By adaptive - September 30th, 2013

As Director of Marketing and Social Media for Qualcomm, Jessica brings 15 years of experience driving business growth through integrated marketing campaigns across CPG, Sport, and Tech industries.

Jessica Jensen, Director of Marketing, Social Media, Qualcomm

Focusing on social media across your company, what have been the core drivers behind the development of your social media activity?

I think that all businesses no matter their size have realised that social media is something they can’t ignore. For us, social media has become vitally important to our businesses. Platforms may come and go but the notion of communicating online in social communities is here to stay.

Social media is clearly one of the most important innovations businesses have seen in some time, and is fundamentally changing the way that we communicate. It may sound clichéd, but social media really allows us to have a whole new level of engagement with our consumers.

Social media is core for us. Qualcomm has seen these platforms as a hand-in-glove strategy with our PR activity, specifically because until recently Qualcomm have been predominantly a B2B company, but with Snapdragon and Gobi chipsets enabling technologies, we are beginning to educate consumers about what’s inside their smartphones and expressing why this matters to them in everyday language. Social is a perfect venue for this kind of storytelling.

Although most of our products, such as Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, are not sold direct to consumers, we could see that the conversations they have about those products via an OEM partner for instance, are important to not only pay attention to, but to also influence as much as we can. We know that if the consumer view of our company is positive and strong, this equates to enhanced relationships with our business partners, and generates demand from end users.

 

How is social media organised within your company? What organisational models do you use and why?

Social is its own team, sitting within the corporate marketing team. We have groups that are focused on PR, video, brand and advertising, content creation, and of course social media. We don’t see social media as a faction of PR or digital marketing, which is often where social media activity begins. For us it is integrated throughout all of our marketing and PR activity. We see social as an essential but not separate component of our marketing activity. And we all report to the same CMO.

There are certainly campaigns that originate out of the social team, but the social team will also have input into campaigns that come out of the brand, PR or partner teams. The social team is brought in as almost consultants to advise how social media could be leveraged with these new campaign ideas.

 

As a corporate user of social networks, how does your company value the networks it has a presence on?

Just like other organisations we know that placing a value on the social media activity we are involved with can be highly complex. Social media, like much of digital, is a double-edged sword. We generate a lot of data. With digital properties you can have analysis paralysis. We look at what we think is relevant to the broader leadership of the company and ensure social measurement is laddering up to broader marketing and business goals.

Our social media “activity metrics” always need to relate and drive toward our broader marketing or business metrics. So, we look at three key KPIs for social: The first is impressions, the second is engagement and the last is audience size. We also consider sentiment, share of voice, and integration within larger campaigns. It’s a balance of measuring quantity and quality. Ideally, we maintain our healthy engagement rate as we build our base of advocates.

Simply using numbers of followers as your only measure is clearly not going to tell you the whole story about the campaign you are running. So we use applications like Sprinklr, Buddy Media (now part of Salesforce), Crimson Hexagon and the analysis tools built into Facebook and Twitter to gain a more holistic picture.

We also look at what the cost of those impressions would have been if we had to purchase them. This gives us a guide to what our social media activity is actually worth in real dollars. This may seem like a simplistic approach, but it allows us to show our organization how social media equates to traditional media and the value we derive from nurturing these ongoing relationships.

 

Can you outline a recent initiative that included a social media component?

Sure. Our Born Mobile campaign, earlier this year, was a big win for the company. Our goal was to launch an umbrella campaign that would elevate the Qualcomm brand, scale globally and cement Qualcomm as a leader in mobile category.

We launched the Best Bus Stop video here in the US and World Without Mobile in the UK. Largely, based on the viral nature of those videos, we generated over 10 million YouTube views and 77 million impressions. We’ve got a couple more Born Mobile videos in the pipeline aimed at other key markets for Qualcomm.

 

The Born Mobile campaign is a great example of us using an asymmetrical approach to marketing – lead with owned content, amplify through paid and close partnership with PR. We surpassed our own internal benchmarks and many of our competitors, with pick up in Huffington Post, Gawker, and Fortune.

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