4:20 — Peter Waldheim introduces Valeria Maltoni, SunGard’s Director of Marketing Communications.
4:21 — Valeria: How did we sell social media in a company that needs to be conservative by nature of what it does – business continuity management and planning.
4:22 — Online,Valeria is the supporting actor to the business to make them successful at what they do.
4:23 — Valeria: I can say with confidence that they have improved service offerings, become more helpful, and shaped category elevation for business continuity.
4:24 — SunGard is a very data driven company. The branding for SunGard is the infrastructure in sales and customer service, so that the applications can run smoothly.
4:26 — Valeria embraced both advertising and PR. In PR, she moved from just a stream of news releases to people relations. She switched content to educate, and contribute to media stories.
4:27 — Because I’m the PR contact, I’d get calls from customers who wanted to reach someone but were not sure whom to reach. The first step was to let them know we wanted to be helpful and tell them exactly what we would do.
4:28 — Valeria: What if we reach out to our customers and ask them to tell a story about how they rely on SunGard? We took our advertising from: Here are our products and services to here is our customers’ story (Valeria showed a video of SunGard CIO discussing the people that make SunGard).
4:32 — Valeria connected with leadership by tracking results from PR and advertising. The data built reliability, which built credibility, which led to trust internally. That’s how you can develop a connection with customers.
4:35 — Internally, SunGard has 20,000 employees globally. They launched Yammer internally. There was thirst around SunGard to do something to contribute.
4:36 — Valeria: We have an internal network with community facilitators to make sure every question is answered in a timely fashion.
4:38 — Valeria: We have an external community of users of our products and services consisting of more than 500,000 people globally. SunGard provides a platform for peer conversations to learn from each other about business continuity and crisis communications.
4:39 — Valeria reads business continuity and disaster recovery blogs, and she makes connections online for SunGard.
4:40 — Valeria: You cannot buy trust back.
4:41 — Though her customers are not online, analysts, media, CIOs, and people she needs to meet are there.
4:42 — In integrating the marketing team, the service delivery team, customer touch points and product development, she brings a cross section of all the groups to get together. The company’s tag line is: “Keeping people and information connected.”
Q&A
Q: Yammer is your internal blogging tool. Are there any limitations you need to place there?
A: Internal communications started seeding conversations to provide examples. When we had our official launch, we set official guidelines with suggestions of how to use it. People are eager to join stuff that is happening. It is important to give people something to do.
Q: How often do you monitor posts? Do you find issues with people hi-jacking topics? Do you allow anonymous posts?
A: We have identities attached to every account for Yammer. We use Radian6 for outside monitoring. Internal communications report to me so I make sure. When you show the monitoring and if you aren’t telling your story yourself, your customers might wonder what’s going on.
Q: How do you measure success because it isn’t based on revenue?
A: We go after the issues and talk about business continuity – and it got picked up by bloggers. I reached out to someone, connected with that person, and was introduced to a whole community. The interaction with business continuity folks was a success.
