Social Media Roadmap

“Modern companies are already integrating efficient social tools in every announcement, launch, and event. The savvy strategists learns to use them in a holistic way” | Jeremiah Owyang, Sr Analyst Forrester

November 16, 2007

Table of Contents

The EMBARQ Social Media Roadmap – Mission

– Strategies

– Objectives

– Potential Tactics with Roles & Responsibilities

– Next Steps

Social Media Roadmap

Corporate Social Media Mission:

Develop, implement and cultivate social media strategies with an evolving tool kit to enhance communications and brand perceptions among employees, customers, prospects, stockholders and the media – aka: “multi-influencers.”

Social Media StrategiesDelivering on our Practical Ingenuity brand promise, we will

leverage social media to communicate with our multi-influencers with the following:

1) EDUCATE: Train to create breadth and depth in our employee base to give them the tools and opportunity to actively engage in social and emerging media.

2) SEEK & CULTIVATE: New employee talent and corporate resources to better position EQ as a “thought-leader” in this emerging space while tapping external influencers.

3) INTEGRATE: Create conversations that are media agnostic and evergreen; ensure all marketing and communication strategies are interwoven to create consistent messaging.

4) RESEARCH: Invest in socnet-specific research to identify emerging trends, shifting EQ from followers to leaders; monitor brand perceptions to identify positive lifts and capitalize on them.

5) MEASURE: Use media appropriate metrics to evaluate performance against best-in-class examples.

6) INNOVATE & EXPERIENTAL: Utilize the socnet opportunity to evolve the brand into one that is dynamic, interactive and relevant; leverage practical opportunities via networks and conversations to position the brand for future growth.

Strategy 1: EDUCATEOverarching Objectives for Q1: 1) Identify and educate key stakeholders and 2) Roll out high level training for all associates

Potential Tactic Lead Partners Status Notes

Open access to socnet sites HR IT, Corp Comm Complete  

Develop online employee communications guidelines for ALL employees, allowing them to participate in the conversations Corp Comm

HR, Brand, Legal, ECM Ops Complete

Identify key socnet stakeholders to create a strategic task force Corp Strat

Socnet task force (engage Portal SMEs)  

Identify socnet immersion training customized for socnet task force and key marketing teams Brand Corp Comm  

Develop interactive socnet educational session for all

employees and post to i-learn HR – Training Brand  

Strategy 2: SEEK & CULTIVATEOverarching Objectives: 1) In Q4 ’07, identify internal SMEs and gaps, 2) In Q1, where appropriate hire social media SMEs & extend depth/breadth of knowledge and 3) Hire best-in-class socnet partner.Potential Tactic Lead Partners Status Notes

Seek corporate executive level champion to lead socnet taskforce and ensure strategies are prioritized and met Corp Strat

Target new hires via socnet media and include socnet skills in preferred job skills HR Brand

Culivate SMEs to become socnet leaders:

•Identify appropriate opportunities where SMEs can growth strengths

•Provide socnet education within their organizations – internal blogs, webinars, etc.

•Take leadership roles in industry organizations: WOMMA, Social Media Club, AMA, etc.

•Encourage participation in local & national industry conferences:

Web 2.0, Ad:tech, Von.x, WOMMA Summit, Mixx, Podcamp, etc.

Brand Corp Comm, IMCC Funding

Evaluate current agencies, resources, costs, contracts to identify gaps and opportunities. Brand

Corp Comm, Bus including Marcom

Strategy 3: INTEGRATEOverarching Objectives: In Q1, integrate social media into all communication, marketing and advertising initiatives.

Potential Tactic Lead Partners Status Notes

Roll out PR plan using holistic offline/online communication elements including social media tool kit: traditional offline with socnet, blogs, microblogs, social bookmarking, etc. Corp Comm All marcom teams  

Aggregate all monitored traditional online and consumer-generated media findings & provide conversation pulse dashboard Corp Comm

Listening to the EQ conversationInitiative #2 June White Paper

Manage corporate blog initiatives: EQIP and web

Target socnet SMEs for internal first, then external blogging and other social media communication (wikis, podcasts, etc.) helping to cultivate industry thought leaders Corp Comm

Develop and maintain a list of relevant and influential social media outlets including blogs, podcasts and video podcasts. Treat them as members of the traditional analyst/journalist pool and provide them with updates and access to similar company information. Monitor third party blogs, wikis, etc. develop relationships with influencers to provide information regarding posts, comments. Corp Comm

Initiative #1 June White Paper

Syndicate all company information on embarq.com with RSS feeds. This includes press releases, investor calls, upcoming events, conference presentations, and more. Corp Comm

Initiative #1 June White Paper

Draft and roll out general response strategy and process

including development of educational components to

push to organization Corp CommECM Ops, Socnet task force  

Prepare, test, roll out a crisis-situation communications

strategy, including proactive and reactive scenarios;

test plans prior to crisis to ensure feasibility Corp Comm ECM Ops  

Key Strategy: INTEGRATE – cont.Overarching Objectives: In Q1, integrate social media into all communication, marketing and advertising initiatives.

