The document discusses BT Ireland's social media strategy and how they are using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to engage customers, gain exposure and credibility, and generate leads. It provides examples of how social media can amplify customer issues and discusses BT Ireland's approach of listening, engaging and committing to a social media strategy. Specific tactics mentioned include having representatives monitor forums to respond to customer issues, using Twitter for customer service during outages, sharing thought leadership content on YouTube and using LinkedIn to empower experts within the company.

1. Managing the Social Media MixSocial networking and BT Ireland BT Business Ireland Larry Taylor

2. Social Media and BT Bravery Opportunity Educate and reach customers and staff Recognise the impact of the social cascade How we’re doing it Listen, Engage and commit a strategy What next?

3. Step 1: Be Brave Only slightly edited Dilbert “ Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. ” ~Winston Churchill

6. What about a Blog? Not yet Dilbert licensed for use from www.thedilbertstore.com. Licence

7. What are we trying to achieve? Exposure The only 24/7 presence we have for BT Ireland. The fastest growing and most influential medium for influencing customers. Measured by ranking, views and viewers. Credibility Promoting the views of subject matter experts, thought leaders and BT innovation. Measured by response rate, referencing, re-posting, customer engagement Customer satisfaction Answering customer issues, tracking complaints, adding value to services. Measured by reduction in calls, complaints and increase in issue resolution Customer feedback Identifying customer recommendations for improvement. Measured by customer comments and indicates trust Lead generation Since the re-launch of www.btireland.com inbound customer queries have multiplied by a factor of 4. The cumulative impact of the above will generate increased leads and customer conversations

8. New Citizens – Generation Y Born between 1978-1995 Grew up in the 1990s and 2000s. 97% own a computer 97% have downloaded music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing 94% own a cell phone 76% use instant messaging and social networking sites 75% of college students have a facebook profile and most of them check it daily. 49% regularly download music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing 34% use websites as their primary source of news 28% author a blog and 44% read blogs 15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week 8% have confessed to having an online gaming addiction at some point in their life Gen Y entering the workforce now

9. Morning Ireland 14th Sept 2010 8:45am Brian Cowen’s radio interview is broadcast 8:55am Politics.ie members begin posting. 3 days later, 7 separate discussions, with up to 5,000 views each 9:16am Simon Coveney Tweets. Re-tweeted 73 times in 2 days 9:46am www.boards.ie begins Cowen discussions. >1,000 posts, viewed over 55,000 times in 2 days. Afternoon: Parody songs and video posted on Youtube. 150,000 views in 2 days. 270,000 views in 2 weeks 15 hours following the interview, 457 press articles were published in 26 countries. Brian Cowen appears on the Six o’clock news, on the 15th. 33 hours between radio interview and 6-1 News

10. Interview Message boards Tweets Minutes Video distribution Taoiseach on 6-1 news Social media cascade Seconds Hours 1 Day 2 Days Number of views

11. Social media cascade

12. Taking the plunge – customer service Found the most damaging and provocative threads Made contact and identified in your username. First name terms when responding to messages. I.e. I said "Thanks for your comments, I am working on the issue now and will revert tomorrow. Regards, Larry“ Even if the issue cannot be resolved immediately, comment on what steps are being taken to remedy the issue in general Take the issue off-line as a call back, or email. Start a private thread if necessary, to capture customer details.

13. Dabs and boards.ie “It's refreshing to see a representative on (boards.ie) - it certainly gives the impression that our concerns are being heard.” – Swampthing “Good to see a representative on here, it's very reassuring. I'll be using dabs again in the future“ – Biro “I’d like to thank Larry for taking the time to post here. it really does show up Dabs in a better light than it was seen previously in my opinion. Bought a Wacomgfx tablet recently off Dabs as a result.:)” – Virgil “Nice to see some feedback from a dabs employee here. I've got a new build project coming up so I think I'll give Dabs.ie another go and see how it works this time. “ – LoLth (Moderator) Agree, it's great to see a bit of representation. “ Terrafirmer (Mod) “I read the boards dabs threads so was wary of the time spent on the security checking but I did the verified by visa, payed by paypal and had no checks to contend with. It was shipped via UPS from the UK and I had it within a couple of days, nothing but praise for them from me. “ - ekevosu “I went ahead with the dabs.ie order, in fact I made three separate orders. ..each order went through smoothly and they have been amazing. I have no qualms about giving them my highest recommendation!” - Ulic

14. YouTube Broadcast: The new corporate dial tone? BT Thought leadership: Graham Sutherland CEO BT Ireland Colm O'Neill MD BT Ireland Young Scientist Exhibition Customers Scan: Check for mood and trends. Also possible for 1 customer to wreak huge damage in a creative way "United breaks guitars" was a song recorded and posted to draw attention to a single customer issue. The negative PR was absorbed by 4 million viewers in a few months. Resulted in a 10% drop in share price, or $180M

16. As before, monitor disruptive sites

17. Join and contribute, if productive

19. Why would anyone ‘follow’ BT? Personal invitation. Take 100 BT staff on LinkedIn, each with ~100 connections, generates a base community. Hosting events and promoting thought leadership content, like securty guru - Bruce Schneier. Sharing cool stuff, finding interesting references, newsworthy content, aggregating sector-based knowledge. Offering free help, advice, knowledge-sharing calls, webinars, consultancy and project teams Collaborate with individuals/Businesses to generate new opportunity

20. LinkedIn: Empowering a small team of experts Schedule timetable of activity for small group of channels/groups Build archive of material from past and present (to use as posts and blogs) Listen and identify opportunities for engagement Alert experts and engage them strategically

21. Next Steps 1. Identify Blogs and communities of interest - E.g. For cloud computing Ireland All cloud groups Ireland LinkedIn groups Ireland

22. /continued Join and contribute to discussion threads - Sales specialists, product managers and account managers. Get some training Build confidence and content on intranet Use expertise from connected staff: Facebook users

23. Internal social networking Profile Share Blog

24. Case study – BT Security Liaising with BT Security experts internally Define measures to make it worthwhile for sceptics Analyse sample document to provide web-standard keywords Produce one search term for use in identifying target conversations. Example of Google search for BT Product Includes reasons for traffic peaks and troughs

25. Case study – expertise request 1. Post subject expertise - slides 2. Promote events 3. Get invitations to speak And requests for information

26. In summary: Be Brave Try it out Find the right people Build on what’s good Choose one thing: One event, one sector, one target 4. Identify what you want: Visitors, calls, sales? Choose a social network Make (small) mistakes

27. Thank you Suggested read: ‘The New Handshake: Sales meets Social Media’ Authors: Curtis and Giamanco Larry Taylor, Online Marketing, BT larry.taylor@bt.com Twitter.com/btinireland http://ie.linkedin.com/in/larrytaylordigital