In this MarketingSherpa webinar replay, hear from Todd Wilms, Head of Social Business Strategy, SAP, discuss with Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, how he was able to create a social business strategy for SAP's 65,000 employees worldwide. By localizing content specific to the needs of audiences in different regions and countries, he found his audience was much more likely to interact and engage with SAP.
During this webinar, Wilms explained where to direct social media outreach around the globe, which was a question from the audience. It comes down to empathy — you, as a marketer, understanding what it is you're trying to accomplish, where the audience is and how to interact and engage with them in a way that puts yourself in their shoes is key to directing global social media efforts.
"The old adage about recycling — think globally, act locally — applies to your social media initiatives. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and try to find a way to connect with them. You're going to be much more effective than a 'spray and pray' approach, which is frankly what we tried to do years ago," Wilms explained.
Also in this webinar, you will learn:
- The metrics to look at when evaluating your social media outreach efforts
- What to keep in mind with social media in different countries
- How critical personas were in this program
- How many people SAP has managing social media
- And much, much more
Download the slides to this presentationRelated Resources
B2B Social Media: SAP Latin America boosts followers 900% [Part I]B2B Social Media: SAP Latin America boosts followers 900% [Part II]Testing and Optimization: SAP’s Test Lab increases digital leads 27%, leads to 20% budget savingsTesting: A discussion about SAP's 27% lift in incremental sales leads — MarketingSherpa webinar replay
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Video Transcription
Burstein: Hello, and welcome to another MarketingSherpa webinar. Thank you for joining us today. Today, we're going to be talking to Todd Wilms from SAP. But first, I want to thank our sponsor, Act-On, for making this free and I want to thank you for joining us today. So, Todd, thank you for joining us from out there in San Francisco. How's the weather out there today?
Wilms: Oh, it's always sunny and lovely in San Francisco.
Burstein: I guess Todd's technically in Palo Alto but I'm thinking of San Francisco because we're about to head to our Lead Gen Summit. Let me tell you briefly about Todd. He has worked with some of the world's best-known brands like eBay, PayPal, Citrix, PeopleSoft and the noted agency, George P. Johnson. Right now, he's the head of social business strategy at SAP. He's going to be answering your questions about social business and social media today.
Before I start asking him those questions, let me tell you a little bit about a Sherpa webinar, how it's different from other webinars. For those who have joined us before, thanks for coming back. For those who haven't, Sherpa webinars are really focused on you and your questions. Todd's really kind. He came here today to answer all your questions, not to present some slides, not to present what he has to talk about, but to present what you want to hear. You can ask us all your questions through #SherpaWebinar on Twitter. You can also share what's worked for you on #SherpaWebinar. You can also ask through the ReadyTalk platform and many of you have asked through the registration form. So that's one way to get more value from today's webinar.
Another way is we have many links with further resources. In 30 minutes, we can only cover just a really small part of everything Todd's done at SAP. We’ve got a lot of further resources we're going to be tweeting through #SherpaWebinar. Pay attention to that as well.
So with that, Todd, let's start with the results. This question's from Max, an e-media research transition lead. He wants to know about metrics and what are your benchmarks of success. So why don't you tell us about how you measure social media and specifically, some of the results you've seen?
Wilms: Sure, and before we get into it, I really want to thank all of you, from everyone from Act-On and MarketingSherpa for the opportunity to come out and speak today. I love this format of just having rapid-fire questions and being able to act and engage with the audience. It's very social. It's what we and myself are espousing here at SAP. I love the idea of not coming in and just talking through a bunch of slides, but really being able to engage and act. And actually, I get to learn a lot from all of you and the questions and pain points that everyone here in the audience is going through, so please reach out to me and us on this call today, but also feel free to reach out to me afterwards. Connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn and I'll be happy to try and address questions as best I can.
