Corporate communications and social media

One of the challenges of our ongoing IQ benchmarking process is making sure that any changes in the rapidly developing webscape are incorporated into our methodology. The two and a half years since we’ve been reviewing and scoring corporate websites across Europe and the wider world has seen a profound transformation.

Social media, of course, has been around for a while: Facebook launched in 2004; YouTube in 2005; and Twitter in 2006. However, as the name implies, these services were primarily used for social networking. It has taken some time for the business ramifications of social media to be widely accepted.

Companies are now catching up fast – perhaps most tellingly in the field of product endorsement. One of the biggest success stories here is the LA-based Ad.ly, a company that specialises in connecting top tier brands with celebrities, who then endorse their products on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Celebrities are being paid up to $5,000 a tweet and earning up to $50,000 a month: Snoop Dogg has tweeted in praise of the Toyota Sienna while Kim Kardashian allegedly earns £7,000 a tweet to “say nice things about Google and Microsoft”. And it’s not restricted to America. Range Rover has signed up the likes of Daisy Lowe and Ben Shephard to tweet about their new 4×4.

Nor is it just about marketing. Social media is becoming increasingly important in the more rarefied field of corporate communications. Today’s users don’t visit just the corporate site for information: instead they use every web resource to find out what other people think as well. Ignoring the ‘chatter’ that goes on outside of the corporate site is a missed opportunity – although, as Nestlé discovered, engaging with social media can be dangerous if you get it wrong.

However, if you get it right you can respond to commentary (or criticism) the moment it happens, showing that you are in touch and that you care about what people are saying. Social media is also a valuable distribution channel for press releases and other corporate messages. You can even use it to drive traffic back to your corporate site – one of our client’s statistics revealed recently that Twitter was the third biggest referrer of traffic to their online report.

Companies like Benetton and Centrica are leading the field in offering dedicated social media sections and pages on their corporate websites and publishing links to all of the sites they’re subscribed to. While many companies may be happy with a presence on just one or two social networks, this is something we’re sure we going to see a lot more of in the future.

We’re reflecting these changes in our IQ benchmarking by positively scoring companies that offer social media sections. But in what is a telling sign of how the website will evolve, we also think it necessary to score companies for the corporate content that they are publishing on external sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It’s a lot more work for us, of course – but it has to be done to build a true picture of how companies are communicating their message.

Posted by Marcus

[Image: Creative Commons License / © David King]

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