Social Media: What are Utility Comm nicators Communicators Doing? John Egan Egan Energy Communications APPA Customer Connections Conference Anaheim, CA, Oct. 25, 2010
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Why Social Media? New technology adopted for Functional reasons Experiential reasons
Culture a driving force Social Media exhaustion g in setting Compared with 2009, how much time do you spend playing “FarmVille”? 10/25/2010
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Life Cycle of “Friend” “Friend” became a verb around 2007. In 2009, editors at New Oxford American Dictionary chose “unfriend” as the Word of the Year. #1 reason for “unfriending”: unfriending : Frequent unimportant posts Source: Christopher Sibona, University of Colorado
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Building the Case “People were talking about us, and we weren’t p part of the conversation – that made an impact on our leadership.” “Timing is everything. We were fortunate to begin really using social media when Larry King did. Any earlier and we would have been too ‘out there’.”
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Starting & Growing Some utilities jumped into the deep end of the pool Big Three/Big Four all at once
Most preferred to wade in Twitter, FB, YouTube FB, Twitter, YouTube Blog, Blog FB, FB Twitter, Twitter YouTube YouTube, Twitter, FB
Use of LinkedIn & Flickr? 10/25/2010
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Key Insights “Social media has helped MLGW recover the faith of its customers.” “We were surprised by how many cheerleaders we had in the community.”
Social Media changes how “Social and where we communicate, but not what we say.” 10/25/2010
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Key Insights “It’s like swimming: you need training, but after a while, you just have to jump in.” “It’s not a time sink, but it’s easier to start than it is to maintain.” “It takes more time than you think if you want to do it right.” 10/25/2010
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Key Insights “Managing internal cultural issues was a big challenge.” “If you don’t invest time at the front end developing a strategy, you’ll waste time at the back end cleaning up.” Start by working with HR HR— “Start present a united front from the beginning.” 10/25/2010
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Key Insights “Before launching, develop an editorial calendar. We didn’t, and we nearly wore ourselves out keeping up.” “What works for Zappos and Ashton Kutcher may not work for a utility.” “Manage your expectations: take “M t ti t k small steps and keep moving forward.” 10/25/2010
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Value Creation Increases CSAT Reduces calls to call center d ring o tages during outages. Shortens customer wait time. Projects/Strengthens brand attributes Transparency Timeliness Customer-responsive
Supports HR recruitment 10/25/2010
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Value Creation “Turning around negative sentiment.” “Allow us to know what people are saying about us.” “Reach customers in their preferred channel.” Communicate directly C i t di tl with ith customers without the media’s filter. 10/25/2010
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Metrics Number of friends, followers, and YouTube views FB Friends: 35-3,000 Twitter Followers: 170-4,517 YouTube Video Views: 988>40,000
Customer awareness Real goal is engagement Relying on anecdotes now 10/25/2010
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Metrics “Have decided not to adopt yet.” any yet. “Not sure which metrics are appropriate.” Can’t control for, “If we didn’t have social media…”
“We know our videos on CO poisoning have saved lives.” 10/25/2010
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Internal Issues Process Management A few utilities have created a cross-functional social media steering committee. Others: “We’re still in the startup phase, we don’t have a process yet.”
Staffing 0.05 to 1.5 FTE
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Positive Surprises “Our leadership has supported experimentation without ‘lessons p learned’ from other utilities.” “Vulgar comments about us never materialized.” “It hasn’t been the burden I g it would be.” thought “Customers came to our defense when others were criticizing us.”
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Positive Surprises “Developing followers on Twitter was pretty easy easy.” “We got 40 interactions with one post. Now if each of those people told their friends and families…” “The number of followers we have – we’re a utility for goodness sakes!” 10/25/2010
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Negative Surprises “Zero customer engagement i stuff t ff – we can’t’t even give away.” “Hoped it would get bigger faster.” Hard to create a two-way “Hard conversation.”
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Negative Surprises “Outages seem to drive i d we d signups, and don’t’t h have lengthy outages.” Public disclosure rules It takes more time than you think. think
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“If I Had to Redo our SM Initiative…” Be more strategic in use of SM tools (though dabbling has its benefits). Start with FB, not Twitter. Don’t create different pages for different services. Start years earlier St t two t li Don’t wait to be pushed by external events. 10/25/2010
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Recommendations Pick your battles (with ti management) t) executive Keep perspective “At the end of the day, we’re not Jet Blue.”
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Recommendations Keep working to build internal support Some leaders seem SM as a waste of time The “seek forgiveness, not permission” strategy can be risky Position SM as a strategic risk management tool 10/25/2010
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Recommendations Develop useful metrics Anecdotes are OK—for now “I know it when I see it.”
Share SM data with your regulators
Stay tuned, keep learning Behavioral economics Customer experience mgt.
“The answer is out there.” 10/25/2010
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Thank You! For more information: John Egan Egan Energy Communications 720-949-4906 J h @E
[email protected] E
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