Here’s part 2 of my morning keynote at this week’s SMB @marketplace event, The Road Less Travelled: Our social media journey.

Social media affords you an online dialogue with customers that provides a special insight to their needs. Conversations become a highly accurate “compass” that helps guide product development, sales, service and marketing. It affords opportunities to query an engaged audience prior to solutions development. And finally, it surfaces negative feedback to a place where immediate action can be taken to improve the customer experience.

To get there, our strategy is based on three activities: listening, engaging and measuring.

• We listen by monitoring key words, tracking important conversations and identifying potential trends and/or influencers.  Listening also allows us to understand what our competitors are doing in a particular space and enhance our capabilities if required.
  

• We engage with our customers. Listening has the added benefit of identifying conversations that we want to be a part of – everything from support requests or business challenges. As we seek to engage our customers in the social space, we’re able to enter into dialogue in a purposeful way.
  

• We measure our progress. You won’t know if you’re successful if you haven’t set a target to measure your success against. For us, success is measured by maintaining a vibrant and healthy social community and the measuring of things like our share of voice and traffic to our blog.
  
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One more benefit: By listening and then engaging, we’re able to participate in conversations that could otherwise negatively reflect on our brand.

Social media is truly built through grass roots effort and a large telecommunications company is no different in that regard.  If you build it, they won’t necessarily come – we launched, tweaked our efforts and continued down the path of trial and error, but without measuring our success, we wouldn’t know if we’ve made any progress and how we need to modify.  From March 2010 to March 2011, we increased our readership by almost 2000%, which is remarkable.

We’ve got a long way to go on this journey, but we’ve had good external validation that tells us our strategy is sound and we’re on the right track.

Where do you start?

Start your plan by listening: Start slowly by listening. Pick a few spots where you know your customers are and listen to what they say, listen to what your competitors are doing, start to formulate your social media strategy that works best for your business; Identify keywords related to your business and competitors and listen to conversations, use monitoring tools – Google alerts, RSS feeds, Twitter Search.

Narrow your focus: don’t try to boil the ocean. Pick one or two aspects that pertain to your business where you’d like to be seen as an expert, and connect your social media plans with what you heard by listening. People often forget that with social media, common marketing practices apply. Identify who your customers are and how they use social media, marry them with your objectives and strategy, and then decide what tools are most appropriate.

Plan the steps you want to take. Look for ways to participate in conversations that will help you grow your community.

Remember the rules of collaboration and respect for your community. Don’t be afraid to try out social media – try, learn and retry.  Mistakes happen. Learn from them and move on. Don’t shy away from the opportunity social media affords you to demonstrate your company values, and the people behind your brand or business that makes your company unique, personable, social.

Nancy Kay is the director of web and social media for TELUS business. 

www.TELUStalksbusiness.com

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This past year, I made the leap into a telework environment. I manage a team of people across Canada who also telework. They work from home, or wherever they’re most productive. The key here is that they don’t work from a physical office location.

This is the third in a series of articles that talk to the experiences of managing a team in a virtual world.

With a geographically dispersed team comes the ability to tap into the very best of talent across Canada. So when I recruit to fill new roles, I have the flexibility of looking for talented minds who fit well within our team culture. When you add to the mix that my team works in the very cool world of web and social media, and that we telework, a new opportunity can be very enticing.

But as an employee and a shareholder, I also have a fiscal responsibility. I can’t be flying across Canada interviewing potential applicants. So how to resolve the dilemma? Get the very best candidate for the job, regardless of location, but limit my travel.

This year, for the very first time, I went through a hiring process in which  I met candidates face-to-face, just not in the same room, or the same city for that matter. I was meeting them using videoconferencing.

I have to admit, I was skeptical at first. As a hiring manager, I know there are certain things that you look for during an interview. And I just wasn’t sure that I was going to get the right experience from videoconferencing. Well, I was wrong.

I got the experience and more. The trade-off was that I didn’t get the hand-shake at the beginning and the end of the session. But then again, neither did my candidates.