Potential Tactic Lead Partners Status Notes

Develop consistent EQ socnet presence(s), plan for creating content, apps, marketing efforts to reach, connect, and build communities around EMBARQ, take part in communities in EQ territory:MySpace: Maintain a corporate profile on MySpace to serve as a corporate marketing, customer service and recruitment tool.

Facebook EMBARQ Network: Employee only, Shows authenticity – walking the walk

Facebook EMBARQ Groups:

HR: Geo-targeted recruitment groups

R&D: Collaboration

Brand: Cause marketing groups/Collaboration

EQ Customer Service: Answer questions group

Local Participation: PAMs, etc. engage in local groups Brand

Consumer & Business Marketing, Corp Comm, Portal Team, HR, ECM-Ops

Consumer led MySpace launch – ends 1/15/08

Brand created Facebook EMBARQ Network

MySpace Launch Initiative #3 from June White Paper

Funding, Owner?

Become active members in online communities in

EQ territories to elevate brand and increase local presence Brand

External Affairs – PAMs, Portal, Corp Comm  

Integrate modest social network and media features directly into the MyEMBARQ portal Portal

Initiative # 4 from June White Paper

Create user forums for support and other Embarq-related issues.

Portal, Ecommerce

Consumer marketing, Business marketing, ECM-Ops

Initiative #2 from June White Paper

Leverage localized content and develop customized socnet applications/widgets (allow customers to embed EQ widgets & media players on their personal websites) Portal

Initiative #2 from June White Paper

Strategy 4: RESEARCHOverarching objective: In Q1, evolve current ad hoc social media research into best-in-class.

Potential Tactic Lead Partners Status Notes

Evolve current research strategies to include social media:Develop social media research dashboardDevelop social media research wiki to keep internal team appraised of new socnet, Web 2.0 trends Corp Strat Socnet task force

Identify emerging socnet and new media brand research methodology to evaluate brand awareness Brand Corp. Research

Aggregate all monitored traditional and consumer-generated media findings & provide conversation pulse dashboard Corp Comm See Educate

Commission social media primary research w/i our footprint to identify:•Usage•Trends•Messaging

Brand, Corp Research

Strategy 5: MEASUREOverarching objective: In Q1, Shift from annually, quarterly, monthly measurements to NOW – hourly, daily, weekly.

Potential Tactic Lead Partners Status Notes

Brand equity and awareness on SNS (pre/post launch), brand attributes

BrandAll Marketing, socnet task force

FundingSee Research tactics

Define engagement with social media included in the mix.Engagement: Unique visitors, page views, time spent on content, depth and frequency of visits Research, All

marketing Socnet task force

Conversation pulse:

Track interaction measurement standards:

•Content contribution (volume of comments/reviews/posts)

•Content use/Web mentions

•Social bookmarking/sharing: del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, trackbacks, etc.Subscriptions (RSS feeds, email)

Corp Comm Socnet task force  

Measurement Dashboard: Internal 360 view of all communications, campaigns, etc. Corp Comm

IMCC, Socnet task force

Strategy 6: INNOVATE & EXPERIENTAL – Company-wideOverarching Objective: Create a culture that encourages, enables and empowers an ongoing dialogue between and among EQ and its many

stakeholder groups. Potential Tactic Lead Partners Status Notes

Continue to monitor social media trends, agency and corporate resources to ensure alignment with overall corporate goals Corp Strat Socnet task force  

Evaluate social media initiatives to ensure alignment with business and brand strategies. Corp Strat Brand

Analyze social media trends and recommend social media tool kit evolution:

Tool Kit Options: MonitoringBlogs Micro blogsWikis Social Network Sites (SNS)PodcastingRSS Social bookmarking Video

Corp Strat Socnet task force

Next Steps

Commitment – Champion

– Role of socnet task force

– Which of these strategies, objectives are we going to tackle? – Need team’s input on priorities

Review/revise tactics, decide priorities - test, learn, & roll out– Evaluate and provide your team’s potential funding needs

– Evaluate and provide your team’s potential SME headcount needs

Present to senior management

Addendum

Social Media Case Study – Integrate/Measure

Unilever– All Unilever brand building programs are designed to surround

and engage the consumer across all media – paid and unpaid; and in all key touchpoints – online and offline.

