By adaptive - January 5th, 2013

In an exclusive interview with Thomas Messett, Global Editor in Chief of Social Media at Nokia - we look at how the Finnish technology giant has leveraged social's opportunities for business...

In an exclusive interview with Thomas Messett, Global Editor in Chief of Social Media at Nokia - we look at how the Finnish technology giant has leveraged social's opportunities for business gain.

Over the past 150 years, Nokia has evolved from a riverside paper mill in south-western Finland to a global telecommunications leader connecting over 1.3 billion people. Nokia is a global brand that has a long history in the mobile phone sector. From the invention of text messaging in 1993 to the introduction of PureView technology in 2012, Nokia is continually exploring new ways of turning innovative ideas into useful tools that keep people connected. Their latest is the new the Nokia Lumia smart phone range.

Thomas Messett, Global Editor in Chief – Social Media, Nokia

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

As an end goal we obviously want to drive acquisition and retention of our customers, as such we look at social media through a lens of four outcomes for consumers:

• Help consumers learn more about our products.
• Help consumers to buy our products / make a purchase decision.
• Help owners to do more with our products to get the best out of them.
• Help consumers to tell more of their friends about how great our products are – online and offline.

These act as the focus points for all our activity and we look at metrics and KPI’s related to those four points to derive the value of our work.

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?

There are a number of ways to cut this and none of them are perfect. The biggest problem really is that social media is actually a very broad term encompassing areas across business functions. So one ROI figure won’t work. Here are a few examples of things we look at:

1. Blogger outreach / advocate outreach: we have a large blogger / fan database we survey regularly to understand their recommendation habits for our devices – we look at the commercial value of recommended devices and purchased devices from their recommendations based on average selling price etc.
2. We have a social commerce programme that uses mechanics like “refer a friend” via Facebook. This can actually track couponing right through to conversion and give us a clear commercial value.
3. For areas like customer care we can look at cases solved in social and a cost per case compared to costs of a traditional call centre.

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

Yes it is. Implementing into the broader strategy is often based on education, in a company as big as Nokia the key is getting the whole business to understand value and limitations and consider social in everything they do. They don’t have to use it in everything, but consider the opportunity.

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

We have just launched our campaign for the new Lumia 920 and 820 smart phones using a campaign call to action #Switch (or in some markets #SwitchtoLumia). The idea is Lumia is a very different and innovative smart phone compared to an iPhone or droid or BB that people are locked into. We want consumers to switch to a lumia and change their perceptions of our devices. But we don’t want them to take our word for it, so, for our TV ads we found real consumers from across the world who have switched to Lumia devices and created the commercials starring them eg:

We also have lots more real switcher stories on YouTube:

And this is only the very beginning with more coming globally and locally over the next few weeks. As part of this our Germany team has run a series of highly successful but controversial virals like this:

To generate conversation and we have all this content as well as content from our consumers and fans on reasons to switch highlighted on our Nokia.com/switch page – the centre of a lot of upcoming plans. This campaign is social to the core, heroing our consumers and early adopters to tell their stories about our devices.

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

To an extent, as on the one hand there is no room for storefronts in Facebook and couponing can only go so far. On the other hand social media offers a real opportunity to engage consumers and fans who have a connection to your brand in programmers like refer a friend (we’re testing this at the moment) to drive sales. However, brands need to be wary of going too far down the couponing / discount route.

What other opportunities does being active on social media offer your business?

From R+D to customer care! For example we noticed through our SM monitoring recently that there was an issue with an update we rolled out for one of our smart phones. We were able to track the issue, suspend the update and fix it in a matter of hours. If we had waited for complaints to come via traditional channels it would have been days maybe a week and the impact / cost / brand damage would have been far greater.

How do you see social media developing within your company over the next few years?

I see it becoming a day-to-day part of life in the company, not something cool or special confined to a few guys or ‘gurus’ or agencies, but something everyone does without thinking about it. I am sure the networks and the tech will change and evolve, but it should become a lot more like using email than like any kind of special tool.