June 25, Porto Alegre, Brazil: at FISL Aaron Newcomb and I will be speaking on Using Video to Communicate About Open Source Software
July 6-8, Wellington, New Zealand: three workshops at the Ministry of Education (open to anyone) on Extending Conversations Through Social Media. Likely Tweetup or other gathering to occur one of those evenings!
My official job title at Sun is, I believe, the vague and essentially meaningless “Program Manager.” My Sun business cards say I’m a “Community Specialist and (Video)blogger”. I made that up in a hurry, and wish I could find something more descriptive. But it has long been the story of my professional life that what I do, even within any single job, is usually hard to explain in a few words or a standard job title.
People do keep asking, though, so I’ll take a shot at explaining just what it is I do for Sun, and why.
When I was originally hired as a contractor by Dan Maslowski nearly two years ago, my task was to help his group of engineers produce web content (I believe they had deliverables about that at the time, handed down from on high).
We thought this would mean white papers and blog posts, so I did the training necessary to be able to edit official Sun documents (you have to know a lot about trademarks). I then spent a lot of time begging engineers to write white papers and blog posts, including weekly meetings in which we all solemnly agreed that these things needed to be done. But everyone was too busy writing code to write about the code they were writing, right?
I couldn’t do it myself. I have at times been a tech writer (and a good one), but it would have taken me years to achieve the level of knowledge I’d need to write usefully about this deep technology. (Of course there are folks at Sun who have this knowledge, because they have been doing it for years; they are already up to their eyeballs in writing documentation.)
So how could we get vital information out of busy engineers and make it available to those who need it, both within and outside of Sun? We needed to find another way.
Upon hearing that I knew something about video, Dan and Scott had bought me a videocamera. In August, Dan hauled me out to Colorado to film five days of training his staff were giving on the Leadville stack (storage software). This resulted in hours of video about the nitty-gritties of things like MPxIO. The audience for this kind of thing isn’t huge, but they are dedicated: it appears that about 150 people (so far) have gotten through all three hours of this presentation!
SNIA’s annual Software Developers’ Conference that September (2007) featured many Sun speakers, but there were no plans to film it: Sun’s preparation, travel, and expense would bear no fruit beyond the (relatively small) conference audience in San Jose. So, with SNIA’s blessing, off I went to film it, with Sun colleague Ray Dunn manning a second camera to cover simultaneous tracks. That resulted in about 12 hours of finished video, which can be seen on Storage Stop.
More importantly, the videoblogging “gospel” has started to spread at Sun. More people have realized that it’s possible to produce useful video, quickly and cheaply (some were already doing it completely independent of me). It doesn’t have to be a big deal, and many Sun offices and individuals already have most or all of the equipment they need. I still do a lot of video work myself directly, but others are now eager to learn. I’ve been sharing my know-how as best I can (and plan to do more, in this blog and in person), and am working with other Sun folks (and others) interested in media to do even more. Let a thousand vloggers bloom!
…but video, though it takes up the bulk of my time, is not the whole story of what I do at Sun. More to come!
Here’s the marketing blurb, I’ll write something more personalized… umm, when things calm down a little?
June 16-17, Chicago: Join us in Chicago when INNOVATING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT meets EXECUTING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS.
Communitelligence presents two full jam-packed conference days on the most essential aspects of employee engagement, HR and social media for internal communications. Conference includes 4 keynotes, 11 case studies, 8 roundtables, 20-plus expert speakers, a networking reception and dinearounds. Plus a $200 travel rebate! One trip, two great conferences, tons of ideas to take back to your office. Full details here.
Note: This was listed in the catalog as “Social Media: If You Liked it, Then You Should Have Put a Digg on It…”, which I wouldn’t have bothered to attend, but when I walked by the room the title had changed to “Social Media: Connecting with Customers”, which was a lot more obviously interesting to me. This was also one of the few panels that didn’t seem to treat large corporations (and those of us who work for them) as the enemy.
Panel:
Chris Bowler – VP Social Media Lead, Razorfish (moderator)
Jordan Corredera -Â Director of Online Marketing, Carnival Cruise Lines
Paula Drum – VP Digital Marketing, H&R Block
Malini Ratnam – Digital Media Mgr, Avenue A/Razorfish/JCPenney
First, each panelist gave an overview on what their company is doing in social media (comments on the companies themselves are partly my own, for the benefit of non-US readers who may not be familiar with these companies):
H&R Block
Well-known in the US as a tax preparation service, H&R Block’s problem is that their business is extremely seasonal, running from January (they kick off their advertising season with the SuperBowl) through Tax Day on April 15th. They are trying to use social media to stay in the public consciousness year-round. The overall theme is customer connections to build lifelong relationships.
