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 4G Marcom Watch By Emma Hancox, Marketing Director Contact the author at emma@maravedis-bwa.com |
Spotlight: Nokia One company that has embraced social media is Nokia. The company actively engages with social media to generate attention for their products, gain feedback, and have a conversation surrounding their mobile handsets and services. The goal is to create messages that are relevant to influencers, and to listen and engage in cross-functional interactions within communities. There are several tactics that Nokia employs to take advantage of the social mediascape. These PR-type efforts include WOMWorld and the Nokia Blogger Relations program from Comunicano, programs that loan devices to bloggers in order to track the buzz surrounding the current Nokia handset models. Another key facet to Nokia’s Social Media Team’s strategy is to engage well-known writers from larger blogs as well as lesser known, up and coming writers. Nokia also uses what it refers to as social media releases (as opposed to press releases), which include video, images, and multimedia files to download, and text that is more appropriate for blogs. More and more packages such as these are becoming available on the market by agencies on behalf of big businesses. A Nokia social media release includes a blogbite, which is like a podcast, and also invites you to “join the conversation” http://conversations.nokia.com/ Nokia has encouraged its company culture to evolve in light of the social media phenomenon. Other examples of how the company has embraced social media include encouraging the widespread adoption of 2.0 tools internally, and developing what they call an “infopedia” internally, which was instrumental in getting Nokia employees to understand what a wiki is, what a blog is etc. Engaging with influencers is a very important item on the Nokia agenda, including through events such as the South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSW09). At this year’s SXSW in March, Nokia’s Molly Schonthal, who is in charge of social media for the Finnish cell phone manufacturer in North America, insisted that the biggest challenge for a large organization is listening and participating openly and respectfully. Although Web 2.0 is not difficult from a technical point of view, working with communities takes much longer, and does not follow the standard principles of traditional press relations. Another challenge facing social media campaigns is that it is very hard to track results back to sales. Social media produces soft numbers, which are not linked to sales automatically. Nokia does monitor the number of people with whom it engages, such as the number of followers on twitter (currently more than 1,400). Over-planning is also a major issue to avoid – it is important to be flexible. Nokia can start a conversation and generate feedback – both good and bad – to which it must respond and adjust. Join our LinkedIn Group and follow us on Twitter. We look forward to connecting with you! For more information you can contact the author at emma@maravedis-bwa.com |
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