Driving Product Adoption via Social Media Engagement
In the fast moving world of social media, listening and learning are the critical first steps for any organization. But they aren’t enough. Translating those hard-earned insights into real time social media engagement by filtering and responding to influential voices and highly relevant posts is an even greater challenge. Doing it all for a community of over 20 million IT professionals, without swamping your team, is the situation Microsoft’s Springboard team found themselves in. Microsoft took on the challenge by turning to Visible Technologies® and their Social Intelligence solutions.
The Problem
The social media challenge facing Springboard was a daunting one: Listen to, engage with, and rapidly deliver relevant content for a global community of tens of millions of IT professionals in order to help drive adoption of Windows 7. With thousands of potentially relevant blog posts and forum comments generated each day from sites scattered across the Web and limited staff time available, Microsoft needed a solution which would help them have the broadest impact while focusing on the most influential voices and content.
Specifically, the Springboard team identified three distinct needs:
- Find and engage the most influential voices from within the community, going beyond the easy to fi nd mainstream media and high profile bloggers
- Respond rapidly and effectively to questions, concerns, and criticisms
- Develop or collect highly targeted content on Springboard in response to the rapidly evolving needs and interests of the community
The Solution
Microsoft turned to Visible Intelligence® as an effective solution to all three needs. Microsoft also valued Visible®’s direct engagement functionality, excellent support, and availability of project management and engagement expertise.
The Springboard team quickly expanded their use of Visible Intelligence from listening to management of their social media engagements. Visible worked closely with Microsoft to develop a scalable process to identify, filter, and score a targeted list of highly relevant blog and forum posts for consideration each day. Visible Intelligence started with keyword-based searches to identify roughly 3,000 candidate posts daily. These in turn were scored for sentiment based on criteria set by Microsoft, narrowing the list down to 400 posts, which were then passed along to the Springboard engagement team. Each post received a score of Red (negative sentiment), Green (positive), Orange (mixed), or Grey (neutral). The filtering and scoring process enabled Springboard engagement specialists to daily review 100-150 posts and respond to 30-60 on average.
To further increase the volume of engagements the Springboard team could handle, Visible Intelligence eliminated the need for each team member to create individual user profiles and login credentials on the myriad of sites, blogs, and forums that anchor the IT professional community. A team member quickly created a single profile within the Visible Intelligence application, which in turn handled profile creation automatically on each site.
The Results
By working with Visible Technologies, the Springboard team has:
- Scaled their community engagements from dozens to hundreds each week
- Reduced the time needed to identify and respond to highly relevant posts from hours to minutes
- Identified 250 influential subject matter experts in 29 countries
- Received positive feedback from within the IT professional community about the breadth and quality of their participation and responsiveness
Visible Intelligence is a powerful engagement tool, allowing us to quickly find the posts we’re most interested in, and then use the same tool to directly respond to and track conversations. What would have taken us hours before can be accomplished in minutes. We’ve also found Visible Intelligence is avaluable tool for finding a wide range of influential community members we wouldn’t otherwise see.
Stephen Rose Sr. Community Manager, Microsoft Corporation