Verizon: How We're Building Brand Awareness Through Social Media — Live from BlogWell

4:30 — Bergen Anderson introduces Verizon‘s Portfolio Leader, Laurie Shook.

4:31 — I’m Laurie Shook and I’m a product geek at Verizon. I don’t come at this as someone who’s full-time job is 100% in social media. I’m involved in blogging, I’m our lead on the Social Media Business Council, and I’m involved in a cross-department social media steering council.

4:32 — Laurie says that you often hear it’s OK to test the waters in social media — that it’s OK to fail. She says she sees a lot of big brands in the room, and thinks they all know that an epic failure really isn’t an option.

4:33 — Laurie talks about their strategies for social media:

1. Build brand equity
2. Grow sales and revenue from social media
3. Provide online customer support through social media

4:34 – Laurie: To be honest, the online customer support part has been a challenge for me. I think for any company that has a large customer base and established customer support channels, you have highly established process and systems in place. But looking at social media, it’s a challenge to figure all this out — but we’re working on that.

4:34 — Laurie says that sometime last year, they realized that with all the energy and excitement and jumping in on social media, they suddenly had a lot of disparate, decentralized social media platforms. People didn’t know who to follow or who was authorized.

4:35 – Laurie says they established a cross-departmental social media steering team to guide this.

4:36 — Laurie says one of the first things they did was set up a process for establishing a social media property. They also created a set of social media guidelines and did a lot of training with practitioners and made this training available to employees who were interested.

4:37 — Laurie says the people who were active in social media said they needed guidelines to know when to respond and how to respond.

4:38 — Laurie talks about their idea of a single, unified Facebook page and how it was one of the things they really wanted to do — but it turned out not to be a good thing. Their plan was to have customers come to one page, ask questions, and then send them where they needed to go.

4:39 — Laurie says they launched this page and found that it had a ton of followers — and were excited until they discovered that the conversation was dominated by Verizon Wireless discussions. Morale of the story: You don’t decide what your property is, your customers do. They went back to the drawing board and came up with new strategies on what each division needed for Facebook.

4:39 — Laurie says they found that different departments needed different Facebook elements (tabs, white papers, geeky elements, tech, etc.)

4:40 — Laurie shows how Verizon FiOS has a tab exclusively for customer support — and how they have a team of 9 that monitors and works with that page.

4:41 — Laurie says they never tried to aggregate their Twitter strategy behind one account, and that it’s been a big benefit. Laurie adds they’ve found that Twitter users understand you won’t be available all the time.

4:42 — Laurie shares how their focused newsletter that’s simple and text based has a passionate fan base and drives a lot of traffic — while their fancy, more general newsletter covered such broad topics that it was hard for fans to follow, and because of this, doesn’t have as passionate of fan base.

4:44 — Laurie says that in the BtoB world, new content drives engagement. She talks about their Data Breach Investigations Report — it covers all the security breaches they investigate and offers their analysis — which they promote through Facebook, Twitter, and blog articles. When they send it out, they see a huge spike in visits because of this content.

4:45 — Laurie talks about their Ambassador Team Pilot made up of employees who weren’t in social media, but were interested in helping Verizon get their message out. There was a lot of concern over control of the message and having people mistake them as representatives of the company. Laurie says that if you want to try something, call it a “pilot”, give executives plenty of visibility in it, and provide plenty of training. For this pilot, she says several benefits occurred:

1. Employees got more involved with the company
2. Employees learned to grow ears and help leaders in different business units learn of important issues
3. The “rogue employee” issues never materialized
4. Don’t expect significant results if you don’t put forth significant efforts

4:47 — Laurie’s concluding lessons:

• Customers ultimately define the property
• Customers decide what content they choose to consume — we don’t control the message
• Customers drive the support channel mechanism — and can’t be oslely driven by efficiency metrics
• Hypothesize, control your experiment, test, and repeat

Q&A

Q: Do you have a mechanism to mobilize your internal ambassador team during a crisis or big event?

A: My concern has been that I don’t want Verizon to sound like we have a bunch of employee automatons that are out there tweeting the message. We’ve done things like say, “Hey, here’s a cool post about a phone” — but we never tell them how to say or share it.

Q: We’re also thinking about similar things as your ambassador program — can you tell me about your training process there?

A: It was interesting — we were all selected and ready to go. Meanwhile, there was some training that was in development for social media practitioners. There was concern that people shouldn’t get started until getting training — even though it was something many of these ambassadors had helped to create. That was the main thing — let’s get this training done.

Q: With the multiple sites you’ve got under the Verizon banner, have you ran into consistency issues?

A: We had a big issue with consistency before we started with this centralized effort. We got everyone on the same page — and the corporate branding folks were very involved. As you can see from my example, some of those properties have started to veer away from that same look — and you know what? I’m OK.

Q: How were you able to do an audit to see everything out there and reign it in?

A: It was hard. We just had to search and discover, and we just had a tracking sheet. We would just find out about weird things going on out there, like a “Verizon Guru” — and had to reach out to some of these properties and have them remove their Verizon affiliation if they weren’t actually doing it on behalf of the company. It was a very manual process.

Q: You mentioned you had to develop different presences for different properties. Did you also have to develop different strategies for BtoB?

A: Definitely. Consumer is much more offer oriented, while BtoB is more customer specific. BtoB tends to focus on content — white papers and interesting tech behind the products — whereas consumers are much more offer oriented.

Q: How did you decide to implement those strategies?

A: Well, trial and error really. That’s why we’ve gone through some changes. Some things worked, some haven’t. You know, test and repeat.

Q: When you were first starting and had a bunch of little independent sites going on, did you just end up starting over or did you continue on?

A: The answer is probably both. There are some that stayed. There are some that the intention was to get rid of it, and it ended up being that it just made a whole lot more sense to transform it into a national page. You want to be careful about eliminating anything that has a loyal following — you want to kind of tune it up and head it in the right direction.