Tnooz caught up with two speakers at the Expion Social Business Summit in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina, USA, last month: Charlene Li from Altimeter Group and Diana Plazas from DoubleTree by Hilton.
Altimeter's Charlene Li
Charlene Li is at the forefront of much of the social business thinking, providing context and best practices for companies seeking to engage customers on emerging and newly-established platforms.
The core idea here is to develop a cohesive business strategy that considers all stakeholders and provides value to each at various points in the chain. By considering how customers want to interact with a brand - and what resources the brand has to support said interaction - a brand can develop an adaptive strategy that ties into clear business objectives.
Charlene points to her "6 Steps of Social Business Maturity," which are: Planning, Presence, Engagement, Formalized, Strategic, and Converged. By following along these points with goals, metrics, and initiatives that support the company, a business becomes mature in the social space.
Here's what Charlene had to say about employing new technologies in the social space:
DoubleTree's Diana Plazas
Diana Plazas is the Director of Global Brand Marketing for the DoubleTree by Hilton brand. With 325 hotels, Diana is focused on developing a social business strategy that works well for a group of hotels spread across time zones and cultures, as well as ensuring a consistent message emphasizing the brand's focus on the CARE principle: to Create A Rewarding Experience for each guest.
Diana points to one particular social media win: the team at Cocoa Beach providing a special birthday welcome to a guest, which ultimately went viral on Reddit with over 1,700 comments and 3,100 upvotes. As Diana says, the brand "couldn't have even bought that kind of advertising."
By allowing each location to develop their own identity - there are no dedicated social media managers on property - the centralized corporate strategy has trickled down into each location, allowing them to interpret and build on the CARE brand principle independently.
Diana also points to the necessity of living and breathing the culture you want to replicate. By making social a core part of the brand, it has become a reflection of the staff as well. The transparency, and the intensive CARE training (12 training modules completed by each new hire) has created a naturally-formed, organic company culture that feeds itself.
Here's what Diana had to say about leveraging social media across a disparate group of properties, including some of the challenges and successes:
NB: Radio image courtesy Shutterstock.