Social Media for IT and Software Companies

Community Ebook / October 2012 / www.radian6.com / 1 888 6radian

Social Media for IT and
Software Companies
Gives you the direction and tools you
need to use social media to become
a more agile, engaged, profitable and
productive IT or software company.

Author Leslie Poston / Senior Brand Journalist

Copyright © 2012 Salesforce Radian6

Community Ebook / October 2012
Social Media for IT and Software Companies

Social Media for IT and
Software Companies
Introduction
1. Inward-Facing Social Breaks Down Silos
2. Front-Facing Social Creates Success
3. Social Funding Connects Value to Your Network
4. The Social Software CEO Leads the Charge
5. Social Media Helps Reach Scalability
conclusion

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Introduction
IT companies, software companies and social media seem like they would be a natural fit. In reality,
many IT and software companies avoid social media – unsure what to do with a medium that doesn’t
at first seem ideal for their vertical.

You may be one of those companies, or perhaps you’ve begun your foray into social media but
aren’t seeing the success of a Dell, IBM or Unisys yet. This ebook will help you forge ahead and use
social media to you and your company’s advantage both internally and publicly.

Forward-thinking CEO David K. Williams of manufacturing and inventory software company
Fishbowl called social media a “universal university” where IT and software companies and
customers could continuously learn from each other and create new successes, and he is
absolutely right. Not only is it a two-way avenue for better business and happier customers, it
also works internally to break down silos and make your company more agile in a competitive
economy. Social media also helps you find the connections you need to get your business on the
right foot, including investors and advisors.

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Inward-Facing Social Breaks Down Silos
A recent IBM study discovered
that while only 16% of CEOS
are active in social media right
now, that number is expected
to grow to 57% in 5 years. This
is in large part because CEOs
are coming to the realization
that internal and external social
media make their company
smarter and more agile.
Your CEO and other executives set the tone
for your company and drive adoption of new
technologies and innovation. As CEOs lead
by example, more and more companies will
break down departmental silos within the

“
Lenovo used Salesforce Buddy Media
organization to get more business done better. to get social on Facebook

If you’re not transforming your company into
a social business, plan to be out of business.
-IBM Vice President Sandy Carter

Nokia is a great example of internal social media. They use a number of internal tools to make that
happen, and have had a social media team driving internal training in (and use of) inward facing
social media tools since 2008. They use this inward-facing social media not only to break down silos
in a company of over 125,000 people, but also to direct the effectiveness of Nokia’s brand voice and
make the company’s externally facing social media presences more efficient and effective.

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Nokia uses social media to keep the internal lines of communication open and flowing and to
highlight employees doing good work and interesting things inside and outside the company walls.
Some of their tools include:

• BlogHub
• VideoHub
• Infopedia (wiki)
• employee interviews
• employee feedback mechanisms
• video conferencing
• e-newsletters
• intranet distribution to remote or factory workers via plasma screen
displays on site for those people who are not at a computer all the time
• surveys

Another example of internal social media is salesforce.com itself. With robust internal tools
like the Chatter network, document and information hubs and a fully integrated online intranet,
travel, expense and even HR department, it’s easy for employees and customers to not only find
the information they need quickly but to reach out for help when they need it, which practically
eliminates the concept of the silo in a huge SaaS organization. This is a monumental success
that keeps a large company agile and enables complex educational and networking events like
Dreamforce to be brought to life.

One of the takeaways that resonates from the IBM study: “Companies that outperform their peers
are 30% more likely to identify openness – often characterized by a greater use of social media as a
key enabler of collaboration and innovation – as a key influence on their organization.”

Shareholders are sure to appreciate the effects of inward-facing social. IBM stands out as a social
business inside and out, and that agility and open corporate culture is reflected in their fairly steady
stock value in a down economy.

Dec 31, 2009 - Jan 03,2012
S&P500 +13.36% IBM +13.36%

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Front-Facing Social Creates Success
If inward-facing social tools like Chatter and GitHub are helping IT
and software companies innovate and iterate better, then front-
facing social media tools are helping these companies connect with
investors, advisors, suppliers, customers and engineers in a more
agile and relevant way as well. Front-facing social media is about
more than simple brand awareness for IT and software companies.
It’s about getting things done.

