How Salesforce.com do social

The final pre­sen­ta­tion at last week’s Social Media Hud­dle was from Xabier Ormaz­a­bal. He’s Senior Man­ager, Prod­uct Mar­ket­ing over at Salesforce.com. His 25 minute slot was filled with a huge amount of insight and action­able advice. Here’s a quick sum­mary of the points I took from it.

Salesforce.com build their social media strat­egy around three pil­lars of online com­mu­nity. Seems like a pretty straight for­ward model:

• First ensure that your cor­po­rate site and other owned web prop­er­ties are work­ing hard for you. Focus on build­ing engage­ment through knowl­edge shar­ing, user groups, blogs and ideas sharing.

• Sec­ondly, cre­ate your own branded chan­nels on exist­ing social plat­forms. Use lis­ten­ing tools like Radian6 to under­stand what peo­ple are say­ing and where they’re say­ing it. Engage with peo­ple where they spend their time and dis­trib­ute your con­tent across YouTube, Twit­ter, Flickr and Slideshare.

• Finally, cre­ate con­ver­sa­tions across the web on sites where you don’t have branded chan­nels e.g. Twit­ter, third party blogs, forums and part­ners sites. And, make sure your social media guide­lines are up to date and dis­sem­i­nate the poli­cies to your con­tent creators.

A good sug­ges­tion that came out of this last pil­lar was how to cal­cu­late a rough ROI for your social activ­i­ties. For exam­ple, first cal­cu­late how much a video costs to cre­ate and to upload to YouTube. Then, ascer­tain the £/$ value of a video view (that’s the tricky bit, but any media buyer should be able to give you a fig­ure). Mul­ti­ply this value by the num­ber of views and divide by the cost. Easy!

There was also a debate about whether peo­ple should have mul­ti­ple accounts on Twit­ter e.g. their “work” pro­file and their “per­sonal” pro­file. The audi­ence seemed split on this topic. I per­son­ally pre­fer a sin­gle account @Wrigsy where I Tweet about a broad range of top­ics (from climb­ing moun­tains to our lat­est new busi­ness wins). But, I sup­pose I’m lucky that I can also Tweet through our Ban­ner account @BannerCorp when the topic is purely focused on work.

If you’re a salesforce.com user, start using Chat­ter. It’s their most suc­cess­ful prod­uct launch to date and gives users the sort of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion they expect from plat­forms like Facebook.