Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Last week saw the conclusion to the third successful series of ‘Social Media Week’ in London which has gone from strength to strength since its inauguration in February, 2009 in the US. Chinwag played host to one of the last seminars of the week, The Firewall: The Social Business Revolution supported by Nokia on February 17^th at the Design Council in Covent Garden. The session moved at a swift pace as we heard from: Adrian Cockle, Head of Online, WWF UK; Euan Semple, Leading Consultant on Social Business; Anirban Saha, Global Head of Social Innovation and Intelligence, Nokia; Simon Morris, Director of EMEA Marketing, Adobe, Chaired by Will McInnes Managing Director, Nixon McInnes.

The central discussion point was how social businesses should look at the way people interact with digital experiences and how they can apply any insight gained to a variety of business processes.

In order to be a ‘social business’ social tools are required to help build your business and can help a huge organisation feel like a startup by bringing people together for example:

• The WWF uses an Intranet called Arena to help support peer to peer communication. Key features:
  • Provides survey applications to gauge opinions before and after their internal lunchtime debates.
  • Showcases thumbnail galleries, journey sharing tools, discussion forums
  • Includes a Google map highlighting 180 of their projects around the world so that staff can see the breadth of their work.

• Adobe Vibe is an internal made micoblog which allows users to post daily updates, tweets and issues with no restrictions. Key features:
  • Create groups and access the service on a mobile device.
  • Created to help employees become evangelists for the business and to reflect on daily learnings as well as to share relevant findings.
  • Encourages teams to give themselves credit for their successes by featuring their best customers.
  • Every team member can share their status via Vibe, without having to send weekly e-mail reports.

• Anirban Saha from Nokia introduced their recently launched ‘social visualizer’ multi- screen installation called Agora. Key benefits:
  • He noted that as Nokia has more than 100,000 employees and cover over 150 markets, they needed to encourage employees to take an interest in monitoring what people are saying about them as a business
  • Tells them how customers use their products and how the business is responding and innovating accordingly.
  • helps employees to be immersed in the customer experience

As the panel discussion analysed wider industry and business challenges it was highlighted that the world of work has become so professionalised that we’ve forgotten how to communicate. As such there needs to be a push towards encouraging social media literacy and training to help professionals become a customer service agent and a spokesperson for their business. Ultimately, in order to take part in the social business revolution, businesses everywhere must look to provide individuals with the power to connect, innovate, enable, empower and listen!