– A typical program will devote roughly 70% of marcom spend to advertising, and 30% to less traditional activities including PR (where community engagement also lives), experiential, in-store, and so on.

– Once briefed on the “job to be done,” agencies work together to develop the uber idea, and then channel-appropriate strategies and plans.

– Increasingly, the company is eschewing standard metrics for ones based on engagement. Each type of engagement is assigned a value (e.g. Live = 4X the value of TV), and the agencies are then held accountable for setting and hitting mutually agreed targets.

– Dove OnSlaught: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaH4y6ZjSfE

Social Media Case Study – Integrate (response system & RSS feeds)

Wal-Mart– After initial bumpy road entry into social media, Wal-Mart is taking

positive steps…

– The key to staying current in this space is active listening• To what people are saying about your company, brands, people, etc. as well as to

the issues (or opportunities) that are most important to you• Need to approach it with both a defensive (reputation) and offensive (brand

marketing) mindset

– Wal-Mart has a team of people (Edelman) that use a combination of free and paid monitoring tools, and then apply the “human factor” to weed out irrelevant data

– Real-time reporting and a formalized response protocol have now been refined to the point that WM can respond to any post it deems worthy of response in less than 60 minutes

– This “urgency” is a real asset when engaging in online conversation:• Several potential crises have been averted before they hit the mainstream news

media • The brand gets “props” for paying attention and caring enough to get engaged.

Google will always show that post higher in its results than the one that we found with the complaint, negativity, etc.

– http://www.walmartfacts.com/

Social Media Case Study

Wal-Mart - continued – Created an external network of 150,000 bloggers,

grouped by common areas of interest• Sustainability, healthcare reform, etc.

– Keep this group informed with WM’s latest developments in each area

• No strings attached• Empowered the network to share the information with their

network (or not) on their own terms / in their own words

– Identifying a similar group of SME’s from within WM’s 1.5M associate universe

• Each SME will be posting a story on their area of expertise (e.g. wine, fishing, etc.) to a public facing blog

– WM is also actively engaged in social networking initiatives with Facebook.com – using the platform to connect with netgen consumers around key retail drive periods

Social Media Measurements

WOMMA & ARF– WOMMA

• The Word of Mouth Marketing Association, has an incredible body of knowledge housed on its site:

– http://www.womma.org• Roughly 10% (40) of the group’s members are research-

centric organizations, tracking everything from online conversations to developing norms around how many times a “good” topic is talked about by influential individuals

– ARF• The Advertising Research Foundation, has an active task

force working towards the development of what they hope will be adopted as a standard metric for “engagement”

• ARF Membership also includes many WOMMA members, including Keller Fay Group and Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Who’s bringing Social Media into the foreground?

The key innovators in the Marketing & PR 2.0 space fall into six buckets:

• Technology companies: Such as Google and Facebook; they’re creating the platforms that enable mass adoption; further, their “open” approach is bringing that innovation to market with lightning speed.

• Consumer products: Thought leaders within blue chip marketing organizations who are taking risks experimenting learning by doing. Examples include Babs Rangaiah at Unilever and Stan Joosten at P&G.

• Holding Companies: Such as Mindshare within WPP; who are broadening their capabilities and extending into the content creation business

• Large PR agencies: like Edelman, as well as smaller PR boutiques (e.g. Shift Communications) with one thing in common – a CEO / leadership team that believe in this new direction

• Boutiques: Emerging “word-of-mouth” specialist shops like BZZAgent and Zocalo Group are exclusively focused on this space (but don’t offer any other services within the 360 idea world)

• Consultants: Finally, there are a number of self-taught “experts,” who are selling themselves to the highest bidder on a day rate or project rate basis.

EMBARQ MySpace Profile Highlights – Kim Wilt

MySpace launched Oct. 30. To date, we have 319 friends and less than a dozen submissions to the contest. Two articles have appeared on EQIP.

Key learnings:

– As a group, our employees are not familiar with the space nor do they understand the nuances of being a part of this community.

– Employee education is key.

– We should depend on viral communication, rather than push marketing, to spread the word internally.

– We have had no negative comments posted to our wall; but it still remains critical to have an online response team (Linda O’Neil)

Contract ends Jan. 15. Do we want to continue? Who should sponsor?