2:13 — Phil Nieman introduces Yann Gourvennec, Head of Internet & Digital Media at Orange Business Services.
2:14 — Yann is in charge of 50 + websites. Social media is an integral part of their strategy.
2:15 — Orange Group is over 29,000 people and distributing all over the world.
2:16 — Yann says that social media is not as widely known and that there is still some evangelizing to do. It is fashionable, but you can’t just jump in.
2:17 — Yann: I told my boss that we have to increase brand awareness and do this “social media thing” and when he asked the ROI, I told him I didn’t know the answer. And I still don’t, but I try to address the question.
2:18 — Orange is B2B and we are always getting used to the new tools of social media. Yann recommend the book Solution Selling about the B2B world.
2:19 — Yann: Social media is what Orange is using to spread the word of mouth and help solve problems.
2:20 — Buyers, who are passionate about niche subjects and annoyed by marketing interruptions, identify their own problems. They want to engage with Orange.
2:21 — Orange has to engage with many people in the Orange Eco-system.
2:22– Yann: We had to start a revolution and we got hundreds of people buying into this. Orange didn’t have a plan, but they had passion.
2:23 — Yann presents the top sites visited at Orange.
2:24 — Orange created their blog 4 years ago and now they have more than 10 blogs. They have at least 5 comments that improve major security aspects of their products. They have interaction with clients as a B2B company.
2:26 – Orange.business.tv is where they started from. They made many mistakes (including software) that couldn’t be seen behind firewalls.
2:27 — Starting just a year ago, they have made major changes in technology, editorial, and production for Orange Business TV.
2:28 — Now they have over 200 videos online, 50% in English, and 35,268 videos played over 10 months – a weekly average of 1,500 videos.
2:30 — Yann shows a video about how you can use Facebook to pick up details and steal information that has been viewed thousands of times, and teaches why you must be careful with social media.
2:31 — Yann: When I see Forrester, Cisco, Google, and I look at our context – that is ROI for you. Maybe we can’t measure it.
2:32 — It’s not about presence in Twitter; it’s about engagement.
Q&A:
Q: What have you done to encourage customers to give you user generated engagement?
A: In stages – we have to get very hands-on. We ask people from syndicates to take time and give us information that we can use and they can share as well. Paul Dunay of Avaya adds that there are a lot of partners involved in creating evidence.
Q: How did you seed the content at first?
A: We tried everything. We had bloggers interview themselves, product demonstrations, and service demonstrations. Perhaps next year we’ll move into another stage of outsourcing simple interviews and we’ll do more fully-fledged programs ourselves. We will do podcast programs as well. Orange is using an online radio studio to interview people around the world. Mostly it’s a repository where you can take the videos and share them.
Q: How do you attract followers/fans as a B2B company?
A: We have syndicated to the sales force and company to share. We also find people through Yammer who would be interested in helping spread the word.
Q: Why did you choose your own TV channel over YouTube?
A: Other networks can block the content and it can cost money to keep them all up. We stream it and host it ourselves.
