A webcare team monitors online conversations on Twitter, blogs and other social media and has a strategy on how to deal with various types of negative responses via social media. When necesary, they can join the conversation, offer support, provide facts or anything else to steer things in the right direction. But it is not just about customer care, the webcare team can also do PR (discovering and preventing issues) and marketing (educating customers or providing feedback to product development).

Why do companies actually care about what is being said in social media? More and more companies realize that, in line with the Cluetrain Manifesto, “markets are conversations”: customers trust opinions of friends a lot more than they trust company websites, and they use information about products and services found on social media to make informed choices.

Who should be in your webcare team?
From the type of work a webcare team has to do, it should be clear that this is not a job for the IT department. Instead, people from marketing and corporate communication should be involved, and maybe even experts on your products and services. Pick your team from people who understand the norms of social media and are able to respond from a personal perspective. As such, your manager PR and corporate communication is probably not a good candidate for the job.

The tools of the trade
Webcare teams get more and more tools to discover what is currently being said about their brand, products and services. Important tools of the trade are Google Alerts, Twitter search, Technorati and Google blog search. These tools are all aimed at discovering relevant online conversations, without having to spend the whole day looking.

What is a smart social media strategy?
Unfortunately, there is no universal recipe for a smart social media strategy yet. Nevertheless, an important starting point is to accept each opinion as such, and not call opinions into question. As with any employee that takes part in an online conversation, the norm is to identify yourself as an employee of the company and behave accordingly. Also it seems important not to be drawn into online discussions: seek direct communication with the person behind the complaint. For more inspiration on social media strategies, I suggest you take a look at the IBM Social Computing guidelines.

I would like to hear your experiences with webcare teams!

The slides of our talk (in Dutch) are available via slideshare:

• June 17: The Professional Playground of the Future (our project day)
• June 22: Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers (Lilia Efimova’s PhD defence)
• June 22-24: ICE conference with a workshop by Marcel Bijlsma
• June 24: Web2.0 in the Enterprise (NAF Insight congres with me speaking on stimulating cohesion with social media)
• June 25-26: Reboot (a yearly gathering of creative minds on digital change and culture). Sad to have to skip this one…

Am I missing something here? (Not that the list above is manageable…) Post a comment!

I actually question whether increasing your visibility, within the firewall, is something many people strive for. More inside visibility certainly increases the amount of questions you receive (thus more e-mail, more distractions), while outside visibility as an expert may be more interesting.

Obviously, it is motivating to contribute something if you know that their actually is an audience for your contribution. Hoewever, I notice that some of the contributions I make (like sharing a relevant link in delicious), I also do for selfish reasons: I need to be able to find that link again in the future and by sharing and tagging it, I benefit as well.

Anyway, I am curious about your personal experiences: why do you contribute to social software that runs behind the firewall?

Picture by Ton Zijlstra

We then continued with a knowledge café: moderated by Mireille, we split up in groups and discussed issues and good practices around the introduction and usage of social software in an enterprise environment. During the knowledge café roundup we discussed our findings.

For me it was the first time of participating in a knowledge café and I was pleasantly surprised about the results. Thanks to the active contributions by all participants and the moderation by Mireille, we could really share knowledge and experiences, while getting to know the people behind the stories. Some points I took away from the workshop:

• Making sure that employees have control over their personal profile, especially when the system automatically tries to establish expertise areas and connections, seems to be essential for user acceptance of enterprise social software.
• Be very careful when giving a manager the role of facilitator in an online discussion: make sure your facilitator is a linking pin and can actually put in the time and effort to keep the conversation going.
• To have some insight in the benefits of enterprise social software, collect anecdotes of how people used the software to solve business issues. Any way, make sure you have statistics on the number of active users and the number of times people queried the system.

For an overview of the event, the participants and links to relevant sources, visit the workshop wiki page.

I would like to end by expressing my thanks to Erik Krischan, Mireille Jansma and all participants for their active contributions. Let’s keep the conversation going!

Purpose of the case

• Help Rabobank define a strategy for the introduction and use of a wiki for knowledge sharing across department boundaries.
• Train KIRA employees in working with a wiki and embedding in their working practices.
• Collect good practices for the introduction and use of a wiki for knowledge sharing

Key lessons learned

• Help people to embed the wiki in their normal working processes; avoid they see the wiki as an extra task.
• Employees have to perceive a personal need to use the wiki; just knowing what one can do with a wiki is not sufficient.
• Wiki use is hampered when the need or the culture to share information is lacking.
• Not understanding how a wiki relates to other technical means can be a threshold for wiki adoption.

Introduction strategy
For RaboWiki a grass roots introduction strategy is chosen, whereby a small group of enthusiastic employees convinces others about the added value of wikis, based on their own experiences.

Step 1: Identify key user groups

Step 2: Identify & analyze key figures

Step3: Turn key figures into “evangelists”

Step 4: Turn “evangelists” into trainers

Step 5: Stimulate (unintended) use

For more information

For more information about the RaboWiki case contact Robert Slagter: robert.slagter@telin.nl, +31 53 4850 488.