So going back to the metrics, you know, this is always a really good, telling question. A lot of organizations struggle with what am I trying to measure? There's so many different moving pieces. There's so many vendors. There's so many tools and technologies that allow me to find something out about how I'm interacting with my customers or the marketplace, I just don't know where to start. What we typically tell folks is just start with your basic reach metrics, number of fans and followers, the number of times something gets retweeted, the number of times things are being seen. What are the basic number of impressions?
Start with those to give yourself a sense of how effective you are in getting your messages out there. Then over time, once you feel like you've got a pretty steady state of growth and a pretty steady of followers, people that are looking at the contents you're creating, and that's growing at a pretty, again, a pretty steady rate, then over time what you want to do is start looking at some of the engagement metrics.
What are the number of times that somebody actually retweets or comments? What are the number of times that people actually engage with you and start a conversation based on the content? What are the number of times that people see what you're writing or conversing or talking about and then they go in and share that within their networks?
Start to look at those metrics about engagement to see, OK, now we've got the reach, now we want to see how effective we are at actually connecting and talking with those folks. Then once you do that, you can start to become a little more efficient, a little more effective about how you grow those, how you change those, and we'll talk about some of those strategies here on the remainder of the call today. So this is a great place for us to start.
Burstein: Well, Todd, I know you're not one to brag, but come on, give us a little insight into some of the results you've seen at SAP there. It's OK, we're among friends here.
Wilms: Well, it's sort of interesting because you see these numbers and these numbers are vast. Of all the numbers on here, the one that I frankly find most impressive and continue to find most impressive in the four and a half, five years that I've been here at SAP is this SAP community network, the second bullet point of 20,000 new posts per month and the third about 4,000 new blog posts per day. I mean, those numbers are astounding, the number of people around the globe that actually feel like they've got something to say on a regular basis and actually sit down and craft out a well-constructed thought or idea around a blog, and we get 4,000 of those a day. That shows true commitment, interaction and engagement.
For those of you that look at the number and go, "Wow, I'm nowhere near that from where our community or our marketplace is reacting to us," the reality is we had the SAP community network, affectionately known as SCN around here, we've had that network up and running for close to eight or nine years now, actually it's going on its 10th year, as a matter of fact. We're celebrating it this year at our SAP TechEd Conference. So it was a long time running to get that community up to where it is today.
But what we've seen as we've worked with folks is, you know, these numbers actually take off and grow pretty quickly, pretty rapidly. The fans and followers on Facebook, the 716,000, that's going on about four years now. We've had a phenomenal growth rate from a global brand to get it up to those numbers. So they're impressive numbers, but I really like the engagement statistics, the amount of people that actually connect or interact with us. I find those fascinating.
Burstein: So SAP is a global brand and I want to ask you about that in just a minute. We have a question here from Mary I just have to ask you because it makes me smile. She wanted to know what SAP stands for. Do you know what SAP stands for?
Wilms: It does and there's a longer German definition, but it's Solutions, Applications and Programs.
Burstein: Oh, that's great. I worked for a company called BEA Systems in the IT industry and all it stood for was Barry, Ed and Alfred, the founders of the company. So sometimes the acronym stands for nothing. We're looking at a picture here now of the globe because as we said, SAP is a global company. You do take a global approach. Elizabeth, the marketing manager, wanted to know, how did SAP decide where to direct its social media outreach? How did they learn about where their buyers interacted socially? So you had a global challenge, but I wonder if you could talk about your challenge specifically and what you would advise to other marketers who might not have as big of a network to look after.
Wilms: Right. Well, and I think that there's two parts to this answer but to some level, they come down to the exact same thing. It really comes down to sort of understanding and knowing where your audiences are and what your goals and objectives are. I'm going to use this turn of phrase a lot. It comes down to empathy. It really comes down to you as a marketer trying to understand what is it that I'm trying to accomplish, where are those audiences, and how do I interact and engage with them in a way that puts me in their shoes, at least for a short period of time?
So one of the things that we've found is as we started this journey of, you know, several years ago, and we made mistakes along the way. We'll be the first to admit it. We tried some things; some things failed. The things that failed we jettisoned and we moved onto something else.
