Category Champions | 2012 Social Media Leadership Awards, Organized by Knowledge@Wharton and Social Strategy1, Sponsored by Ernst & Young
All finalists that were invited to attend this year’s event demonstrated innovative and meaningful applications for social media. Winners were chosen based on their scores from the listed criteria: To what extent does this entry meet its stated objective? To what extent was this entry able to help the organization implement its social strategy? How novel is this entry? What is your overall assessment of this entry?
Overall Grand Champion
Girl Scouts of the USA (ENT.)
Lillian Ruiz, Social Media Specialist
Girl Scouts of the USA’s Interactive Marketing team sought to overhaul GSUSA’s erratic social media presence. Prior to that time our social media channels were existent but unruly. Tweets went unanswered, Facebook comments were frequently off-topic, posts were sporadic, and content was boring at best. In addition, our audience was small: 20,000 fans on Facebook and around 3,000 on Twitter, with slow organic growth. Compounding the problem were various GSUSA branded pages and feeds, most started by internal departments, the further fragmented our audience. Lack of strategy and investment in social media hampered our efforts to engage with active volunteers, Girl Scout alumnae, sponsors, and prospective members. As our 100th anniversary loomed closer, decided to consolidate our efforts, expand our engagement in the digital space, and use social media to increase membership and and start a national conversation about our girl leadership program.
Banking:
Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (ENT.)
Lauren Boyman, Head of Digital Strategy
In August of 2011, MSSB took the industry by surprise and announced that we were the first major wealth management firm to support our Financial Advisors in using social media in a compliant way. We leveraged a compliance technology from a vendor called Socialware, and also leverage their content distribution tool so our Financial Advisors can distribute firm-approved content to their social networks in an easy and efficient way. We wanted our FAs to use social media as another distribution channel for the client-facing materials they send out today via other communications channels (email, mail, phone, etc).
LeavingStone (SMB)
Giorgi Avaliani, Project Manager
The solution was to find a way for the people of Tbilisi to celebrate their own rural heritage, as most of them trace their roots back to different regions of Georgia, each with its distinct traditions, food and clothing. To accomplish our goal we targeted the most personalized space on Facebook – profile pictures, and transformed this intimate form of self-expression into means of spreading our message for free: “We all come from the countryside!” campaign offered Tbilisi residents a social way to connect with their roots, so profile pictures became a mouthpiece for our “propaganda” provoking a wave of celebration of rural origins on Facebook, the most popular online communication platform in the city. This way Bank Constanta used shared sense of belonging to break the ice and build the first layers of trust with urban public in cyberspace, where such bonding was least expected to happen.
Entrepreneurship:
MyHeartMap Challenge at the University of Pennsylvania
Raina Merchant, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine
We aimed to use innovative approaches to improve population cardiovascular health by increasing access to life-saving AEDs in Philadelphia. Our goal was to use a social media crowdsourcing contest and mobile phone technology to accurately identify the location of installed AEDs in Philadelphia.
Customer Services:
The Vanguard Group Inc. (ENT.)
Shayna Beck, Head of Social Media
We strove to overcome the challenges innate to our company’s “virtual” presence. We wanted to give our clients real-time access to authentic and genuine insights from our leadership team, and we wanted to provide our leadership team with a new way to stay in touch with everyday investors and gain client insights.
The Institute of Customer Experience (SMB)
The Institute of Customer Experience (ICE) is 6 months old! This infant organization is part of Human Factors International, the largest UX consulting organization and has been around since 1981. The ICE initiative was formed to create an inclusive and community oriented/crowd sourced platform where the focus would be research around the ‘Future of User Experience’.
The challenge was 2 fold:
1. Severe budgetary constraints
2. With the above constraints, how would this very new entity reach out to its constituent audience, differentiate itself sufficiently from the very high ‘confidentiality ‘ oriented consulting parent organization, HFI AND build its own ore team who were spread out across diverse locations. However, we decided to showcase ourselves not primarily through the website but through a Facebook page called UXTRendspotting (http://www.facebook.com/uxtrendspotting).We felt that creating a platform using Facebook would let us reach a large audiece without major marketing spend AND the medium would also be the message ( of inclusion/community/ crowd sourcing).
