With special thanks Rohit Bhargava who spent the day at the Corporate Social Media Summit. "The event was put on by the team at Useful Social Media - and that indeed was the theme of the day as panelists offered real case studies, answered tough questions and generally demonstrated that there is real hope for large corporate brands to actively use social media to generate real business value in multiple ways." Here are a collection of some of the biggest lessons that brands featured on Day 1 of the event shared in their presentations.

1. Social Media
Big Brand Lessons From The
Corporate Social Media Summit
Special thanks to Rohit Bhargava
and socialmediatoday.com

2. “Altruism has a long tail.” > 1. American Express*
Uniquely qualified to talk about the
impact of altruism, American Express
Open Forum VP of Social Media Laura
Fink went behind the scenes of the
hugely successful “Small Business
Saturday” campaign that American
Express launched back in November of
2010 to create a day where consumers
could get rewarded with a $25 statement
credit for shopping at a small business
location.
According to Fink, the campaign engaged
more than 1.2 million small businesses
around the country and also helped
those businesses to see a 28% sales lift on
the day of the promotion.
Perhaps more importantly, it showed
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that doing something good can generate
a real business impact for customers as
well as for the big brand putting on the
campaign.
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3. “Never underestimate local communities.” > 2. Union Pacific
One of the largest railway companies in the
United States, Union Pacific has also been
around for nearly 150 years. To celebrate
this heritage, Senior Manager of Media
Technology Tim Mcmahan shared a case
study of a crowdsourced competition that
Union Pacific held to get people to vote on
the ideal route for one of their old steam
engines to take on the “Union Pacific Great
Excursion Adventure.”
The voting was split into several rounds,
with some fierce competition from
unexpected locations. Through each round,
Mcmahon shared that the consistently
surprising result was that smaller towns
like Tuscola, IL were routinely outpacing
big metro markets like Chicago.
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The point, he noted, was that sometimes
the most passion for a campaign like this
can come from smaller local communities
for whom winning may be a bigger deal.
Across the campaign, there were nearly
200,000 votes recorded, over 100,000
email addresses captured and the brand
plans to reprise the campaign next year.
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4. “Nobody owns social media.” > 3. Best Buy
In one of the most eye-opening talks of the day,
Gina Debogovich shared some big lessons learned
from her time over the last 3-4 years building up
the Best Buy customer service and social care
center to what is now called the “Twelp Force.
As a former customer care person herself, she
talked about how Best Buy uses the overarching
mission of “creating meaningful communications
in the virtual world” to guide all of their efforts.
They have an inner circle of about 26 team
members dedicated to social media at their team,
and then an extended 3000 employees who are
actively encouraged to use social media and
offered lots of different forms of training on how
to do it. Her team is a resource that individual
stores can use for advice on such tasks as how to
effectively use Facebook specifically for their
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store.
In addition, their team is the only customer care
team in the world who currently has their own
production studio for creating content such as
their Best Buy Unboxing feature.
In one case, Gina shared the unheard of stat of
how they managed to reduce the volume of one
“call driver” (customer service lingo for a top
reason that people call a contact center) by 50%
simply by producing a video to answer that
question.
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5. "Negative experiences are our biggest opportunity." > 4. Samsung
Samsung is a brand that has made lots of strides
recently in integrating social media into their
customer service, and has been very active in
joining conversations about their brand online.
One of the leaders of this, Jessica Kalbarczyk (@
samsungjessica) shared her insights about how
her small team of four colleagues manages to
engage people online about Samsung, and help
solve their problems.
For Jessica, coming from a marketing and PR role
into one more focused on customer service was a
fulfilling role because every day she manages to
address real problems and change consumers
experiences one by one.
Anyone in a marketing role who has suffered
through never ending meetings about social
media without a real vision or tangible outcome
will easily be able to imagine how nice a feeling it
much be to actually solve real problems and the
sense of accomplishment that would offer on a
daily basis.
