By adaptive - September 12th, 2012

Gemalto is a leader in the development of security technology. Their expertise spans the entire process for creating digital security solutions that embed the trust of their clients and customers. ...

Gemalto is a leader in the development of security technology. Their expertise spans the entire process for creating digital security solutions that embed the trust of their clients and customers. Gemalto develop secure operating systems and run them on trusted devices – like UICC and smart cards, banking cards, ePassports, eID cards, tokens and other devices – which they assemble and personalize. Gemalto’s know-how and field experience mean they are uniquely placed to support their clients in the delivery to end-users of trusted solutions for the digital and wireless world.

Tim Cawsey – Head of Branding and Content, Gemalto

Tim manages Gemalto's branding, corporate publications and social media. He has been with the company for 12 years in a variety of marketing and communication roles based in France and the USA. Prior to this he worked in Tech Transfer at the University of Manchester. Tim speaks French and Spanish and holds an MSc in Digital Marketing Communications.

Q As a corporate user of social media, how does your company value your social activity?

A Gemalto has been involved in social since early 2009 on a project basis but saw the value to apply to our whole organization and created guidelines and a strategy in late 2010. We’ve been working on a campaign-based approach using our blog as the hub for our content and have seen good value particularly in terms of awareness and web traffic.

Q Measuring the effectiveness of social media activity is a focus for corporations at the moment. How does your company track the ROI that its social media activity delivers?

A Our objectives for social media are mainly based around raising awareness for our corporate brand and promoting specific software or solutions such as mobile payment, secure eBanking or identity management. In terms of awareness we measure this in terms of increased web traffic or followers while campaigns could be based around webinar inscriptions or whitepaper downloads.

Q What are the unique benefits of social media over other marketing channels?

A Social media needs to be used as part of an integrated marketing campaign and we shouldn’t forget the other channels. However, it offers many advantages in terms of reaching people you couldn’t in a physical context and creating word of mouth, as consumers trust their friends more than a brand’s messages. It is also great for SEO and raising web traffic particularly in light of the latest changes to Google’s search algorithm, which favour frequently-updated content-rich sites such as blogs over more static corporate sites.

Q Is social media integrated into existing marketing strategies? How do you go about including social in a broader marketing strategy?

A Social only works well if it is integrated into wider activities and therefore we work on a series of campaigns both to promote the corporate brand and specific solutions where it is just one channel of the marketing mix. The broader campaign could also include a web element, tradeshows, direct emailing, PR, customer magazines and more.

Q Can you outline a recent marketing initiative that included a social media component? How is your company innovating in this area?

A One of our high growth areas is in secure access to IT networks to replace passwords with stronger authentication for PCs, tablets, smartphones and cloud services. This is a very “noisy” market and many influencers such as bloggers, consultants, analysts etc.

In order to reach out to these influencers we commissioned a survey into CIO’s security concerns. In itself this isn’t novel but in order to increase engagement we used our blog, Twitter and agency to reach out to influencers to crowd source the questions for the survey. The results became a series of blog posts and a whitepaper, which was then used for lead generation.

Q Is social media now offering corporations tangible commercial opportunities to sell their goods or services?

A There have been examples of consumer goods manufacturers such as Dell selling PCs via Twitter. However, we work in a complex B2B environment with long sales cycles and so far we do not have a commercial objective behind our activities – this may change but I don’t believe the tools exist to truly track how social contacts become sales (maybe someone from Salesforce or Radian 6 would disagree ;-).