Enterprise Social Media

How to Start a Game-Changing Dialogue with Consumers

Posted on 23. Jun, 2009 by Michael Brito in Community Management, Social Media

Last week, I was invited to speak at the Facebook Marketing Breakfast (hosted at the Razorfish offices in SF). Thanks for the invite Justin. The turn out was amazing; and from what I understand, the waiting list was super long (sorry to my friends that I couldn’t get in). But what can you expect when you have such fantastic speakers like Jeremiah Owyang show up at an event like this to present Forrester’s latest report, The Future of the Social Web.

Here is my presentation, followed by some commentary:

Title Slide:

Before we start talking about engaging with consumers online, I think it’s imperative that we first start referring to them as people and not consumers, target audiences, or segments.

From my experience in working at Yahoo! and now Intel, is that when it comes to building relationships online, people relate to other people more so than a logo or brand.
Once we can accomplish this organizationally, we can then be better equipped to be more human and directly engage with people.

So, I hope you don’t mind, but I changed the title of today’s discussion to, “how to start game changing dialogue with people”

Slide 1:

How to Start a Game-Changing Dialogue with Consumers people

Slide 2:

There are few different ways to engage with consumers on Facebook. There is a branded fan page; a Facebook application; and lastly, through personal profiles (a community manager). And, when I refer to a personal profile, what I mean is a community manager or an employee who uses his/her personal profile to drive brand engagement within their own micro communities.

Slide 3:

We know through some very specific research that a high percentage of our audience join and use social networks here in the US. We also know how they behave in the social web. So, not only is it important for us to engage in direct dialogue with consumers, but we can also build in those social capabilities that our consumers are familiar with.

One of the key fundamentals in any social media engagement is authenticity. But, more importantly, a brand or an employee representing the brand needs to be believable. And in order to be believable, you have to spend time in a community and listen, observe and fundamentally understand the dynamics of that community. Once you foster trust and begin that relationship building process – you, the BRAND become believable. So when I say that this Netbook is awesome and fits my mobile lifestyle, people will actually believe me and maybe even buy one.

The topic of personal profiles versus branded profiles comes up a lot at Intel, especially in reference to twitter, and personally I think there is a strong need for both. At Intel we cannot legally tell someone to talk about Intel within their communities. If they do, of course disclosure is important. We have a comprehensive training program where we equip our employees with tools they need to engage online.

Slide 4:

Mass Animation was one of two programs we had to support the launch of the Core i7 processor, which is a desktop processor for content creators (multimedia, film animation, rich media). It was the first ever collaborative effort to utilize Facebook and its community to create an animated film. Basically, the way it worked was that we provided the community with a storyline and 3D character assets. The community downloaded the assets; downloaded Maya software and animated a 5 second clip. Then, they upload their clip and the community votes on the best clip.

The dialogue – which is still happening today – happened on the Mass Animation fan page; and it also spread to twitter and even our Intel blogs.

Slide 5:

Present these metrics to senior management and they will be pleased with the results. What they won’t see are the rich conversations that are still happening today; and the relationships that have blossomed from this program.

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