Tactics include:
a tax news widget for tax professionals
YouTube contests
online community
tax-themed content related to other times of year, e.g. back to school, company benefits enrollment periods
provide customer service via Twitter and Yahoo Answers
helping tax professionals participate in these programs as well
along with the Social Media Club, have organized/participated in Tweetups in 10 cities
JC Penney
Penney is a very old retail company, and is trying to overcome a rather musty reputation with younger shoppers: “Trying not to be ‘your mother’s store’.” They have chosen to actively participate in women’s online communities.
Their first big project is the extremely funny “doghouse” video (which I had seen long before this conference, though I had probably forgotten that it was done by JC Penney):
At the time it had had 4.1 million views with a 60% completion rate, resulting in 600 (new) Twitter followers and 1100 tweets/retweets. It was initially seeded from a Penney microsite using Facebook Connect. Traffic crashed the server and led to higher fees. Offloaded the traffic to YouTube.
They’ve also set up a Facebook group targeted to women, after finding that segmentation by Penney sub-brands did not work. And they’ve got a customer service Twitter account.
Someone asked what was the ROI on the doghouse video campaign. The answer was that brand awareness, not ROI, was the objective; a hard sell would not have been as successful.
Carnival Cruise Lines
In 2005, Carnival set up a group planning tool built on Community Server. The Cruise Talk forum there grew to 500 posts/day, and was followed by a “scrapblog” and a Twitter account with 1300 followers.
Then came a blog by John Heald, a cruise director, which has become immensely popular, as measured by 100 comments a day [visitor stats were not given].This has grown into a multimedia extravaganza including live chats, videos (quality was an issue), etc. Cruising is inherently social, so this has worked well.
[D here: This is an example of how effective social media marketing can be when tied to a real personality. You can also build community around that person: Heald fans want to talk to each other, there are now even Heald-themed fan cruises.]
Then the moderator asked questions:
How do you set up your organization to participate in social media?
H&R Block: You have to figure out where does this fit. Customer service, communications, marketing, field coordination…? The company isn’t yet on board, we’re still in a skunkworks phase. We’re trading off media dollars with human capital – we have only one person for Twitter, which is a 24/7 job. [But she said later that some resources are being shifted to social media.]
Also, the Federal Trade Commission is changing the legislation about blogging [as relates to professional tax preparers]. We’re still figuring out how to train people, what legal disclosures are needed. Ideally, we’d like tax preparers to be blogging. Education and support are difficult. People need to understand that it’s okay to have your own personality.
JC Penney: Similar situation, we have no dedicated social media team. [Some problem of] brick and mortar stores vs. jcpenney.com. Facebook took off for us when it became a two-way conversation, but that takes dedicated staff.
Carnival: We have an online community manager with two moderators and a social media strategist. Not seeing any particular efficiences from online yet.
How can we measure the results of social media?
Page views, links to transactions.
How does this tie back to brand? How do we make the brand relevant to the new generation?
Word of mouth as brand tracker, but it moves over multiple years.
ROI = Risk of Ignoring
creating spheres of influence, measuring awareness
Traditional ROI isn’t the be-all and end-all – Twitter is free! [except for staff time]
Use Radiant6 to monitor buzz.
Facebook charges $300k for a brand page – Carnival elected not to spend this. Buying a YouTube channel can cost $500k plus media costs.
But you can get started for free.
If you’re going to lead social media [teams], you have to be doing it yourself.
Content creation is expensive.
How might employee culture affect the use of social media in older companies?
An interesting question, but, frustratingly, I didn’t note the answers. Maybe there weren’t any.
D’s Conclusions
A good and useful session, one of the few at SxSWi to address the needs of large companies and their employees.
I was very frustrated that Sun was not speaking on this panel, as we have one hell of a story to tell in this space.
And, even absent Sun’s support infrastructure for blogs, wikis, and video, I could have told them that there are cheaper ways to do this stuff than what Facebook and YouTube are charging for branded offerings.
