Social Equity

From blogs to Twitter to Facebook, companies and firms are leveraging the power of social networking as a business tool

By Gilles Lajoie
Illustration: Gérard Dubois

Fergie Devins’ fingers were flying over his keyboard at the Toronto office of Molson Coors. His brows were knit and his eyes were scanning, up and down, back and forth. He was obviously looking for something. “Ah, there it is. November 10, 2007,” the 51-year-old chief public affairs officer said with a smile.

As it turns out, November 10 was the day Devins took Molson Coors onto Twitter, the social media microblog that has exploded in popularity in Canada over the past year. And the company has been successfully tweeting ever since.

In November 2008, only about 200,000 people, including a handful of companies such as Molson, were using the service introduced in September 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone. A year later, 3.2 million unique visitors in Canada had accessed the Twitter site, increasing traffic by 1,337%, according to the latest data from ComScore MediaMetrix Canada, the barometer of the country’s Internet industry. Unique visitors are users who visit a site at least once a month. Microbloggers include business users from accounting firms such as Deloitte, Grant Thornton, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers as well as organizations such as CCM, Telus, Workopolis and Cirque du Soleil.

A digital tidal wave
No organization can entirely escape the tsunami of social media. A study released last December by the head office of Forrester Consulting in Cambridge, Mass., notes that Canadians are the most active social networkers in the industrialized world. And ComScore MediaMetrix Canada reports that by November 2009, 79.6% of Canada’s 24.6 million web surfers had conversed on sites such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Sophie Beauchemin has taken note. As executive director and social media expert with IBM Canada in Montreal, she’s naturally connected. “Employees today want to work from anywhere, anytime, via any system,” she says.

The leader on the crest of the wave is Facebook (see “The pillars of social media” below and “Facebook is not just for kids” on p. 27). Though only six years old, the site currently monopolizes the social media sphere. It attracts more than 350 million unique visitors each month in North America, including 19.4 million in Canada. In December, for the first time in the short history of the web, it even toppled Google as the most popular site in the US.

It’s interesting to note that Facebook’s strongest audience growth last year was among adults aged 35 to 49. Forrester Consulting classifies visitors under six personality types: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives.

The pioneers
Molson Coors has long understood that social networking leads the way to a potential gold mine of information. For nearly two years, Devins and his three co-workers on the company’s Social Media Influence Team have been closely monitoring what is being said about the brewery on the web. And the company even had a series of dispatches on YouTube from the February 2010 Olympics in Vancouver — a way of associating Molson with the spirit of the Olympics.

As Devins points out, it is conversation that is fuelling the spectacular growth of social media. And the blog remains one of the major launching pads into this interactive universe. Last year, Blogger and WordPress, the two main freeware tools for creating blogs, saw their audiences grow by 12% and 27%, respectively.

Although the trend is still in its infancy in Canada, more and more companies are using blogs. At KPMG Canada, for example, Toronto-based CEO and senior partner Bill Thomas has been the most connected user in his firm since he launched an in-house blog last year. And now it is the most popular social networking tool at the firm, says Margot Brown, director of knowledge services.

Drummond House Plans of Drummondville, Que., an architectural firm specializing in the residential market, has had a blog since 2006. And the company’s CEO, Yves Carignan, is one of its bloggers, along with four of his co-workers. “It happened by accident,” he says. “We did it because we wanted to optimize our presence on Google.”

Vancouver-based Vancity credit union also came out a winner with its blogging experiment in 2006. The initiative started with an ad campaign based on the message that you can change everything if you change your bank. One ad, for example, showed an image of a person in a boat looking at mountains in the distance. The tagline: “Amazing what changing your credit card can do.”

Given that Vancity prides itself on its environmental and community focus, it decided to take the idea of change one step further. Explains William Azaroff, Vancity’s director of web engagement and banking: “We thought, why not create a microsite where people can talk about changes within our society that are central to our values?” The site, www.changeeverything.ca, has since become a key way for Vancity to engage the community online.  

At IBM, social media are seen mainly as tools for encouraging interaction among the company’s 350,000-plus employees worldwide. In-house creations include the Blue Pages, a directory comparable to the Yellow Pages or White Pages, where employees can look up co-workers and find out more about their interests and areas of expertise.

The multinational also banks on social media to enhance its visibility. It has more than 75,000 bloggers across all divisions worldwide. “Our employees are strongly encouraged to blog,” says Beauchemin.

There’s no prescribed approach for using social media. But experts agree on one thing: there’s no point in jumping on every tool or site that comes across your screen. “We still haven’t decided on the best way to embrace the trend because we know we will have to feed the beast when we launch a social network,” says Ève Laurier, vice-president, strategic relations, at RSM Richter Chamberland in Montreal. Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image, a Montreal company specializing in interactive communications, has a similar take. “The first thing you need to do is to determine the why, not the what,” says Joel, the author of Six Pixels of Separation.

Following an online survey of 5,886 Canadians conducted in the third quarter of 2009, Forrester Consulting drafted a marketing plan called POST (people, objectives, strategy and technology). The idea was to help companies take advantage of business opportunities in social networking environments. As Forrester senior analyst Nate Elliott points out in his report on the survey, Canadians would rather comment on content than create it. (Elliott is the author of Canadian Social Technographics Revealed — How Marketers Can Leverage Canadians’ Love of Social Technologies.)

