12. Social Businesses in the Real World: EMC and Intel
This book serves as a playbook for companies that want to evolve into fully operational and collaborative social businesses. In a perfect world, company leaders realize early on that they need to change the way they do business to stay competitive, innovate, and ultimately address the dynamic nature of the social customer. The focus is to get the internal house in order first and address issues such as organizational culture, silos, and models; then the company adopts social media best practices for technology, governance, training, collaboration and processes, and workflows. When this is almost complete, the focus naturally shifts to addressing external engagement strategies for interacting with the social customer.
To reiterate, an organization cannot effectively engage with customers unless its employees can effectively engage internally with each other first.
However, the reality is that every organization is different. Each company’s journey is dynamic; it will change course multiple times as the market moves, leadership changes, culture dynamics shift, and new organizational models are designed. Some companies might already have an open, collaborative organization and simply face technology challenges that prohibit them from getting to the next step. For others, technology might not be the challenge; they might still be operating in the old-school “command and control” mindset and are afraid to change. The nature of social business requires a company to have all its operations working together collaboratively at all times. When a process is broken or internal communication fails, the entire organization can suffer the repercussions. Worse, the social customer will also suffer—and will surely tell others about it.
Many companies today struggle with moving their organizations through this evolution and are seeking answers. Either they can’t persuade their managers and executives to change or their organization might be too big for them to make an impact. Maybe they just can’t afford technology solutions that will allow them to collaborate. Or maybe the organization already has multiple social media initiatives but they’re all working in silos.
Many companies have successfully navigated the transition to a social business and faced these thorny issues head on. Two tech companies, EMC and Intel, are notable because they successfully operationalized social media internally.
EMC is unique because it focused internally first, creating a fully collaborative, social organization. Next, EMC unleashed its employees to engage externally with customers. The results speak for themselves. Several hundred EMC employees engage on Twitter, which has resulted in fully collaborative internal and external communities where business and technology conversations are happening daily.
Intel’s evolution was different yet just as effective. It started as a grassroots effort more than 10 years ago, when technology experts and IT managers were engaging in forums and chat rooms, talking shop with other IT managers. Today Intel has a Social Media Center of Excellence that helps drive governance and training across the organization. It has fully embraced social media as a viable channel to engage with customers and partners. Intel’s internal culture and organizational models allow the company to empower employees, integrate social with all other media, and scale its technology platforms as the business grows.
The following case studies were conducted via interviews with EMC’s Director of Social Engagement, Len Devanna, and Intel’s social media strategist, Bryan Rhoads.
EMC’s Social Business Evolution
EMC is a business-to-business (B2B) company that develops, delivers, and supports information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure hardware, software, and services. It is a Financial Times Global 500, Fortune 500, and S&P 500 company with offices globally and headquarters in Massachusetts.
EMC has effectively reinvented itself during the past decade. In 2000, EMC held the title as leading provider of enterprise storage systems. By 2010, EMC not only retained that title, but also became the fifth-largest software provider in the industry.
This growth was driven organically but also through an aggressive acquisition strategy: EMC acquired more than 50 companies between 2002 and 2008. With each acquisition came a new group of employees, a new culture, and a new market. Although such growth is wrought with complexity, it has proven to be extremely rewarding to EMC and its customers. At the same time, acquisitions naturally force an organization to evolve its culture. This dynamic is challenging for thriving organizations that want to become a social business because one culture must become multiple cultures. Each new acquisition has forced EMC to learn and adapt.
The Early Days of Social Media
EMC had approximately 46,000 global employees in 2010 and many diverse product offerings and business units conducting operations across the globe. As with similar-sized companies, a strong ecosystem of partners, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders plays an integral part within the overall business strategy. As with any company of any size and complexity, fluid communications across stakeholders is key.
In mid-2007, EMC formally began its journey toward becoming a social business and a fully engaged enterprise. At the same time, it faced the realities of explosive growth, cultural integration for several acquisitions, and a rapidly evolving digital landscape. EMC recognized that it had an opportunity to begin engaging externally with partners and customers, but the organization wasn’t ready. No one was using social media internally or externally, so it faced a severe learning curve. Starting at ground zero was the only option.