What we found is if we tried to design a plan or program, even a local one, based on what our needs and goals were, what we wanted to do out of Palo Alto or what we wanted to out of Philadelphia, or what we wanted to do out of New York, if we tried to run those programs through our eyes, they traditionally failed. If we tried to run a program out of Palo Alto and tried to do it around the globe, we never really connected with our audiences.
The reasons we found out were, one, the tools that we typically used, maybe we'd promote something through Twitter, we'd find that in Europe they don't traditionally use Twitter. They're going to use things like LinkedIn to do that kind of promotion. Or if we'd ask our global constituents to try and blog for us, in Europe in particular, when we'd ask them to blog about the company, they shied away from that. That's not part of their culture, part of their DNA. They'd be more than happy to blog about what they do personally and, in fact, they're much more forthright about their personal lives through a blog then maybe we are in a North American audience. But that wasn't something that they were comfortable with.
Then if we tried to put things out on YouTube, we found that there were certain countries in particular that would have YouTube blocked, sometimes only for a couple of months, but sometimes it was blocked entirely.
So we always tried to look at what is it that we were trying to accomplish? We were trying to accomplish promotion. We were trying to accomplish brand awareness. We were trying to accomplish, you know, engagement and connection. Was there an idea we were trying to get across? Then we would develop those and look to local and regional resources to find the best mechanisms. We'd give them the tools and the content and the information to make those smart decisions, and then to do that on a local basis.
You know, it's that old adage about recycling. It's "Think globally, act locally." It absolutely applies to your social media initiatives. So if you put yourselves in the shoes of your audience, think about what they're really looking at and then try and find a way to connect with them through smart listening techniques, you're going to be much more effective than trying to do a spray and pray approach, which is, you know, frankly, what we tried to do years ago and a lot of brands are still trying. That make sense?
Burstein: Yeah, we talked a lot about social media channels here, but I wonder how this related to channels outside of social media, like email, for example, because we have a question here on #SherpaWebinar on Twitter from Jeff. He wants to know, "Any thoughts on how to drive email newsletter signups through social media?”
Wilms: Well, I think, you know, specific to that, it really is going to come down to, again, you've got to understand your audience. If your audience wants to connect with you through a newsletter and that's a mechanism that you can communicate because that's the best mode for your content, your channel to connect to your audience, then it's a relatively straightforward exercise. You can use those social channels to direct people back to, you know, signup. You can use those channels to direct people back to a website where they can opt in. You can use those channels to direct people to, you know, connect with you, give you their email address so that you can direct that content to them.
The challenge, again, still comes back to if your audiences don't want to engage with you in an email channel, and many don't because they feel like that's opting into a spam network, then they're going to resist that mode of communication, and no matter what techniques you use, you're going to run into some hurdles and obstacles from being able to connect to that audience.
Burstein: Yeah, I like that. I like to think of it as some people are hunters and some are gatherers, right? Some want to actually hunt for their information, maybe through social media. Some want to gather it through email. So we have a question here from Danielle, a marketing coordinator. "Trying to build up our social media efforts. Any advice on the best way to do that?" Now I ask you this because when our visual storyteller, Jessica, was working on these slides with you, you were saying you didn't even want to talk about social media. That's a topic for the webinar. What do you want to talk about? You want to tell us a little bit about that?
Wilms: Yeah, and it's a fundamental shift in how we start thinking about social media, the tools and technologies. This was a great example and we used this for most of our definition to help educate people in and around SAP. It comes down to this MIT/Sloan example. There's others out there that are just as fine, but this one, really, was the abbreviated version of a social business for us. It's how you use those social media tools, techniques and networks to drive more mutually beneficial mutual connections between you and your customers. It's how do you use those tools against a business goal and objective.