Molson Coors tried twice before it got http://blog.molson.com up and running the way it wanted. “At first, we were trying to tell our story, but we weren’t telling it in conversation form,” says Devins. “Our posts looked more like newspaper articles. It’s crucial to have conversations on social networks.” Now the Molson blog provides links to its latest Tweets as well as posts on everything from mentoring programs to contests.

Danger ahead?
Many companies think twice before getting into blogging, for fear their employees or others will post something controversial that could damage the organization’s reputation or trigger an avalanche of complaints. “Nine times out of 10, when you intervene in a negative circumstance, you manage to turn it into a positive outcome,” Devins says.

Like all IBM employees, bloggers must agree to adhere to the company’s code of conduct. Special guidelines also apply to social media, which IBM declined to disclose.

Vancity has good reason to be concerned about fault-finding bloggers. Because its site encourages change, particularly within the local community, advocacy groups and militants can sometimes post controversial comments to promote their cause. “Obviously, you have to be prepared for the worst-case scenarios,” Azaroff says. “We’ve put measures in place on the site, but I always say, ‘Be a concierge, not a security guard.’”

Joel doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. To prove his point, he mentions Texas-based Bazaarvoice (www.bazaarvoice.com), which analyzed about 10 billion reviews of different sites. “You know what the average rating was out of five? It was 4.3,” he says. “Those who are afraid can say whatever they want — there’s nothing that can stop someone from launching an online rating system for accountants. So you’d better be on these networks to know what’s being said about you.”

“There’s always been talk about corporate brands,” Devins says. “It’s just that now, we can view these discussions online. They’re like a ringing telephone. You can either let it ring or you can answer it.”

Sometimes it can be dangerous not to answer. Take United Airlines’ experience with Halifax band Sons of Maxwell. After one of the band’s guitars was damaged on a United flight in March 2008, it sought revenge online by posting the first of a series of three songs entitled United Breaks Guitars. The song was an overnight hit on the web. As of March, the song had garnered more than 8.2 million YouTube hits and reached 100 million people through traditional media such as TV, radio and print. The song also drew about 24,000 comments, most of them critical of the airline. As the band’s Dave Carroll says, “It was one of the first times, if not the first time, that a song/video went viral on the Internet while at the same time becoming a worldwide mainstream media news story.” In September 2009, two months after the song went viral, United apologized. It has since described the situation as a unique learning experience.

Even though social networking is the marketing flavour of the month, companies have not yet assigned many resources to the area. “We have just one employee who is responsible for keeping up on developments in social media,” says Laurier.

Similarly, Drummond House Plans employs two full-time people for the job, and Molson’s Influence of Social Media Team has only four members. And although Vancity has a web team that handles the credit union’s website and Intranet, it has just onepart-time employee who is in charge of social media as well as www.changeeverything.ca. “You’ll burn out if you try to be everywhere at once,” says Azaroff. “That’s why we’re not on Twitter yet. We’ve got limited resources and we don’t want to spread ourselves too thin.”

There are many similarities between social networks and the early days of the Internet in business. Both saw phenomenal growth at the outset, and organizations were happy to let their techies handle the trends. Few senior executives paid much attention; in fact, they were highly skeptical about the return on investment.

Return on influence or ROI
At the moment, there is no generally accepted method for measuring the return on investment — or what David Alston calls “return on influence” — of social media. Alston is marketing vice-president at Radian6, a Fredericton-based manufacturer of listening platforms for social networks that serves major clients such as Dell, GE, Kodak, Comcast and Microsoft. Nevertheless, IBM says chat tools and webinars allowed it to save an estimated $97 million in travel expenses in 2008. “We are able to measure the impact,” says Beauchemin.

Similarly, Katheline Jean-Pierre, blogger and senior manager, online marketing, with Deloitte Canada, pointed out last November at a luncheon in Montreal for marketing and communication professionals that the firm had seen a 342% increase in visibility via press articles and a 64% rise in attendance at its private presentations, as well as a 12,000% increase in organic traffic via Google.

Carignan is happy with the effort he has put into Drummond House Plans’ social networking presence. According to in-house statistics, the company’s blog has raised traffic on the site by 13%. But Carignan’s biggest source of pride is the fact that the blog has boosted online sales by 25% in two years — in a shrinking market. “If the content on your blog is truthful and authentic, people tend to like it,” he says.

Meanwhile, Vancity’s microsite boasts 5,000 signups and about 7,500 unique visitors each month. While these statistics are no match for Facebook’s, the company is still satisfied. “We didn’t launch the site to get a return on our investment,” says Azaroff. “We use it mainly to gain leverage with community organizations.”

Devins, for his part, enjoys doing the math of social networking. He likes to think in terms of viral marketing — a way of getting free marketing and advertising by letting users spread the word.

Social networks have a viral impact, Devins says, that’s comparable to word of mouth in the digital world. “My Twitter account now has close to 5,000 followers,” he says. “According to Twinfluence, a tool that measures viral impact, these followers reach 12 million people one way or another. If each of those people drinks an average of five beers a week, you can see why we’re interested.”

Absolutely.

Gilles Lajoie is a Montreal-based consultant in strategy, business and content development on the web. He founded www.lapresseaffaires.com, a French-language financial news site