A small and agile team in the corporate communications department assembled and began to plan for EMC’s expansion into social media. The team opted not to treat this like a traditional project with a lengthy business case, goals and objectives, large investment ask, and numerous approvals from senior management.
“In the spirit of the evolution of 2.0, we opted to work outside the confines of traditional thinking and take a more stealth approach,” says Len Devanna, Director of Social Engagement.
Among the first major steps in EMC’s evolution into a social business was the need to begin conversations with a broader audience internally, to explore the opportunities to engage externally. EMC’s new team built an internal community in just a few days, using the freeware platform Drupal. The length of time between conception and launch of this initial community was a matter of days, not weeks or months, a timetable largely unheard of in an enterprise the size of EMC.
Next, the team invited a larger, more diverse group of employees who were excited about EMC products and customers to participate in the community. They focused on figuring out how to operationalize social media internally and change the culture at the same time. Simply inviting employees to be more open and transparent within the community and soliciting feedback contributed significantly to the culture change. The first conversation that seeded the subsequent evolution of EMC into a social business was, “What are the opportunities afforded to EMC and its customers via social media?”
As time progressed and conversations blossomed, the adoption and use of this new community grew exponentially.
EMC Experiences Strong Internal Community Growth
The internal conversation at EMC went viral quickly. A groundswell effect arose within the company, and an appetite emerged for new collaborative capabilities, discussions, and ideas. This sent a strong message to senior management. If a zero-dollar investment can generate such a high degree of collaboration and employee engagement, what would happen if EMC put real energy, time, budget, and planning into the evolution of this new real-time communications shift?
EMC quickly outgrew its experimental community and needed to move on to something more robust with a broader set of capabilities and functionality. The existing platform could not scale with the number of employees using it to create profiles and join the conversation.
EMC’s initial investment into its social business evolution was extremely small, considering the impact it would have (thousands of dollars, as opposed to tens of thousands). Needing to move beyond the freeware platform, EMC chose an emerging vendor in the community space, Jive, but opted to purchase only a small number of licenses as the initial investment. The plan was to scale investment and adoption slowly, with hopes that the growth of the community and the conversations taking place would make the case for subsequent and much bigger investment ask. In the proceeding months, that would prove to be an effective strategy.
It quickly became apparent that the interesting story was not necessarily the tools or the platforms, but rather the cultural and behavioral changes that were taking place as a result of having a community offering. The conversations within the community revolved around EMC’s business strategy, internal policies, and ways to communicate more effectively. Employees were also having personal conversations. This internal community came to be known as EMC|ONE, with ONE serving as an acronym for the Online Network of EMCers.
The impact and influence of the community quickly became clear when executive management proposed a new mobile phone policy within EMC|ONE. The community backlash against this policy was overwhelming, to say the least. It was one of the first times that most employees rallied together to push back publicly against a new policy proposed by management. As a result, all levels of the company came together to collaborate on a new mobile policy that worked for everyone across the organization.
EMC’s Decision to Start Internally First
Several fundamental decisions were made early on, and they turned into guiding principles for EMC’s transformation into a social business. The most important was building a high degree of employee proficiency before focusing on external audiences.
EMC wanted to focus on the skills and behaviors within the organization before going outside the comforts of the corporate firewall. EMC also wanted to learn the nuances of social media—the etiquette, the challenges, and also the opportunities. In a sense, the social media team wanted to focus on the social side of social media.
Because this community was started internally, EMC was able to engrain social media into the fabric of employees’ daily workflows. It was an internal sandbox where EMC employees could test the waters, experiment, and learn the tools; at the same time, they learned how to use these behaviors to do their jobs more effectively.
By this time, EMC|ONE consisted of a small yet passionate and influential group of employees from every region. These early adopters of social media were critical to the growth, influence, and adoption of the community across EMC. They became the social champions, helping to oversee the direction and strategy of EMC|ONE while also serving as evangelists throughout the business, creating excitement and helping to expand the community by encouraging their coworkers to give it a try.
Another major component to EMC’s early strategy was to resist the desire to have closed conversations. They found that, in most instances, employees were more comfortable having conversations in small groups than in public forums, not unlike public speaking. They knew that if they encouraged this dynamic, they would find themselves trapped with hundreds of closed-off communities and conversations; the result would be a lack of transparency and openness.
