The Chief Social Media Officer: “Not here to manage a blog” – Podcast

Philippe Borremans

During the 2009 Summit of the European Association of Communication Directors in Brussels on 2-3 July, I spoke with Philippe Borremans who left IBM last month to become Chief Social Media Officer at Van Marcke Groep in Belgium. Philippe certainly is Europe’s first CSMO – probably even the world’s first.

I spoke with Philippe about why his company decided to create this position, what his role is and where his role sits in the organization. The result is an interesting 6-minute insight in this unique job that also might inspire your company to think about the use of social media at a more strategic level.

Podcast: listen to and download Shoestalk with Philippe Borremans.

Is your company blogging? – Podcast

It’s still a dilemma for many companies. Will we start a blog? Who will blog? Do we allow our employees to blog? And can we tell them what to say and what not to say about our company? Don’t worry if you feel I’m describing your company, you are not alone out there! The far majority of global businesses don’t blog and many are weighing the pros and the cons.

But there are also great examples where blogging has become a routinely job in an employee’s daily live. Companies where blogging is highly accepted and adopted by large numbers of employees who speak of their work and their company in public blogs. They seem to know what they are doing: they blog professionally, speak credibly and authentically about their company, and by doing so add undoubtedly to their company’s corporate reputation.

I had the great pleasure to meet a senior comms director of one such company, Terry McKenzie of Sun Microsystems. We spoke this week at a New Media Conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, about how Sun saw its employee blogging community grow to over 4,500 bloggers. Listen to this podcast how Terry explains how Sun got to such dynamic blogging community, what the value of blogging is to Sun and how simple their blogging rules are.

Podcast: listen to and download Shoestalk with Terry McKenzie

Leave your comment to share your experience and learnings. A big thank you on behalf of those companies who are in the process of deciding whether and how to blog!

New Media Conference Amsterdam

Today’s first day at the Amsterdam New Media Conference at Schiphol Airport proved once more to me what different views companies have on the use and value of social media. Terry McKenzie from Sun Microsystems chaired the day and kicked off with a presentation that showed the greatly inspiring culture at Sun to use social media in employees’ everyday work. 4,500 employees are blogging about their work, discuss their work in online communities and most of it happens in an external environment, which makes everyone able to follow and comment on them. A similar great presentation followed from Kerry Bridge, Digital Media Head at Dell, UK. She gave a very practical overview of ideas and suggestions how to improve the value of social media in our day-to-day corporate communi cations work. Dell’s IdeaStorm seems a highly interesting concept, which has generated some 300,000 ideas from customers, leading to some 300 product improvement ideas that have actually been integrated in Dell’s products.

Jan Taug of Telenor showed the virtual workspace concept at the Norvegian mobile operator. It is a well-designed architecture combining many of the online tools. Of course, the many clever ways of integrating employees’ mobile devices formed an integral part of the design.

From the mobile and IT techies we switched to B-2-B companies in the chemicals, insurance and agriculture industries. It was not unexpected to see a gap in the use of social media. For B-2-B companies, using social media to better manage the company’s reputation seems the most important driver. There was a common understanding between Stephen Delvoye of Bekaert and myself that a company’s .com (corporate website) is the centerpiece of any online strategy: it is the prime source of information for stakeholders and social media tools should first and foremost have the function of trafficing stakeholders back to your information center.

I gave a presentation on how corporate communicators should link their social media tactics to the business context and the corporate culture of their company. I talked about how we apply social media tools at Syngenta, including our Youtube channel and Twitter experiences and the success of podcasts with our employees. The internal use of social media tools must not be underestimated: they are a great way of informing and supporting employees tell their story about the company and their work, and hence serve as excellent tools to create true Ambassadors. At Syngenta, we put much effort into this.

It struck me how many Scandinavian colleagues attend the event. It’s clear that online engagement is high in the Northern European countries. I am happy to hear what other participants thought of our first Conference Day and what their learnings were!

2008 Journalist Survey on use of social media

Last year I conducted a small survey among a group of journalists I frequently work with. I was curious to learn how much they really made use of online and new media tools. At the time, most journalists weren’t using many apps, the corporate website still was regarded the prime source of information.

We’re nearly a year down the road. I’ld really be interested to learn from journalists how they are using social media in their daily work? Are blogs becoming a more trusted source of information? Do social communities at all play a role? What about apps like Twitter?

This video was recorded at a conference in Amsterdam last year May, where I spoke about the use of social media in corporate communications. Bowen Craggs interviewed me on the outcomes of the survey. If you’re a journalist, especially from a print medium, leave your reaction. I’m most interested!

It’s about time

It’s about time that I finally let my own blog see the daylight. So often talked about it, never made the move. Any particular reason? Guess I was -still am, actually- afraid that I am not able to keep the blog going.

Keeping the momentum is everything if you don’t want to write for yourself. But will I have enough time? And will I have enough inspiration? I decided that blogs are like any social media strategy: you can think and rethink your ideas time and again, but in the end you just got to do it and learn by doing. I want to be taken out of my comfort zone, be challenged, try new things, hit a wall, get up again and in the end achieve great results. No risks, no results.

So, here we go. I have no editorial calendar, no agenda. But you’ll find me most often writing about my professional passions: corporate communications, the role of modern agriculture to feed our world, and multicultural organizations and societies. Do chip in, join me, debate with me, talk to others via my blog, be critical, be smart, have humor, and above all: enjoy sharing and learning!