You wouldn’t expect a 138-year-old technology firm like Unisys to embrace social media, but that’s
exactly what they are doing. Beginning with their CEO Ed Coleman, who embraced the idea of
internal social then encouraged Director of Knowledge Strategy & Governance Gloria Burke and
others to develop Inside Unisys, Unisys brought social collaboration into their workplace. This
eventually led to encouragement and use of external social media.

Unisys took this a step beyond, giving employees a jump start on social media literacy with classes
(in fact, making this training mandatory). This empowers their social media strategy on external sites

like LinkedIn or Facebook by giving employees firm guidelines on what to share, how to engage and
how to make that benefit for the company.

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Front-facing social media can not only
increase productivity and brand awareness,
it can have a positive effect on both B2B
and B2C sales, your supply line, finding new
talent, connecting with investors and more.
The key is in the tracking. Internal social
media is easy to measure. The benefits from
internal social media in increased productivity
and employee happiness are fairly evident
and able to be traced out to customer
satisfaction and more sales and customer
retention and increased shareholder value.

Front-facing social media requires a little more
effort to track.

Key to success here will be a solid system of metrics and tracking systems that are attached
to your social profiles, landing pages, content nodules, email marketing and specific groups
and campaigns. Train your employees on social media tools and engagement, as well as
on how to use social media to handle sales, customer service, competitive intelligence, find
suppliers and more. There is no such thing as too much education and support for your
employees in social media. An empowered workforce is an agile workforce.

Use this simple checklist on how to get your employees on track for successful social media use for
your IT or software company.

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Social Funding Connects Value to Your Network
Another avenue where social media can be useful for the IT and
software company is social funding, especially if your company is in
startup or lean-growth mode. In fact, a whole host of social media
sites specifically designed to help fund companies have popped up
to make it easy to connect with funding via investors (AngelList) or
reach new levels of crowd funding (Kickstarter, WeFunder, Startup
Addict, Believers Fund, Quirky).

If you don’t want to join yet another network, never fear: you can leverage the networks you are
already ‘rocking at’ into funding for your startup, and later, a successful exit.

Just ask Laura Fitton, founder of startup oneforty (later acquired by Hubspot). She made the
connections she needed to start her company (finding both her talent and her investors) right online
using her favorite social network, Twitter, then achieved a successful exit via the Hubspot acquisition
— Hubspot’s Mike Volpe and team are another connection she had made and nurtured over Twitter.

The key word in that paragraph is nurture. Gone are the days when you can toss a canned
marketing message or dry business plan out there and hope for strangers to invest in your idea
based on what they are being told on the surface. Now investors (whether they are big Angels, VCs
or the average person investing via crowdfunding) want to get to know you, the power behind the
throne, and research your idea. Investors use your social activity to determine not only your breadth
of knowledge and product offering value proposition but also your level of trust within each network.

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Social networks, in fact, do a great job establishing both knowledge and trust for individuals and
companies. Trust is essential: you’re asking people to invest their hard-earned money into your IT or
software product or service idea.

Another key factor in getting investment for your software or IT company through the content,
knowledge and ideas you have put out in social media lies in answering the key questions investors
are asking. Fred Wilson, venture capitalist behind companies like Twitter and Tumblr, laid out what he

“
looks for on his blog:

I’m asked this question all the time. Is it team?
Is it the idea? Is it product? Is it market?

The answer is that it is all of them and
most importantly it is the way they all come
together in a single company. Why is this the
right team to do this? Can they package their
idea correctly for the market? Is the market
ready for their product?
- Fred Wilson

Practice your message and develop a 30 - 60 second pitch that works for social networks, then
put some meat behind it by engaging online well before you seek funding. You don’t have to reveal
your company secrets ahead of launch. Establish your knowledge, gain trust and build your online
network so it’s ready when you need it. Giving back to the network you build is also key — give back
in the way of advice or other help as much as you can.

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The Social Software CEO Leads the Charge
The leader of your IT or software company
sets the tone for the brand and leads the
company into new territory by example. Some
standout examples of this include Marc Benioff
(Salesforce), Michael Dell (Dell), Marissa Mayer
(Yahoo!), Josh James (Domo), David K Williams
(Fishbowl), and Ed Coleman (Unisys).

Josh James, formerly CEO of Omniture, has a IBM Study on CEOs in Social Media (infographic)
new company now: Domo, a business intelligence
company. The company conducted a live social media experiment in summer 2012, trackable by
the hashtag #domosocial. Domo mandated that every employee get into social media, specifically
requiring the completion of 20 specific tasks using social media for the company over an 8-week
period beginning in May 2012.