Since the beginning of this evolution, EMC embraced a policy of openness. Knowing that EMC|ONE was available only to employees, the team pushed back on requests for private spaces, asking what information was so sensitive that peer employees could not be privy to it. Although some initial resistance to this arose in the early days, the policy helped EMC|ONE avoid becoming a siloed organization and go beyond just community discussions. With all the recent acquisitions and blending of cultures and behaviors, this was a significant effort.
“We’ve repeatedly seen value in employees from across the globe participating in discussions from other business units or geographies on a variety of different topics,” says Devanna.
Interestingly, not only did this policy contribute to the collaboration on EMC|ONE, but EMC as a company also became an organization of openness willing to communicate publicly about important topics.
As with any new technology or business initiative, there is always a desire for control, by either IT, operations, or executive management. Early on, many discussions revolved around governance, with some even suggesting that every conversation would have to be moderated and approved before publishing. Instead, EMC opted to take a lightweight governance approach, influenced by the fact that the conversation was happening behind the firewall. EMC’s position was clear. Community members were also employees. They’re adults, paid by EMC, and any malicious individual or employee could do as much damage via traditional tools such as email as they could in a closed community. EMC was careful not to confuse governance with security; even though the conversations were open, the underlying technology was secured by the IT department.
EMC opted to embrace a basic approach of trust. Instead of tightly controlling or moderating content, the company focused on a basic strategy of education and empowerment. EMC used traditional techniques such as “lunch and learns” to teach employees why social media was important to them as individuals and to EMC as a brand. Employees were also trained to leverage tools such as EMC|ONE to work more seamlessly across the organization.
The conversations in EMC|ONE began to grow exponentially. For example, many employees started using EMC|ONE as a way to share information using the blogging functionality in Jive. They used the internal platform to experiment and find their online voices in a safe environment with other community members.
EMC also created a watercooler space within EMC|ONE, to coax employees who were not familiar with social media or communities in general into participating. The Watercooler was a place where employees could talk about their cats, their cars, or whatever they were interested in; it was designed to help them take that first step into real-time community engagement. This stepping stone helped employees feel comfortable communicating in an open environment, and it equipped them with the know-how in a safe environment.
In addition, community spaces such as EMC’s Social Media Club began to resonate, furthering the discussion around the opportunities for EMC in the external social landscape. Then a wiki was created that described the company’s activity on Twitter and identified conversational gaps on the social web. According to Devanna, “The organic growth that was realized from the inside-out approach made it extremely easy to begin taking the conversation outside the firewall and engaging new audiences.”
Today more than 15,000 employees from around the world are engaging in conversations via EMC|ONE. The communities are vibrant and open, and many of the company’s employees have become proficient at using social media.
EMC Opens Up the Corporate Firewall
In January 2009, with a solid understanding of community building and social engagement, EMC launched the ECN, or the EMC Community Network. Similar to EMC|ONE, the ECN brought an external community to EMC’s customers, partners, suppliers, and other audiences, such as analysts, journalists, and influencers.
“The ECN is helping us realize a completely new model of co-innovation. It’s helping us break down traditional corporate barriers and further put our customers at the center of our business,” says Devanna.
Today the ECN has a community of more than a quarter-million members. Using the channel, EMC exposes prerelease products for input, collaborates with customers to help them solve their IT challenges, and provides a forum for customers to easily access EMC employees, engineers, and customer support teams. The community is broken down by the following topics:
• Product- and solution-specific forums
• Support-related forums
• EMC labs
• Developer programs
Additionally, to support product launches, initiatives, and events, EMC creates a social activation kit, which is a wiki document that helps employees who participate externally understand the following components:
• Key supporting messages
• Supporting content, including video assets, blog posts, and press releases
• Customer-shortened links, for tracking purposes
• Hashtags
The social activation kit is used for every external engagement opportunity that is relevant to EMC’s customers and partners.
Through the ECN, EMC employees work with customers to solve important issues and have relevant conversations with the community. As a result, EMC’s social footprint is growing.
EMC’s Social Footprint
In 2009, EMC was ranked the 14th most socially savvy brand by NetProspex, a company that uses the power of crowdsourcing techniques to analyze social activity and engagement. From page views on the EMC Community Network to its aggregate reach on Twitter, EMC registers between 10 million and 20 million social impressions per month.