I think what happens when you start talking about social media and social media marketing and social media tools and technologies, it focuses too much on the tools themselves and doesn't focus on what's the business outcome that you're trying to create. I'll use this as a quick example because I found this really telling. I was at a conference in New York just a couple of weeks ago and in the middle of the panel, I just sort of, this idea dawned on me and I asked the question, how many people in the audience have a marketing strategy? And about half the audience raised their hand.
Now, this was a marketing conference so I was a little disconcerted that only half the people raised their hand. Then I asked how many people had a social media strategy and about, you know, a third of the people raised their hand. Then I asked people, all right, how many of you have a social media strategy that's part of your marketing strategy? Only a few hands stayed up. What that tells me is that people are using social media as this ad hoc relationship that they have with their customers, and it's not tied into your marketing strategy. It's not tied into your business strategy. It's not tied into what are you trying to accomplish with your customers. What are you trying to help them with?
So we're focusing more not on what is the social media effort, but what's that social business effort? How do I use these tools and technologies to draw that greater aim? So most of what I'm going to be talking about today is how to use that to a higher level and create a social business strategy in and around your organization, instead of just, "I'm going to use social media," which means, "I'm going to use Twitter or Facebook." I think this is a great, quick example of, you know, the articulation of that.
Burstein: Well, and then the nice thing about the social business, I think this ties great into these two questions we got here. From Maria, she wants to know, "How do you make your conversion funnel from social presence to Klein?" I think she's talking about your conversion funnel and how you map it out. We also had a question here from Rachael. She's a senior specialist in corporate communications. "How to encourage employees to be involved in social media?" I think both of those ideas really tie into the social business in general. When we were talking before this call, you told me a lot about how you got, specifically, the sales team involved, and why the sales team should be involved in social media, and how that ties into the conversion funnel. Can you tell me about some of those statistics and how you got them involved?
Wilms: Sure, and one of the things that I'll call out is, you know, you and your team just finished a great case study with us about some of our results in Latin America. What you may want to do is tweet that out to the channel just so people can get a little bit of a deeper dive into some of the things that I'm about to talk about. One of the things that we found when we were working with the sales organization and you know, let's face it, if any of the marketers on this call or any of the sales people here, if you work with other sales organizations, you realize that the quickest way to get them into new techniques or new programs is to find one of them and get them into a new Mercedes, right? You can talk about new strategies and tactics all you want, but they're very results-driven individuals. They want to see how this is going to impact their business and their bottom line and help them meet quotas.
So what we started to see as we were working with them was, if we went in and said, "OK, here's a series of social tools to engage with," we got a few people that nodded their head and said, "Yeah, that's the right thing to do." But they went right back to their old techniques and their old behaviors. We started to see over time, though, as we as marketers engaged in these social conversations, as we talked to our customers and gave them content in the format that they wanted, in the timeframe that they wanted, in the channels that they wanted, we spoke to them in their language and met with them on their behalf on their concerns and helped them address their business problems - as we did that, we found that we had a more engaged, more informed, more intelligent organization coming to us in the sales pipeline.
So instead of getting involved with the salesperson earlier in the deal cycle, they get involved with them later in the deal cycle. They came in and said, “You know, your marketing organization already held my hand through all of this. I've got a sense of what I need, where I want to go. Now I want to work through the details with you." The salesperson found that they could engage at a higher level for a shorter period of time and get the same qualitative results. They also had a more engaged customer. The customers traditionally had longer, better relationships with us. So the salespeople looked at this and said, "Well, hold on a second. Now I can talk to more customers and engage with them in a better way. There's something to this."
Once they started to see those results that actually impacted them, now they became those, you know, you used the term “hunters and gatherers”. They followed those same techniques in their organizations. The sales teams now adopted sales tools. The sales teams are now using these social media channels to communicate information. The sales teams are now creating their own content to becoming thought leaders and the customers are coming to them. It took the marketing organization to drive that change into the funnel instead of just hammering on them to say, "Use this tool, use this technique, use this technology."
Burstein: And speaking of which, so Todd, you're in a corporate role, correct?
Wilms: Correct, yes.
