Post was written ans submitted during Blogwell Conference, so please excuse any typos
First session I chose to attend at the NYC Blogwell was of “Sabre Holdings” about “The Great Community Race”. Turned out a great and useful session nailing one of the known challenges of getting Social Media understanding internally – using community to communicate with other internal departments. The key to the success? as Tweeterer Kristin Hersant tweeted “Sabre’s executives drove participation. As is usually the case, effective change needs to come from the top down”. Sometimes I guess this is unfortunately the case.
Lorie and Susan described their community ecosystem highlighting key elements:
- Community Conference done periodically
- Product Plan voting – enhancement suggestion given by custmer that are then voted for
- Community Board
- Community Portal from which one can land at the Hub.
- Community Portal Hub – customers and employees have profiles, there are dedicated groups for each product where service and offerings are being discussed.
Goal “increase employee engagement to improve customer experience”.
Challenge revolved around apprehensiveness to participate, ” How can we motivate busy employees to participate” as people found it yet another task they need to perform daily, instead of seeing the value it can give their time management.
Solution: devise teams competition to use the platform more and more: the Great Community Race.
How it worked: Instead of getting everyone to analyze and use the master plan spreadsheet for enhancing customer/reps interaction, the Product team narrowed tasks down, assigning 6 tasks each month, asking employees to do minimum of 3 tasks to get points. Tasks included developing engagement roadmap 2011, posting a blog, conducting an online chat, etc.The participating teams then posted their achievements using a blog for the judges to award points. Winning team was named and awarded at annual sales conference.
Awards were given to highest accumulative points team, to product suite with highest average score, team with very high score and consistent approach to community, and to team that made a big change: started weak and made real progress.
Results:
- 23 teams fully engaged
- average blogs a month went up 575%
- portal accounts went up 7%
- 3090 portal content items published, created or modified
- biggest win was getting the community to engage.
Other Benefits also included becoming more efficient with emails and learning about other issues that were raised by customers with other representatives.
Lessons Learned:
1. A little fun goes a long way
2. Executive involvement is key
3. Team liked being told what to do – assigned tasks and templates ,meant less analysis
Some of the methods used to get internal community engagement were leveraged to increase understanding and participation of other areas of the business.
Susan Via – Manager, Community Marketing and Engagement
Lorie Robinson – Product Manager
Sabre Holding Session Blog Review – http://www.socialmedia.org/blog/live-from-blogwell/sabre-holdings-the-great-community-race-live-from-blogwell/