Although reach is the easiest measure, EMC puts far more value in its level of engagement with customers and partners. Specifically, the company is constantly measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at the engagement mix of EMC versus non-EMC conversations, ensuring that the social media team is actively participating and providing constant business value to its audience. A few KPIs used to measure the team’s effectiveness include the following:
• Employee versus nonemployee engagement
• Frequency of visits to community properties (return visitors, unique visitors, page views, and so on)
• Time between questions posted and answered
• Net-promoter and advocacy sentiment
EMC’s community is thriving; in-depth technology conversations on a variety of topics between employees, customers, and partners are the norm within the ECN. The company’s Twitter activity also shows high levels of engagement, including consistent retweets and @mentions. In addition, EMC often shares links to partner/customer content that add value to the conversation.
EMC’s Organizational Model and Governance
In 2010, EMC reorganized its social media team, moving it from the web team to the corporate communications team and aligning it with the likes of public and analyst relations. This reorganization was designed to help evolve EMC’s overall communications model while ensuring that social media and community building was a core component of its emerging communications strategy.
The social media team actively encourages employees from other EMC organizations and geographies to participate in the social web. It has created simple social media guidelines that help employees get started, based on a few key principles:
• Use common sense.
• Be transparent.
• Add value.
To ensure consistency, the team manages a wiki of EMC “voices,” a landing destination where social media is discussed in detail. The team also covers what area of expertise each employee should talk about externally with customers. In other words, the team encourages broad participation but also asks that EMC employees respect the basic principles—be transparent, add value, use common sense—and keep a keen eye on the customer experience.
EMC believes that social media should be a core part of everyone’s job and has strongly embraced a mantra of “Educate, enable, and scale” with regard to its employee base. The social media team has taken this vision and deployed several training courses designed to help educate employees on the importance of community engagement and how to use tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
Another organization that exemplifies attributes of a social business is Silicon Valley chip maker Intel Corporation.
Intel’s Social Business Evolution
Ever since the Intel Inside campaign in 1991, Intel has had a steady cadence of digital communications. Intel was an early adopter of using the web as a business tool, launching corporate web sites as early as 1995. Intel’s online presence quickly grew to include product support and channel and developer partners.
In the late 1990s, Intel.com—and, specifically, Intel’s Customer Support site—offered a wide array of early social technologies, such as forums and message boards. The Intel Architecture Labs created nascent Internet Phones and video codecs. To support these online efforts, the teams experimented with early virtual worlds such as thepalace.com and a 2-D virtual world called the Intel Boardwalk.
The 2000s saw the continued development and experimentation of Intel’s digital offerings. Of note were academic research projects with schools such as the MIT Sloan School of Management. A four-year online project named Web Trust launched in 2001.
Today Intel is a fully engaged social business. Internally, employees are communicating and collaborating across business units, job functions, and geographies. Employees at all levels also are empowered to engage externally on behalf of the brand. The Social Media Center of Excellence (SM COE) is helping to streamline communications and create process and governance models that address the use of social media externally.
The company is using social technologies such as Jive and Microsoft SharePoint Intel to create and manage internal employee communities that are an active part of their employee communications strategy. In particular, Intel’s internal Planet Blue employee social networking platform has become a critical collaboration asset for more than 90,000 employees around the world.
Externally, Intel has a significant presence on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, corporate blogs, and communities. Company leaders, marketing teams, and various business units have fully embraced social media as a viable channel to communicate with customers, suppliers, partners, and, in some instances, competitors.
The Early Days of Social Media at Intel
In many respects, Intel followed a classic social media adoption cycle. In 2005, web and digital innovation happened at the edges, with smaller business units and grassroots bloggers using social media to communicate externally.
These early adopters were actively engaged in social media to address customers’ needs and solve business problems. One of the first teams to engage externally was Intel’s software developer group. The team understood early on that the target audiences were also early adopters of social technologies such as blogs and communities. After initial pilot blogs started by employees, the group formally created the Intel Software Network (ISN); this is now a thriving community where deep technology conversations are happening daily between Intel and its partners.
