Anita Veszeli, Head of Social Engagement at Ericsson

My name is Anita Veszeli and I'm Head of Social Engagement and Advocacy globally at Ericsson. How I describe my job role is that how to drive Ericsson and the whole organization through the social media maturity, getting really that transformative power and climbing up that ladder. I think social media or its role within Ericsson has shifted in ten years so much. I remember ten years ago when I was one of the cool young people who, oh, they know something about social and actually they have an account and they are posting. To today, whenever social is, it's not that easy. It's not about posting, it's not just organic, it's paid. What works for engagement, what works for paid social, for employees. It is essential parts of our everyday life and also how it makes business impact. So I think it has changed a lot in ten years. If a campaign is successful, I think we're, and how do we measure campaigns that are successful? It always comes with the objective. What is the objective of each of the campaigns? Is it share of voice? Is it driving conversions? Is it driving sign-ups? Is it brand awareness? Each of them needs different KPIs and different tactics to use and different assets. So I always put the objective first and then the KPIs and then of course success is whenever we met at least the KPIs. If I would share like one campaign and maybe we can call it campaign. It's related to an event which is the biggest one for our Exxon Mobile World Congress. And that's when most of the product launches are happening before the event and we keep up the campaign or the Mobile World Congress communication for two, three months. And we set our objectives that what do we need to do before the event, during the event and post-event. And all the tactics, how do we use organic, paid social, influencers, employee advocacy, the websites, SCM, banners, native advertisement and what type of content we are using needs to be built in. And I think this year, the reason why I think it was successful, it's not only because of course we got the KPIs and we were super proud of that, but it's how the team worked together to not in silos as still so many companies are working together, but the event team, the digital team, the website, the content creators, community management. And it was so great to see that this is how a team should work together in an agile way that this is what we see, this is what we need to tweak to even get better. This is what competition is doing. So that was super exciting. I think always start with your objective. And if it makes sense to use any tactics, use them. If it doesn't, then don't. Know your target audience. For example, if they like video, use video. If they are not in the age range that video engages them, then use something else. Then use the PDFs, use the reports. What they search for and what they consume is what we should deliver. We love videos. I think video, in many social campaigns, we are also A-B testing, whether it's a GIF, it's a video or a steal, and which one works better for which platform, which audiences, which countries. Most of the cases, video is growing. There are a lot of consumer lab reports or mobility reports. It also says that video consumption is growing and it's immersive. We use it both internally and externally, shorter, longer versions, depending also on the channel and on the audience and on the topic. Video view is quite a good number to take a look at how long people have been watching it, were they engaging with it. So I think that's one of the key ones. We know that, for example, if we are using Twitter's first view as a tactic, then it's only video what we can use. We also know it cannot be 10-minute long. We know that YouTube likes more than 11-minute videos, so then we create the long format one. The channels that we are using also depends on do we want to have a broader audience to reach or it's a really niche. In B2B, many times, LinkedIn or Facebook are the channels where we can really target specific companies, specific roles. Twitter is a lot better for other type of promotions. But we see that, of course, the algorithm of the social platforms also like video. It played a huge part. Video played a huge part and still plays a huge part, changing how we communicate internally. In my presentation, I was talking about our social media instruction and how it's a boring document, so come on, it's boring. But it has to be there. Policies and guidelines are not created to be fun. And we know that it could be a struggle for employees to actually read and understand. It's so much easier for them to create a video based on that and share it with their internal screens. They can watch it on their phone whenever they have time. So that's pretty much, I think it's a really, really good case when video probably will perform a lot better than my really boring document. We have started to work in a lot more strategic way with social listening. We had a couple of small trials and what we shared internally, what worked, what didn't work. We used to have agencies who were supporting us. And this is the time when we really feel that we need to scale up. We need to have these two are not just available for the social teams, but also for business development, for research purposes, for sales teams, for different parts of the organization. So actually, these are exciting times because this is when we are going through changing or challenging different vendors looking into it and also onboarding other parts of the organization. We try to use different types of communication depending on different internal groups. Some love video, some like podcasts, some like guidelines, some like checklists. So we try to give a mix to all of them. We use videos for inspiration, short snackable content