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As part of that, she shared a point of view which is
common among customer service pros ... that
they would much rather find negativity and have a
chance to fix it and change that consumer's
perception. Marketers, on the other hand, tend to
run scared in the opposite direction from any
negativity. There is clearly a lesson here about the
necessity of integrating marketing and customer
service more closely.
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6. “Forget ROI and focus more broadly on business value.” > 5. Dell
At the top of most analyst’s lists of brands that
have managed to integrate social media into their
operations in a real and tangible way would likely
be computer maker Dell.
During his talk, Richard Binhammer from Dell
shared a historical perspective of how social
media became integrated into the organization,
and one of the most powerful points in his
presentation was where he shared the six
business areas which have fully embraced social
media for different business reasons – marketing,
product development, sales, online presence,
customer service and communications.
While other brands focus on one of these at a
time, Dell has reached a point where they can
“inhale and exhale at the same time” as Richard
shared in his talk.
Ultimately, his biggest point is that “ROI” is such
a restricting term when it comes to describing
what social media can offer and there is a much
stronger way to describe the real value behind it
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that we need to think about including in more of
our discussions.
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7. “Have fun and be human.” > 6. Southwest
Fun and airline are not two words that anyone
would typically use in the same sentence, yet
Social Media Manager from Southwest Airlines
Alice Wilson devoted a good part of her talk about
how Southwest creates a more human brand by
using an irreverant voice.
The questions that keep many other large brands
up at night in terms of making sure they have
backup for employees who are running social
media channels, or mapping everything back to
some specific campaign or column on a
spreadsheet don’t seem to matter as much for
Southwest.
They have guiding principles around their social
voice, yet Alice shares that most people who
speak out for the brand “just get the hang of it.”
Without that formalized training or overly
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bureaucratic approach to managing every aspect
of Southwest, the brand succeeds because they
have such a strong culture that people start to
take it on as their own from day one and this
translates into social media.
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8. “Real time listening pays off.” > 7. Kodak
Kodak is a brand that has won a lot of respect for
how forward thinking they have been in moving
into social media over the past several years, even
publishing a guidebook which was available for
the attendees on how to use social media and
what they had learned. In his talk Tom Hoen, the
Kodak Director of Interactive Marketing, shared a
number of examples demonstrating the power of
listening.
In one example, the brand awoke to a barrage of
negativity from fans of a Nickelodeon TV show
called Degrassi because there was a rumor that
the brand had pulled all their advertising due to
the show’s sometimes adult themes.
Fairly rapidly, they were able to use social media
to diffuse the rumor (it was actually just a natural
pause in flighting for their ads) and engage those
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angry voices – leading one person to share on
Twitter “Now I feel bad. I told the Kodak people
to eff themselves sideways, and they sent me a
tweet being all nice.”
Aside from the newly found good feelings,
Degrassi and Nickelodeon offered up 2 free spots
to Kodak during their season premiere. Not a bad
ROI for engaging a few irate teens.
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9. “Real time listening pays off.” > 8. Pepsi
The last presentation of the day came from Josh
Karpf, who focuses on an area that more brands
should consider having as part of their marketing
efforts ... digital research and development.
His group runs many forward thinking
experiments on how to use social media to engage
consumers, and he shared some real examples
and hard data from a few of their efforts around
trying to offer couponing as a layer on top of
geolocation and encouraging people to check in.
For one campaign with Hess convenience stores,
they found that using a Foursquare promotion in
a particular location offered a 47% boost in
volume of purchase over previous weeks where
the campaign was not running - a great result for
the retailer.
On the Pepsi side, they interesting learned that
coupon redemptions were much higher when
offered to people as a reward for some type of
behaviour, which seems to offer the logical
conclusion that people are more likely to follow
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through a claim the discount or product from a
coupon if they feel they had to "earn" that coupon
in some way such as by checking into the gym for
10 days in a month.
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