After the early adopters demonstrated success in building communities, more formalized pilots followed. In 2006, Intel’s social media strategist, Bryan Rhoads, launched the first official corporate blog focusing on the IT audience. Intel’s IT@Intel blog was the first of many multiauthor blog channels that Intel developed to connect with audiences who were using social media to communicate and collaborate. That same year, it won a “Best in Class” audit award from industry web analysts and garnered accolades from the tech press.
“The IT@Intel blog was the perfect pilot candidate for launching our blog platform. We built a pilot blog for our own Intel IT managers and had them communicating on topics that were important to their peers in the industry and in IT—real topics like information security, wireless network management, and even information overload. These topics and others are universal to the IT audience and fulfilled a peer-to-peer communications requirement to keep them authentic and interesting,” says Rhoads.
In 2006, social media was decentralized and essentially uncoordinated among teams across Intel. Intel had an early social media advocacy group called the Blog Ambassadors, made up of enthusiast employees whose mission was to promote social technologies at Intel. But beyond this volunteer group, Intel had no central strategy or governance.
With the rise of employee involvement and the growing need to connect with audiences, Intel management realized that the company required a deliberate and integrated approach to social media. Senior management also realized the potential risk associated with the rise of employees blogging without any formal guidelines, process, or training. In 2008, Intel created the Social Media Center of Excellence to serve as a central advisory and strategy team and to move the company forward as a social business and address many of the governance issues.
The Establishment of the Social Media Center of Excellence
The Intel Social Media Center of Excellence (SM COE) was formed to bring social media at Intel to the next level. A main goal was to learn from the employees who were already actively engaged with Intel customers within social channels and to make them part of the planning process. This was a strategic decision meant to collaborate with employees who already had significant experience and influence across the social web. Additionally, their involvement was the first step toward scaling social media throughout Intel’s global employee base.
The SM COE is also responsible for crafting the global social media strategy and marketing integration. The team recommends and establishes social media integration techniques into more traditional and digital marketing, such as paid media, online, print, and even broadcast/TV globally.
The SM COE is also responsible for training employees at all levels in digital communications and social media. Social media participation is open to all employees, and Intel requires training to participate on behalf of the brand and Intel. A 30-minute on-demand video course certifies employees as Intel social media practitioners (SMPs); it covers Intel’s global social media strategy, legal cautions, guidelines, and case studies of successful and not-so-successful social media programs.
The SM COE is also responsible for driving collaboration among all SMPs and ensuring that sharing best practices is top-of-mind for everyone participating in social media. Part of this scale includes building a collaborative employee SMP community for knowledge sharing, social coordination, and crisis management. The SM COE fosters the SMP community and has created email distribution lists, social media alerts and announcements, and newsletters to keep Intel’s growing army of SMPs abreast of the latest trends in social and emerging media.
Finally, Intel’s SM COE is responsible for establishing measurement and metrics frameworks and managing social listening tools. Empowering Intel’s SMPs and business units with measurement strategies and techniques has been critical to the growth of social media adoption as a business and marketing communications tool.
One of Intel’s most recognized successes in the social media industry was publishing its social media guidelines externally (you can find it at www.intel.com/sites/sitewide/en_us/social-media.htm) near the end of 2008. These guidelines were made public in more than 30 languages. Creating the social media guidelines was a collaborative effort between the SM COE, the early adopter employees, and internal advocacy groups.
“It was very much like crafting a piece of legislation as we included those employees who had been at the forefront of social media at Intel. Each employee stakeholder was representing their distinct role, business unit, and customer base. The goal was to craft a democratic document that accounted for the employee’s desire to utilize social tools in their jobs and also addressed management’s concerns around risk mitigation and the potential ‘oversharing’ of proprietary information. By leveraging the enthusiasts, we ensured that the tone was transparent in accordance with social media standards and that it would be met with widespread adoption from employees,” says Rhoads.
Intel’s social media guidelines have served as an industry example and been emulated by other Fortune 500 companies, private firms, and even some state and local governments. The guidelines are written in plain language and avoid heavy legal jargon. Some main points of the policy include these:
• Stick to your area of expertise and provide unique, individual perspectives on what’s going on at Intel and in the world.
• Post meaningful, respectful comments—in other words, no spam and no remarks that are off-topic or offensive.
• Always pause and think before posting. That said, reply to comments in a timely manner, when a response is appropriate.
• Respect proprietary information and content, as well as confidentiality.
