

1:38 –The result: The voice is authentic and the customers have connected with it.

1:39 — Tia shares that the community has posted over 3,000 times, including 300 videos.

1:40 — Tia: The Community Associates on the site build on the community members’ answers and do proactive posts. One example was on how to build a lemonade stand: The post included tags and links, which further helped SEO.

1:41 — Tia: We also tag all of our photos properly for SEO purposes.

1:42 — Tia says they encourage the associates to scour other sites too so that they can build on strengths and weaknesses.

1:43 — The benchmark — provided by Lithium — compiles them higher than other DIY community sites. This has helped build traction on other sites like Adage, etc.

1:44 — Tia introduces Travis, aka the “Lawn Ranger,” who has 21 years experience as a sales garden associate. She explains that it feels real, because not all the conversations that he has online are the same.  The answers may be a bit more polished, but that’s it.

1:45 — Next is Illean, aka “Designing Woman,” who specializes in DIY, home repair. ”It’s great to serve people online and the community is reaching 50 countries now.  Making the store experience better is all part of interacting with people.”

1:46 — The final community associate is Chris Fixit. Tia shares, “He loves a problem that ‘can’t be solved.”  To give them confidence is something that can’t be beat.  It’s the same culture in the store, we just brought it online.

Q&A

Q: Are most of the customers in the Community active shoppers or buying more than expected?

A: Tia: They’re going in pre-project. The tone of the post lets us know that.

Q: Implementation and buy in — how did you get legal and everybody to sign off on it?

A: Tia: The VP got the buy-in by working very hard to assure people and proving the need for the Community.

Q: How did you approve the members as content producers?

A: Tia: They interviewed each one individually — gauged personality, written ability, and checked their references.

Q: The names are interesting, how did that work out?

A: Tia: We wanted them to show their personality and gave them the opportunity to pick them — mostly to be proud of it and have fun.

Q: Do they receive reputation questions?

A: Tia: They’ve been trained to talk about projects only.

Q: Have you thought about premium Communities?

A: Tia: In terms of growth, they’re looking for more ways for the store associates to be experts. Lithium has provided lots of back-end research, performance, and metrics so that we can identify their strengths.

Q: How do you manage the associates, do they have free range to create?

A: Tia: They had to be able to write very well for the internet and articulate themselves well. The associates are very good at turning content around in a timely professional manner.