Non-Profit
Girl Scouts of the USA (ENT.)
Lillian Ruiz, Social Media Specialist
Girl Scouts of the USA’s Interactive Marketing team sought to overhaul GSUSA’s erratic social media presence. Prior to that time our social media channels were existent but unruly. Tweets went unanswered, Facebook comments were frequently off-topic, posts were sporadic, and content was boring at best. In addition, our audience was small: 20,000 fans on Facebook and around 3,000 on Twitter, with slow organic growth. Compounding the problem were various GSUSA branded pages and feeds, most started by internal departments, the further fragmented our audience. Lack of strategy and investment in social media hampered our efforts to engage with active volunteers, Girl Scout alumnae, sponsors, and prospective members. As our 100th anniversary loomed closer, decided to consolidate our efforts, expand our engagement in the digital space, and use social media to increase membership and and start a national conversation about our girl leadership program.
Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) (SMB)
Tammy Wiggs, SHRM Board Administrator
As more businesses and organizations integrate social media into their operations, human resources professionals are being asked to take a leadership role in the implementation of social media as a talent recruitment and engagement tool. In addition, HR professionals – who comprise our membership – are being asked to create policies to govern the use of social media in the workplace to mitigate the risks companies face when employees are actively communicating to the public via social media. This has posed a particular challenge to the HR professional, who is still seeking to grasp basic knowledge of social media strategies and tactics. This knowledge is not readily available via organizational training as our statistics show that nearly 3 out of 4 companies do not provide any form of social media training to their employees.
Advertising/Marketing
Adobe (ENT.)
Jennifer Kremer, Senior Marketing Manager
The challenges demanded a campaign that would shift the focus from technology/product to a rallying cry that creative professionals can get behind, and serve as a platform that the social marketing strategies and tactics would ladder up to. Supporting these goals were the following objectives:
• Catalyze social conversation in a way Adobe hasn’t done before with past product launches and sustain the momentum
• Address existing stigmas and misperceptions around the membership model while communicating the value proposition of Creative Cloud
• Drive and measure social demand generation
HYDRIVE Energy LLC (SMB)
Rosemarie DiLaura, Associate Marketing Manager
Our goal was the grown our fanbase to 40,000 fans. After discovering that Facebook ads were not yielding the fan growth that we had hoped, we developed a strategy to give a free sticker to each new fan that joined our page. We advertised the promotion on “freebie giveaway” websites which helped to spread the word. The sticker had a catchy slogan – The Caffeine Made Me Do It – and our company website. In order to receive a sticker, new fans had to complete an entry form (name, address, email) which helped us to grow our consumer database and allowed us to follow up with additional promotions. Our fanbase grew 10-fold in a few months and the cost per acquisition for a new fan was 50% less than any advertising campaign we had done on Facebook thus far. It was a win-win. We were capturing new fans and growing our consumer database, and for our fans were getting a sticker.
Social Media Start-Up
Bump Network, Inc.
Kristina Kenyon, VP Marketing & Operations
BUMP.com wants to create a system that allows vehicle owners and drivers a way to communicate with one another. With safety, social and business parameters in mind, BUMP decided that unique identifiers, already visible in the public domain, were a legitimate and safe way to connect legitimate property owners to each other. The most obvious unique identifier is a license plate, which BUMP decided would be the initial focus. BUMP.com also built a benefit program that offers relevant discounts and privileges to BUMP.com members, a bit like AAA. To date BUMP.com has acquired Platester, BUMPchat, and Plateside and has close to 100,000 members.
Voice of the Future
University of Pennsylvania Social Planning & Events Committee
Gregory Reiner, Head of Marketing
I wrote a “code-word” on a piece of paper, placed it in a zip-lock bag, and hid the code-word somewhere on campus. I gave students a Google Maps image of the entire world as a hint for where the code-word was hidden. In order for me to zoom in the map, students had to tweet at @UPennSPEC. For every 50 tweets tweeted at @UPennSPEC, I zoomed the map in one iteration closer to the hidden location of the codeword. The first person to find the code-word and then post it on the Spring Fling 2012 Facebook event would win a free pair of floor passes. Additionally, for each round of 50 tweets, I chose the most exciting, fun-inspiring, and clever tweet and then re-posted all of these “best” tweets on the Spring Fling 2012 Facebook event. Whoever authored the tweet that received the most Facebook “likes” won the other free pair of floor passes. The video explaining the competition achieved 1,181 views and the competition went through 4 iterations before the code-word was found. The tweet with the most “likes” received a number of “likes” in 3 digits. The code-word was a hyperlink that led to another YouTube video congratulating the winner. Tickets sold out faster than any year in Spring Fling history.