The guidelines serve as rules of engagement for Intel SMPs and even agencies or third parties representing Intel or managing social media programs. These same guidelines serve as the backbone for the overall SMP training and include topic credos such as “Write what you know, and know what you write,” “Perception is reality,” and “If it gives you pause, take a pause.” These all remind authors to be mindful of their content at all times.
Intel also established its corporate-wide moderation policy with the same spirit of openness and transparency. The policy asks all participants to follow three memorable principles: “The Good, the Bad, but not the Ugly.” The guidelines state, “If the content is positive or negative and in context to the conversation, then we approve the content, regardless of whether it’s favorable or unfavorable to Intel. But if the content is ugly, offensive, denigrating, and completely out of context, then we reject the content.”
Intel Social Media Footprint Focuses on Employees
After Intel employees complete the main social media training course, called “Digital IQ 500,” they are considered official SMPs. Intel SMPs can participate on behalf of Intel in all forms of social media. More than 1,600 SMPs represent Intel from all business unities, geographies, and levels of management.
That number of 1,600 SMPs equates to several tens of millions in effective and potential reach of Intel messages. These practitioners are active on all major social networks around the globe, from Facebook to RenRen, from vKontakte to Twitter. This level of engagement by Intel employees has resulted in huge increases in community growth. As of April 2011, Intel’s Facebook page had more than 1 million fans and 40,000 followers on Twitter.
Social Media Ownership of Intel
The Social Media Center of Excellence was created to help steer and guide the ship. Sitting within Intel’s Corporate Marketing Group, the team is situated in Marketing Strategy and works closely with the web marketing team, the public relations department, and creative and brand teams. They work with all the geographies, business groups, and product teams to develop strategies, social properties, and tactics for the entire marketing and communications mix at Intel.
However, each team and group at Intel is responsible for its own execution and microstrategies relevant to its mission, business goals, and geography. Individuals and teams coordinate and develop their own social assets and communications. The teams themselves activate and integrate social media into specific campaigns, web properties, and media.
Conclusion
Many organizations today spend a lot of time, resources, and financial investment trying to understand the social landscape and engaging externally with their customers and prospects. They are on a quest to become a social brand. They are investing in Facebook applications, branded communities, and blogs; many are using online monitoring solutions to listen to what people are saying about the brand. From this perspective, many companies today are doing a decent job.
Friends, fans, and followers are important, yes. And brands increase their social equity by engaging in two-way dialogue with their constituency, yes. And transparency is key to these external engagements, yes. But while many organizations are trying desperately to humanize their brand, they are failing to understand that they need to humanize their business first.
And therein lies the business challenge. As the use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social applications grew and as the influence of the social customer became apparent, companies of all sizes and in every division began to join the conversation. Not only did customers expect it, but social influencers enjoyed playing Monday morning quarterback and criticizing brands for every action and inaction.
And companies listened. Today organizations are aggressively hiring community managers and social strategists, allocating budgets to social media, hiring agencies, and creating engagement strategies. They are doing everything a “good” social brand should be doing.
But this book is not about social brands. It’s about an organization’s natural (sometimes forced) evolution into a social business. A social business deals with the internal transformation of an organization and addresses key factors such as organizational models, culture, internal communications, collaboration, governance, training, employee activation, global and technology expansion, team dynamics, and measurement philosophy.
For companies to do this effectively, they have to get smarter; acquire new technologies, intelligence, and talent; and become more open and transparent. They have to establish processes and governance models that protect the organization yet empower employees. They have to change the way they do business, and that starts with the people of the organization.
An organization that uses social media to engage externally with customers is a social brand, not necessarily a social business. There’s a huge difference.
From the outside looking in, most wouldn’t recognize or understand the challenges that social media has created in the enterprise. The anarchy, conflict, confusion, lack of communication and collaboration, and organizational silos that exist behind the firewall are not visible. These challenges make the process of becoming an effective social brand much more difficult and less effective. So for some organizations, this quest to become a social brand and a social business is one of a simultaneous effort.
The key takeaway of this book is that organizations cannot and will not have effective, external conversations with consumers unless they can have effective internal conversations first. And much more than internal conversations, conference calls, and a collaboration forum are needed. For this evolution to take place, organizations need to adopt social behaviors in every aspect of their business operations.