Burstein: So let's take a look at some of the SAP field and see how, you know, you didn't just have to convince sales, you also had to work out to the entire SAP field and have them look at social in a new way. So we have a question here from Craig, an executive director. "How critical were personas in this program?" Here's an example from the field, from that case study that Todd referenced which we're tweeting through #SherpaWebinar, the entire two-part case study, huge case study, very helpful. Then talking about personas, one challenge you faced as social media, which we've seen this a lot, just all over the place, right? People were engaged in all these different ways and you were really trying to coalesce it around certain channels and, I assume, around certain personas as well for those channels to target, right?
Wilms: Right, right. I think this, you know, this goes hand in hand. The idea of personas and this enthusiasm that comes in with organizations to use these social tools, techniques and technologies. You know, we found that what's happened over the last couple of years in particular is people have caught on, this is the right thing to do. They know this is the direction they want to go. So there's no lack of enthusiasm for most marketers to want to engage in these channels and use these techniques. What we found, though, is that that enthusiasm might not be sustainable, that they're busy in other areas of the business. They've got other goals, roles and responsibilities within the organization.
So they'll go and develop a channel, a program, a campaign and over time, what we'll see is that'll start to wane. That will become, you know, dormant and it's now just digital wreckage on the side of the road. What happens, though, is as you leave those digital campaigns out there, your customers are still occasionally interacting with them.
So if they come across something, and this was an example we used in the case study, like SAP Slovakia Banking, it's a very, very specific niche audience. You know, you have to be within banking and have a banking concern. You have to be concerned about SAP and you're probably located in or around Slovakia. That's a pretty small constituency. So they engage with this audience. They had these great conversations with them. But over time that audience wasn't growing. It was the same number of people. They lost some enthusiasm for communicating with them and then went dormant.
But now as customers come across that, they see that they've got this digital wreckage on the side of the road, they actually have a negative experience with our brand. As you see this replicated a couple of hundred times around the organization, you start to see that you're not leading people to a location where they can get information. You're not leading people to a place where they can get better insights. You're leading them into these dead ends, these cul-de-sacs that lead nowhere.
So what we started to do was take that enthusiasm and guide it, steer it a little bit. Move them to larger channels. Move them to a finance channel, where there's a blend of conversations from around the globe, not just in banking. Move them to areas where they can have wholer, richer conversations and develop great content to connect with those audiences. The idea here, getting back to the personas, is really key to that. Get an idea of the kind of person you want to communicate with. You can find that through social listening. You can find it because you just know your customers. But get an idea who that person is.
We've seen teams that have gone so far as to actually put a picture of who they think that person is and write up a whole background, a case study of them, almost as if you were an actor taking on a new role. You want the background of that person and they'll come up with an entire persona of who they want to reach and then put themselves in their shoes and say, "If I were that person, where am I going to find information? What do I need and what content and what format?" Personas play a great role in and around SAP, but they also help us to refocus our energies and not become so siloed that we run the risk of becoming dormant. A bit of a long-winded answer, but this is a really important area of our social strategy.
Burstein: Well, that was in Slovakia. Let's take a look in Latin America, as well, what you did there. Here's the Latin American Facebook page real quick. But more important than a specific Facebook page is how you did something similar, bringing 34 different social media accounts into some specific accounts. We have a question here from Alex, an art director. Integrating Facebook and Twitter with email campaigns in sight, look and feel is what he's interested in.
What did you learn in Latin America? I mean, when we talk about integrating Facebook and Twitter and email, like you said, what we're really talking about is, you know, social media, email, there can be all different communities. How did you decide what communities to target in Latin America and what was important to the audiences in Latin America?
Wilms: Right. Well, it comes down to a couple of things, you know. I'll go back to the previous answer of this enthusiasm. You had plenty of folks that were going out there and they wanted to create an interaction with their audience. They wanted to find a way to connect with them. But this has to be sustained. So what you find is over time you've got a litany of different accounts that, maybe they have some interactions, maybe they don't.
