Eurocomm 2011 (Part II): Detecting Value & Twittering Ashes

EuroComm 2011 took place last week in Turin, Italy. Over two day over 100 international communications professionals gathered to listen to the contemporary leaders and discuss the challenges they face in an ever changing society and industry.

In the ideal setting of Villa Gualino, overlooking the whole city of Turin and facing the Alps, we heard from high calibre communicators such as Stephan Dujarric, director of News and Media, United nations, about the need to find creative solutions to increasing budget cuts and ongoing compelling communications needs. He illustrated how the UN has been Bartering  for Effective Communications.

Monica Poggio is Head of Corporate Culture, Identity and Communications at Unicredit, Italy’s top banking group and the result of the integration of several Italian banks that began in the 1990s and continued for more than a decade adding banks and operations in Germany, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe. The Group has now more than 160,000 employees and 9,500 branches serving 40 million customers in 22 countries from Italy to Kazakhstan.

Monica illustrated how Unicredit in 2009 created OneNet, an internal social media platform, in order to support the complex task of maintaining a consistent message across several countries, time zones, cultures and organizational layers, as well as accelerating internal processes.

They developed a gradual internal system, allowing employees to create individual pages one hand and build communities on the other, giving visibility to their individual competences and know-how, as well as increasing senior management understanding and involvement.

In terms of governance Monica claimed “It takes a village!” The centralized project management approach has shifted toward a hub & spoke model. “The need for consistency and guidance is constant, but diversity has proven to be a true richness in content outcome,” added Monica. “We discovered that Internal Social Media empowers corporate identity and culture and supports change management,” she said.

She also suggested that traditional ROI should not be the only metric use to evaluate internal social media, while the strength of the relationships built is the real differentiating factor; IOR (Impact of Relationship) is therefore a better suited evaluation tool.

Paolo Cederle, Unicredit’s Head of Group operations and ICT, underlined how implementing OneNet  required a shift in mentality, from vertical to horizontal, but how peer to peer has been embraced positively by as many as 50% of the employees. More than 500 spontaneous blogs, at all hierarchical levels, have spurred as a result, bringing new ideas and helping the innovation trajectory.

31 active communities spread across 11 countries, 171 topics discussed, 1400 proposal are some of the metrics that resulted in 10 concrete new bottom line affecting projects developed. The social approach forced the organization to ask itself: who are the real enablers?

Lessons learnt included:

  • Several functions should “own” social media efforts in an organization: IT, communications, Management, etc.
  • Strong commitment from top management is necessary
  • The community manager’s role is key
  • This internal effort allowed Unicredit to test and experiment in a safe environment what the group envisions already to create for their clients.  The objective is to offer a co-design and co-delivering model to its customers in a relatively short term.

 Aurelie Valtat, online communications Manager at Eurocontrol, shared also her lessons learnt during the ash cloud crisis last year, following the eruption of the Icelandic volcano.

When individual countries begun shutting down air space for security measures, Eurocontrol was blamed unjustly in the press and had to react fast. With Eurocontrol’s website crashed due to the massive access of travellers stranded worldwide, Twitter and other social media platforms emerged as ideal tools to still communicate and inform constituencies in real time. On day 2, already several thousands of followers were asking questions on Twitter about the short term and the long term forecast of the situation. Eurocontrol had a visibility of about 6 hours forward. Aurelie Valtat braced her 3 laptops and 2 smart-phones and kept busy for several days and night, replying to all those inquiries. She energetically highlighted the need to be very human in these specific crisis communications actions: being available and responding rapidly to the concerns of the passengers with a personable approach, vs. a voiceless organization, proved to be a winning strategy.

“In social media, the difference between the number of “likes” and the number of “loves” is the engagement factor, “claimed Valtat.

Interactivity is really key, and the nature of the information shared should be concrete and useful. For this purpose, the Social Media officer should be de facto present in the crisis room and be informed, just as much the social media channels need to start being included into the crisis communications plan.

“Momentum really builds up when mainstream media relies on social media outlets for content,” recalled Valtat.

The future of social media, according to Aurelie Valtat, lies in mobile applications and widgets. However, she stressed the importance to have several trustworthy team members trained to utilize these tools properly, so that in case of a crisis the burden is equally spread within the team. “There is an inevitable blurring of personal, professional and institutional identities on social media,” said Valtat. Women seem to be better apt since their innate sense of empathy transpires through the medium.

She also stressed the negative impact that certain lurking activities entail: companies creating the Twitter account and leaving it inactive don’t realize how badly this reflect on their image.

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