Published on the 05/06/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Organisations which want to more closely engage with clients on social media first need to ensure their staff are properly engaged or risk missing out on the benefits…
Specialist engagement consultancy Bluewolf has warned that those companies which hope to engage with their clients over social media networks such as Twitter or Facebook first need to ensure their employees are engaged and comfortable with social networks.
Corinne Sklar, Bluewolf’s vice president of marketing, on a visit to Australia last week said that there was a clear appetite for social media client engagement, citing IBM statistics. The IBM 2012 survey of CEOs found that although only 16 percent of CEOs reported that their organisation used social networks today to engage with customers, they expected that would increase five fold over the coming five years.
Sklar said that social engagement was probably still a few years off maturity, but said the advent of more effective metrics should speed adoption.
Bluewolf will launch an enterprise KPI model at the end of the third quarter which will provide executives with a dashboard to see if clients were being engaged on social media, and whether they were actually seguing that engagement into a purchase.
Sklar claimed however that even with the metrics, “The hardest part of this is (understanding that) employee engagement equals customer engagement”. She said that Bluewolf had itself attempted to address the issue by “gamifying” employee engagement. Employees were encouraged to blog and to share information on social networks. Those whose blogs were read, and who managed to start a dialogue on social networks were rewarded with points that could be used to buy treats including company t-shirts or lunch with the CEO.
She said that in the first year it had led to a 72 percent increase in blog traffic, a 35 percent increase in social visits by customers, a 130 percent increase in the company’s blogger community and a 57 percent increase in use of Salesforce Chatter in the organisation.
She said that Bluewolf customers were increasingly interested in the application of game mechanics – predominantly to engage sales and call centre staff. However she acknowledged that Australia was a couple of years behind in terms of enterprise adoption of this trend.