What we started to look at was a couple of things. We went back to this idea of empathy. What's the business goal that we're trying to accomplish in Latin America? What are we trying to do? Where are we trying to grow? What are the services and solutions that we think will have the best impact based on our understanding of the culture and the needs of the region? Then we went back and looked at it and said, "Where do we believe that these people are and where are they hanging out? Are they hanging out on specific digital sites? Are there communities out there?"
So we engaged in some listening techniques and tools and programs. You go out and start to listen based on keywords. You'd do some keyword analysis. You'd find out who the best influencers and the best connectors are. You'd find out what communities they were engaged in. You'd find out, you know, where they were talking and where they were conversing. And if it wasn't the person you were looking for, who could actually influence that person? Were there groups or organizations or even influential bloggers that you could connect with?
Once you've done that bit of analysis, it becomes pretty clear what your roadmap is. Then you develop a strategy that takes people from one location to the next. I think we get to this a little bit later on the webinar, but one of the things we constantly get asked is, "How do you create this idea of ROI?" What it comes down to is you want to give people the opportunity as they engage in one conversation, to always go to the next step.
Now, it may be I engage on LinkedIn and then I'm going to take you to Twitter. Then I engage on Twitter and I'm going to take you to a blog. But you always want to lead them to some next location, some next logical place to the argument, some next logical place to the conversation, some next logical place for information.
As you develop that campaign structure, this becomes really clear to develop the, you know, the different social tools, the different social channels. Where people fail is they do the shotgun approach. They put everything up on everything and hope people are going to find their way through it, are going to be engaged enough to actually go out and search for it. You have to lead them down the path you want to go. Then you also have to understand that they may not go where you want to go. They may go offline. They may go read about you in a New York Times article and then may come back. But you always want to give them that option and make it as easy as possible for them.
Burstein: It sounds like doing this right really takes working with people and making sure that people understand. So that ties into this question from Helen, and don't answer this just yet, Todd, but think about this for a moment. "How many people do you have managing your social media accounts? Different people for different parts of the world? And what about languages? Do you use German in Germany, etc.?" I know language was key to this Latin American case study. So in just a moment I'm going to ask Todd that question and ask him for some of these results about this Latin American case study.
But first, I wanted to mention that Todd will be joined by Adriel Sanchez, a VP of Demand Generation of SAP at our Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco from September 30 to October 3. We picked this case study for two reasons. Well, one, Todd is an exceptionally handsome man. When you see him in person, you'll know that. One, there's some great lessons you can learn about the social media and a social business from both Todd and Adriel for a company of any size, but specifically, if you work for a company like SAP, where you have both corporate marketing and a field marketing of some sort, and you have to find out how to work together, we're so excited to be able to have both of them onstage. They say they're just going to lay it all bare and let us know what it's like from the field marketing perspective, from the corporate marketing perspective, how they're able to work together, what they're able to produce, and maybe they'll even share some dirty laundry about what doesn't work.
I also want to thank our sponsor of today's webinar. Again, thank you to Act-On for making this free. Act-On software is a leading provider of cloud-based integrative marketing automation software and it was recently named to the Forbes America's Most Promising Companies List of 100 U.S.-based, privately-held high-growth companies with bright futures. Companies of all sizes turn to Act-On to execute multichannel online demand generation and lead-nurturing campaigns by automating critical marketing tasks and providing rich analytics and reports in real time. You can learn more by visiting act-on.com and you can see what they're doing with 1,500+ customers, ranging in size from small and midsize businesses to departments of large enterprises across all major industry verticals. Thank you, Act-On.
Well, with that, Todd, let's talk about who are the people behind these programs? How are you managing it from a people perspective and what worked for you here in Latin America?
Wilms: Sure, and I want to, you know, also tie this into the question that we had from Helen just a minute ago, and I'll reread that for the audience, was, "How many people do you have managing these accounts? Different people for different parts of the world? Languages, German in Germany, etc." This all ties into the strategies and things we've done for Latin America. So one of the things that's surprising. You've got to think about the scope, size and scale of SAP. SAP is 65,000 global employees and has a rich 40-year history. It's in 128 countries. So we’ve got this massive footprint around the globe.