pieces. We use them sometimes for education or maybe it's not a traditional video, but recording presentations. It's still a video. We're not going to win any Hollywood prizes with them, but you can see the content. There's a voiceover, so it's more engaging. I think generally our colleagues like it. I don't believe in talking heads. I think they don't really work anymore. Interviews are something that is encouraging or engaging works well. So I think there's a difference between video and video. Video is a format, but how you create that video also matters. I think videos are a great tool for storytelling. So many of us just fall in love with the new stories, for example, which most of the platforms are offering right now. That's where you can really tell stories. It's not a picture, but you can create that and videos are perfect for that. One video itself can tell a story, but actually if you want to encourage or make really an impact or change perception or change behavior internally, you have to tell those stories. We get a lot of time, and externally too. People love to hear stories and video is a great format for that. We are exploring influencers. We have been working with influencer marketing or influencers, again, like in a little bit scattered way for the past one and a half or two years. This is again the time when we really think or I really think that we need to rethink and regroup. How do we do it? What are the principles? How do we choose an influencer? Who do we want to work with and who do we don't want to work with? Who are representing our brand or we have the common values? There are a lot of discussions about influencer marketing nowadays and the paid one. Are they trustworthy? People are not stupid. Whenever it's paid and it's not authentic, they will see that it's a paid one. I would really like to go and start to work on the long-term relationships with influencers. I think that's again a learning curve. Social is not new, but influencer marketing is also not super new, but there are a lot of learnings. I think in some cases we can, definitely. Sometimes we can really prove it by hard facts. Sometimes it's a little bit softer and I think both need to work together. For our employee advocacy program, right now we know that we get return on investment in three months. For social paid campaigns, we know what impact did we drive. In a B2B business, it is quite difficult to prove that because of that one advertisement, a telecom operator bought something for $1 billion. It's like good luck with that, proving that it all started with my tweet or the sponsored post. If you're looking back at insight-based selling or what information we can provide to sales, what they can use to speed up sales velocity, that is something that we can use as a proof. I don't think that we can say that in an overall level we can prove it, but I think we are getting there. Most cases whenever we use mainly social paid, the main goal is to drive traffic to our website. We know who's visiting, we can retarget them, and the tactic is pretty much using an A-B testing, what works best. What messages work, what images work, is it video, is it a GIF, what colors? We are learning a lot. We have seen that, for example, if our main goal is to drive traffic to the website, of course social organic works, paid works even better. Our employee advocacy program works fantastic. Influencers are not. They are good for share of voice, but not driving traffic to our website. Today I had the pleasure to talk about the six pillars for a social first organization. Many of us are struggling with that, and I try to share my dream with the audience that a social first organization means that whenever both customer-faced or internal activities are planned and executed with the digital first mindset. But actually everyone knows what we are doing. Social media is appreciated. They know what the business impact is. Tools are working together, and we are using it, and everyone knows. The role is on their social. My six key pillars were get leadership eye in, because without that it's quite difficult to succeed. The second one was policies and guidelines, even though they are boring, they are super useful in every kind of organization, and it helps people to adapt and change. The third one was clear roles and responsibilities. As social is changing, the groups internally who we work together as digital, our roles are changing. We cannot work in silos, but whenever we work in a campaign, we have to make sure that everyone knows what their role is, what they are bringing to the team, and how can we share information. Training and education, I really, really believe in that. Creating training material for different personalities, different job roles makes a huge difference for all types of organizations. Instant feedback and recognition, everyone likes to be recognized at feedback. Was it good what I was doing, or do I need to tweak it? Making it fun and useful. We can have all the tools in the world, if they are not fun to use and they are not making my life easier, I'm not going to use them. There are a lot of discussions now, like where social is going in 10 years, will we have a job role in 10 years? I really believe that social needs to be an integrated part of every job role in 10 years. So I don't see that there are social media persons who have this unique knowledge, it exists in every part of the organization, but everyone needs to be enabled and they need to understand how social works. I think a function probably will be needed because every company needs governance, there are new tools and functionalities, so onboarding adoption rates and how do we create that framework for the whole organization or the enablement or center of excellence will be needed, but not probably as the way it exists today.