This is part 4 in a series of posts from Dells B2B Social Media Huddle held on 9th December 2009 at Dell’s UK Headquarters. For previous posts, read Part 3 – The Business Case, Part 2 – Community Matters and Part 1 – Social Media Trends.
Social Media Case Studies
The second half of the day consisted of various breakouts delivering case studies in social media. Some great companies presented but I could only sit in on a couple and not all slides have been shared.
Salesforce.com – Jamie Grenney
Jamie’s was one of the session’s I sat in on. He gave a great presentation about how Salesforce.com has approached social media. Here are some soundbites captured on the day:
“To buy the word ‘Cloud Computing’ on Google [Adwords] costs $14 which is expensive. Creating a cloud computing video and publishing it on YouTube shows higher potential RoI”
YouTube is seen as the most beneficial social media channel for Salesforce.com. Why? Because the videos have the potential to go viral. Twitter activity accounts for less than 1% of YouTube views. But most interesting is seeing YouTube become more valuable than what has now become traditional Internet advertising.
“Having a ‘Contact us’ button at the end of a video is more effective than having a form to fill out at the start.”
Salesforce.com analysed site statistics and found that making someone fill out a form was impacting the likelihood of viewing the video. It has proven far more effective to have an easily accessible ‘Contact us’ button that people can choose to click at the end of the video. Again, as has been seen in other posts, this approach is sales driven rather than cold call marketing.
“Write about what you know. If you’re not a product manager, don’t write as though you are”
Salesforce.com have put a lot of effort into staff training and have clear guidelines for what to do. This includes identifying yourself as a Salesforce.com employee. Social media guidelines are available publicly on their web site. They are even concerned that customers should publicly disclose they are customers when talking about Salesforce.com
“We are still quite new to this – only have 7,000 followers across all channels.”
A healthy reminder that social media is still in its infancy for most organisations. And again back to previous posts in this series – think big, act fast, start small. The financial investment should be tiny. The time investment is another matter entirely…
LinkedIn – Henry Clifford Jones
No slides this time unfortunately and I’m not sure if the case study is public so I won’t name the client referenced.
LinkedIn analysed their membership database for a pharmaceutical company and provided some interesting statistics:
“On LinkedIn, there are approx 3.7 million people globally in the healthcare industry. 6,000 groups about healthcare. Profiling down to job roles, there are 121,000 doctors…”
How useful is that data? At the very least, people are talking healthcare. If healthcare is your business, do you join in or ignore it? How easy is it to build a target audience to evaluate a new product? Could a group on LinkedIn make it easier?
Whilst the potential is there, there are challenges. When Henry asked us all what we thought of groups, there was unanimous animosity and comments about groups being barely more than a badge on your profile, that the group itself is full of spam dominated by job adverts. Seems this hasn’t gone unnoticed and LinkedIn have already released a newer interface and have some interesting improvements in the pipeline.
Dell – Richard Binhammer
Missed Richard’s session but from his contributions during the roundtable and closing, I can guess it was a pretty good session and the slides have been shared.
Coming next: Part 5 – Roundtable discussion and closing thoughts
References:
- Salesforce.com presentation on Slideshare
- Salesforce.com Social Media Guidelines (bottom right of the page)
- Jamie Grenney on Twitter
- Dell presentation on Slideshare
- Richard Binhammer on Twitter
Joining Dots 