The tasks ranged from the somewhat strict (mandating an update to Facebook timeline before
Facebook made it non-negotiable) to the more useful (creating a blog) to the fun (creating music
playlists on social music sites). This touches on some unexplored territory in human resources law
and offers some innovation in marketing and company growth. James considers the experiment
a success on bringing his employees closer together, closer to the customers and in creating a
positive atmosphere internally.

Josh James commented in Social Media Today that instead of asking what he and other CEOs were
risking by having employees active in social media that instead they should be asking, “What are
you risking by NOT having your employees using social media?”

A 2012 study by BRANDfog agrees, stating that 82% of people who seek out companies online
are more likely to trust a company with a CEO active in social media. This has huge implications
for the IT and software CEO — two industries where trust in the product or service is a requirement
for both customer acquisition and retention.

Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!, recently made waves by giving all employees the latest smartphone
of their choice from a list of four top phones right now (Apple, Windows, or one of two Android
models) as well as a data plan to match, and no longer supporting use of Blackberry. Her
reasoning? She thinks it’s important for her team to use the same technology and social systems
their customers are using so the company can grow with the times and understand what the users
want and need.

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This is an innovative step for the new leader of a company currently perceived by those on the
outside looking in to be struggling, and one that makes perfect sense: social platforms can help any
company grow and succeed in a more agile way, and mobile social is the new king.

Social Media Helps Reach Scalability
When it comes to scalability, IT and
software companies may not think
of social media as being helpful.
Companies like Twitter, for example,
might disagree. By creating a quirky
environment around their initial scaling
problems in 2006 and 2007 and a
series of backend programming flubs
(FailWhale, Maintenance Ice Cream
Cone), they allowed their users to feel
like they were part of the process,
helping to avoid most of the negative
feeling that comes from a favorite
service being down while allowing them
to fix mistakes and grow.

Of course, making in-jokes (and
T-shirts) about drinking FailWhale
Pale Ale when a site is down is only
amusing for so long. At some point the
problems need to be solved. Social
media can give companies an assist
with this by using concepts of market
research and crowdsourcing to locate
and track problems.

Download our Agile Market Research with Social Media ebook for pointers on how to use social
media to help you source and fix problems in an agile way.

Get a jump on fixing the problem by using social media, polling, bug reports and user commenting,
spreadsheets and metrics to track responses and get excellent reporting on what is happening for
your customers and user base. Involve the customers in the solution and use social channels to
give ongoing feedback and outreach. You’ll increase the chances of retaining your customer base
through any challenge while you work to improve your product or service or fix an outage.

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Conclusion

2012 BRANDfog CEO Survey

In a world moving to the web and to mobile, where people increasingly rely on social platforms
to connect, grow, explore and learn, it’s essential for the IT and software industry to embrace
social media.

It’s a bit ironic that IT companies struggle to embrace social media in the same sophisticated
and enthusiastic way their customers do. Companies that don’t embrace this new media will
be left behind, simply because they won’t have the tools in place inside the company and out
to be as agile as they need to be to thrive in a fast-paced world. By training and educating
employees and adopting social on all fronts and at all levels of the company, IT and software
companies will succeed.

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Employee Social Media Onboarding
for IT and Software Companies
This simple checklist will help you get your employees on track for successful social media
use for your IT or software company.

Define Social Media Policy with Human Resources and Legal

Add a Social Media Conduct & Guidelines page to your Employee Handbook

Provide or reimburse your employees with the right tools for the job (smartphone, tablet, laptop)

Define which social networks you want to focus on

Create solid guidelines for experimentation on other social networks and platforms

Create guidelines for showing the difference between personal and business social media use

Create employee training materials in social media (webinars, internal sessions, slide decks)

Mandate employee social media training using these materials

Run periodic fire drills to test employee knowledge of social media tools and engagement

Run periodic assessments of how your brand and your employees are doing on social media

Ensure that a copy of metrics and analytics data goes out to all participating employees regularly

Create feedback routes for employees to seek direction and help with social media concerns

Have a mentoring system in place for employees who struggle

Use the buddy system: pair employees strong in business savvy but weak in social savvy with
strongly social employees who need more business acumen

Conduct 3, 6 and 12 month evaluations of your process and how it is tying back to sales and
retention and make any adjustments as needed

Be consistent over time

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Social Media for IT and Software Companies

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