Media
Center for White Rose Studies
Denise Heap, President
We believe that our methodology will eventually become standard practice for historical analysis.
To 3) We have created two new public blogs, one a travel blog (TakeMeAlongGuide.wordpress.com), the other a cookbook (GermansInAmerica.wordpress.com). The first highlights a side effect of our mission statement, namely German-Jewish reconciliation. By posting travel tips for Germany and Israel, we invite readers who may know one country but not the other to explore the unknown. The second takes a cookbook from the 1870s, written for Germans (including Jewish Germans) in America, and allows our members to contribute to the cookbook’s creation.Municipalities and Governments
Queensland Police Service
Kym Charlton, Executive Director
The ability to communicate directly to the people of Queensland was invaluable and in turn, allowed QPS to become more effective in supporting and serving the needs of the community. Additionally, these benefits presented QPS with the ability to manage potentially damaging misinformation being disseminated throughout the community and media. Because of this, QPS was recently hailed as “world leaders in the use of social media in disasters” by the Queensland Information Commissioner, Julie Kinross.
Since that time, the QPS has continued to grow its social media presence, recently passing 300,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/QueenslandPolice and approaching 28,000 followers on Twitter http://twitter.com/QPSmedia. In addition to the YouTube Channel http://www.youtube.com/QueenslandPolice, the QPS has started to use Pinterest http://pinterest.com/qldpolice/ for image-based content.
The channels are proving valuable in assisting police investigations, finding missing persons, and broadcasting and receiving information from the community on traffic incidents and critical events.
Globalization
Cognizant (ENT.)
Manikanda Pisharody, Product Manager
Cognizant 2.0 was introduced with intention of addressing the above diverse needs of Globalization through a comprehensive product suite built on top of a robust platform that enables collaborative work management, knowledge management, and a seamless platform for collaboration among geographically distributed project teams across Cognizant’s extended enterprise of Cognizant associates and it’s globally distributed customers and partners.
Tom Lincoln and Tracy Steen (SMB)
Tracy Steen, Artist/Owner
Our online art event was a remarkable success. More than 2 million people viewed our Warhol tribute, and 4,000 people from around the world indicated that they liked our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tom-Lincoln/294179530644094). More than 800 people specifically liked the Warhol tribute piece, and 400 shared it with their friends. Notably, 12,000 people viewed our work after seeing that their friends liked it or by organic means.
People (HR)
Aon
Venetta Linas Paris, Global Interactive Marketing, Social Media
Our global “Pass It On” campaign, which launched last fall at half time of the match between Manchester United and Manchester City at Old Trafford (Aon is the principal partner and global shirt sponsor of Manchester United), was created to engage and unite our colleagues around the world, while enabling them to share knowledge, learn more about our business and physically as well as virtually connect to other colleagues at in-person events or online with rich media such as photos and videos.
Over the course of the eight months, the Pass It On campaign was a global effort to connect colleagues to each other – whether with real-world events or through virtual activities. During that time, a branded Manchester United football travelled throughout the globe physically uniting Aon colleagues in specific geographies.
Corporate Governance
National Association of Corporate Directors
Cheryl Martel, Associate Editor
When NACD began to develop a social media strategy, the team examined the array of channels and selected to focus on Twitter, a blog and LinkedIn. The thought behind limiting the channels was the simpler it is for directors to engage, the more likely they will take the time to do so. NACD then determined the goal of its social media channels would be to encourage dialogue in the director community by sharing insights and news as well as encouraging directors to begin to venture into social media channels. NACD set the following overarching objectives to govern each channel:
- Engage leading corporate governance and influential technology experts to offer a diverse perspective on social media in the corporate governance realm by including followers and readers.
- Educate and promote leading boardroom practices through NACD resources, publications, campaigns and events.
- Establish a coordinated and organized strategy across all channels.