When you think about the scope, size and scale of the number of people that are interacting with SAP and how we're interacting with them, our core social media team is only seven people, which is a phenomenally small number when you think about it. What we have is this core team and then we have local teams within the regions and within each of the individual countries that take that consorted and consolidated central effort, all the content that gets created from those core teams and from the product teams and the solution teams, it gets fed out. They take it and then localize it into their audiences based on their needs and their understandings.
So we may, from a corporate perspective, come in and create a program, talking about the future and direction of the cloud. But then the local teams have to then go through that, kind of smart filter and say, "As I engage with my audiences in North America and then I engage with them in the western hemisphere of the U.S., or if I engage with them in Latin America, but I'm speaking specifically to a Colombian audience, I have to then understand and empathize with their understanding of the Cloud, what they're coming from, where do they need help, and where do they need guidance.
They'll take that and localize that, not only from a language perspective, but from a content and a context perspective and help direct that same conversation in with their audiences. They may need to bolster in certain areas, they may need to direct it in other areas, but they're going to connect with their audiences even though we're doing something on a global scale. I think that's the real strength and real success of a true social program is not just one size fits all, not just shoving something from a central location, but really localizing it and having the teams and able to do that. We've seen companies that have done that with their internal folks or they actually outsourced that to an agency, but that local touch, that local flavor is really important because the personalization gives you the success.
Burstein: Well, Todd, we just have two minutes remaining. You talked about some social business examples from SAP but to broaden it to make it work for everyone in the audience today, can you talk about maybe some other social business ideas or what you've seen work with other companies?
Wilms: Yeah, and here's four really great examples. You know, I'm not shy to talk about what other companies are doing because I think there are some phenomenal examples. Frankly, it's a pretty small community of people around the globe that are engaged in social media marketing, that are developing social business strategies for their companies, and we're all in a place where we're sharing content information and best practices.
So here's four really great examples. I think the underlying thing that's not quite stated here but should be understood is this really comes down to culture of your company. Where I've talked to people and they said they've been really frustrated within their organization is when they've gone in and tried to create a social campaign, a social program, a social initiative and it just smacks in the face of the culture of their company. If your company's very operationally focused and frankly, is not a service and support organization, you're going to have a hard time coming and talking about how you're going to restructure services for your company. Your company's very big on, you know, thought leadership, but you want to then get into working in the supply chain in the back office and how social can help there, you're going to have a really difficult time.
The reason why these four are great stellar examples with Dell, Capital One, Starbucks and Time Warner is because these are areas that are part of their culture. It was very easy for them to look at this and say social is the next logical extension for what we do day in and day out. It's a more efficient, more effective way to interact on new product ideas, like Starbucks, or to change the way they work with their suppliers for Capital One, or for Time Warner to revolutionize how they were finding job seekers and recruiting, or from Dell on how they revamped their revenue supply chain within 18 months.
It's because of who they are as an organization. So you've got to sort of follow that lead and not try and swim upstream. I can't stress that enough because I think that causes so much frustration for marketers when they try and change the culture of their company through social, they should use social to enhance the culture that's already there.
Burstein: Thank you, Todd. We're all out of time, unfortunately, but thank you for joining us. I look forward to seeing you in San Francisco in a few months.
Wilms: This was great. Thank you for the questions and I really enjoyed getting all these ideas from everyone. Again, I expect everyone to reach out to me on Twitter and LinkedIn and if we can follow up on the conversation, I'm happy to help.
Burstein: Yeah, follow up with us. We'll be sure to put you in touch with Todd if you have any more specific questions for him. Thank you to all the marketers who took the time to call in for this call today. We know how valuable your time is. We're going to have a survey at the end of this webinar so please let us know what's working for you, what's not, so we can make them more valuable for you. Thank you.