There were a surprising number of pluses using videoconferencing:

• We got to hear, see and watch each other, even though we were in separate cities
  
  
• I got to bring my list of candidates down to a short list with no travel costs
  
  
• I saved an incredible amount of time in the hiring process because I was able to set up sequential meetings in the same meeting room (and the candidates never ran into each other).
  
  

I know there’s no substitute for the real thing. But this comes in a really close second. And it’s as easy as turning on your living room TV.

Nancy Kay leads the web and social media team for Business Solutions at TELUS. Nancy has been leading teams of marketing and web professionals for the last 15 years and has extensive experience in marketing, in both traditional and digital mediums.

Have a story to share about how technology has changed the way you work? Join the conversation.

This past year, I made the leap into a telework environment. I manage a team of people across Canada who also telework. They work from home, or wherever they’re able to be the most productive. A single established physical office location is a thing of the past for all of us.

To make the leap, I found I had to take my comfortable office routine that I’ve grown so accustomed to over the last 20 years and toss it out the window. I've now made a complete transition to managing a team in a virtual world.

The list of what I don’t miss about working at the office is just about as long as what I do. I don’t miss the morning rush hour commute. Getting into my car and crawling along at 15 km an hour every morning was no fun. Not to mention the associated stress that goes along with that kind of commute.

Even when I was trying to be environmentally friendly by switching from automobile to subway, I still had to deal with the stress of hundreds of other people standing on the subway platform with me. You’d get caught in that never-ending sea of people trying to cram their way into subway cars, nudging and squirming around to get that extra inch so the train car door can close.

Reclaiming commute time

Now I spend my commute time as my quiet time first thing in the morning. I go through outstanding emails and organize my day. It’s amazing what a productivity difference this extra time savings can make.

I do miss the contact with people. Voices over the phone from one day to the next just don’t make up for the in-person experience. So I make it a point to get into the office 1 – 2 days/week. I do miss everything being within a few seconds of where I was sitting. So for that, I have a brand new set of management tools that I have adopted into my new daily routine.

For a manager of a teleworking team, what are the fundamental infrastructure requirements necessary for steady, successful communication?  I’m going to shamelessly salute my employer a few times to better describe my virtual office. Without these services, my team would never be able to perform the way we do.

Essential telework tools for managers

My day gets going with my first meeting on my audio conference bridge line.Even if you don’t telework, you’ve probably used a conference bridge line. My conference bridge is the virtual meeting room I use most often. I had my personal passcode committed to memory after the first day on the job. Anytime you want to speak to one or more team members, just have them dial into your bridge line. It’s quicker than trying to arrange an impromptu meeting in a physical meeting room and my team can call in from anywhere across the country to one easy access number.

But it’s more than just about talking. We do a lot of planning. And for this type of activity, a picture is worth a thousand words. More difficult in a virtual world you say? Actually, not. We use web conferencing services. I can have a presentation running on my laptop, and with my team logging into our web conferencing service, they can see exactly what I’m seeing. We work together, in real-time, as we discuss and make changes to presentations on the fly. In fact, we can even white board during our brainstorming sessions.

During the course of any normal work day, I always need to consult with other team members. In an office environment, working in proximity of almost everyone, I could simply get up and have a chat, even if it meant visiting another floor in the building. But working with a virtual team left me little choice. There was no avoiding the addition of one more communication channel: Instant Messaging.

For many, including me, this can take the most getting used to. I resisted for a long time because I was already challenged at keeping up with the voicemails, emails and meetings. Now that I’ve given in, I have to admit, it’s not that bad. In fact, it’s made my life easier in one way: I manage much less voicemail. One of my colleagues compared the start of an IM chat with someone stopping by your desk a physical world for an impromptu chat. Yes, it took me a bit of getting used to. But now that I’m there, I’m not sure how I managed before IM.

As a converted teleworker, I’ve come to rely on these basic services. Whether you work remotely, or in a physical office location, they can dramatically improve your daily productivity. I know they did for me.

Nancy Kay leads the web and social media team for business solutions at TELUS. Nancy has been leading teams of marketing and web professionals for the last 15 years and has extensive experience in marketing, in both traditional and digital mediums.

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