Be prepared to be wildly successful
By Alexandra Reid
Michelle Kostya, RIM’s go-to person for social media support, offered this fresh advice during her speech last night at Third Tuesday in Ottawa. With the introduction of smart phones, RIM has evolved passed its traditional siloed approach to customer service and marketing to be able to listen to and support today’s social media savvy consumers. To successfully engage with millions of RIM enthusiasts and critics in the fast-paced and potentially dangerous world of social media, RIM had to set out clear objectives, guidelines, processes and defined roles as it integrated and organized these two departments. By making RIM accessible and transparent, Kostya and her team have set themselves up for long-lasting social media success. Here are a few pointers from Kostya:
1) Start with a strategy and pilot project
RIM did not bite off more than it could chew at the outset of its social media activities. Instead, Kostya and her team began by laying out a thorough strategy that defined their objectives, rules for engagement, processes and roles. Objectives included reducing call volumes by empowering customers to find the answers where and when they wanted while also building brand loyalty and better users. To allow social media processes to flow between marketing and sales, they charted the workflow and review processes between departments and established specific roles within each department. To ensure rules for engagement were consistently followed, they recruited a social media customer-service team whose members were selected based on communications skills, social media interests and technical support abilities and then trained according to RIM’s social media guidelines.
Kostya and her team did not roll out all their social media activities at once; instead, they introduced their strategy bits at a time, beginning in 2008 with their support community on Facebook. They waited a full year before launching RIM’s first blog, Inside BlackBerry, and its Twitter handles @BlackBerry and @BlackBerryHelp. In 2010, they expanded RIM’s blog reach by including a help blog and boosted their Twitter presence by offering communications in Spanish.
Kostya and her team measured this entire process. Each week, they produced reports outlining what they were doing right and wrong, what they learned and how they planned to do better the following week. As a result of their well-planned efforts, RIM has received increasingly positive feedback from its communities, which today include millions of fans, friends and followers across dozens of social media platforms.
2) Build the buzz
It’s all about expanding the BlackBerry love, says Kostya. To get people talking about BlackBerry on social media, Kostya and her team held several social media events. For example, they set up a booth at BlogWorld where they offered free giveaways and a battery-exchange for people whose BlackBerries had run out of juice. The result of this event was about 400 Twitter mentions about the brand.
To build excitement about their new products, Kostya and her team carried out social media pre-launches, parties and events. For example, for the launch of the new BB6, Kostya and her team set up a #BB6 hashtag on Twitter to get people talking about the new device. They also interviewed the product manager for a blog post on BB insider. Once people had bought the device, they offered tips and tricks on all accounts including Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
3) Delight your community
Kostya says consistent communication with their community has been integral to their social media success. To delight their community, they bring all feedback directly to the right people within the company who respond in a timely manner. They also speak to their community and give them reasons to stay by offering them information and products and by teaching them ways in which they can help support their own communities. Kostya says they also like to surprise people by reaching out to them first when they have questions or issues, offering them gifts and bringing their biggest online fans together to meet in person.
What do you think of Kostya’s advice? Did you attend the event and come up with any additional insights?
