Social media frontierswoman, PR pro and MD of PR agency thebluedoor, Abigail Harrison gives us some solid practical advice from the pointy end of using social media in a business context. Just don’t call her Bernard.

LD: Abi? Abigail? What should I call you?
AH: Abigail or @AbigailH would be just fine
LD: You just can’t help yourself, can you.

LD: You work in PR – what are the top 3 three things individuals can get from using social media?
AH: (1) It facilitates conversations with ‘influencer’ audiences about things they care about, (2) Ensures individuals stay ahead of the curve as digital tools evolve and networks develop, (3) Helps test ideas and develop thinking – people sometimes forget social media is great at delivering excellent results, it’s a brilliant research tool.

LD: Tell us about your organisation and what you do – yup, this is the chance to plug your biz
AH: Ahh music to my ears! thebluedoor is a PR agency. Our ’sweet spot’ is understanding the relevant digital tools – what they do or don’t do, and how they can work for different companies, brands and campaigns. Digital hasn’t changed the nuts and bolts of what PR is.

LD: Continental or ‘Full English’?
AH: Neither really – I love a pink grapefruit or a bowl of porridge.

LD: What got you interested in online social networking?
AH: I’ve been involved in online for a while, and worked on the PR for one of the largest dotcom IPOs in 2000 – StepStone, the online recruitment site. It’s a fascinating world which allows us all to work creatively with some brilliant practitioners.

LD: Isn’t this all a bit … well … geeky?
AH: Well, yes and no. Part of the problem is language. We do ourselves no favours hiding behind walls of geek-speak. It’s vital we make digital approachable and normalised. That said, it is crucial we understand the geekiness behind it all – and once you start to understand it, there’s a beautiful, measurable logic about the digital world.

LD: What are your top social sites for work?
AH: It has to be Twitter – the digital rock-star of the PR and online world. I have a separate screen on my desk with TweetDeck running – through this Twitter application we discover breaking news, respond to requests for help and interact with the multiple social communities using it. [LD: That is sooo 'geek chic']

LD: And top sites for play?
AH: It isn’t strictly a social site, but I couldn’t live without BBC iPlayer. It’s wonderful – great for catching up on the world and business.

LD: Pint of beer or glass or wine?
AH: Glass of wine – it’s been a long time since I had a pint!

LD: Favourite online social success story?
AH: The work that we have recently done for SocialSafe has been a real high point for me. Key to cracking online is to identify the ‘influencer’ blogs and sites. We successfully pitched a story to Mashable, and the ensuing traffic (meaningful rather than drive-by) and knock-on pick-up was phenomenal!

LD: Favourite online social disaster story?
AH: Thankfully I don’t have one. But I did send a new business pitch, addressed to ‘Mike’ but was actually ‘Mark’. Naturally he was upset – but we agreed as penance I’d be ‘Bernard’ for time-immemorial.

LD: So … Bernard … advice for someone starting out with social networking?
AH: Get your hands dirty and jump in.  It’s the only way to learn. Follow people on Twitter who use practice – it’s a great way to understand what and how people are using the tools. A key challenges is staying on top of developments, so keep reading. And of course don’t lose sight of the world outside the digital bubble.  

LD: Let’s say I’m a business who’s ’social curious’ – what are the top benefits and risks?
AH: Benefits:

• just taking a step towards understanding the digital world opens up a world of opportunity and possibility
• digital is a real-time barometer about how your audience, customers, stakeholders feel about you – not knowing is a bit like sticking your fingers in your ears and not looking, because it is happening anyway and isn’t going away anytime soon
• engaging online is a great way of qualifying leads and researching potential customers

Risks:

•  the major risk is letting the excitement of online get in the way of rational objective consideration – just because it’s shiny and powerful, it’s vital to understand the medium to ensure it fits in your overall business strategy
• also if you haven’t conducted the due diligence of understanding your current online footprint before you start experimenting you risk tripping over quite quickly and publically

LD: Thanks, Abigail. Want to come to my free social media event in London? Go on – it’s going to combine theatre, art and business skills and there’s a glass of wine in it for you?
AH: Go on then.

• More on Abigail / @AbigailH / Bernard (so many profiles, so little time) on thebluedoor website.

Soon after I joined  one particualt company, their intranet was benchmarked by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF). They conducted a number of usability tests, measuring ‘task completion’:  a number of commonly performed tasks (find the company org chart, download a particular form, find the contact details of a particular department etc), using employees to see, firstly, if they could complete the task and, secondly, how many attempts it took. The intranet in question was benchmarked 36th out of 36 FTSE/Fortune 100 and public sector equivalent organisations. Not good.

Over the next 12 months, while a long running IT acquisition project lumbered on, I redesigned the intranet publisher training, created a community of practice for these publishers and run two conferences for them, a governance structure had been put in place and I had spent a lot of time cleaning up and deleting content and whole sections of the intranet that were out of date, duplicated or, in my opinion, substandard in terms of usability or brand (it’s amazing how departments suddenly find resource to clean up their sections of the intranet when you tell them they’ve got a month, or you’re archiving the whole section to disc).

Now … while this all seemed good and there was a generally positive feeling things were getting better, I wanted to give some proof. The IBF’s next annual measurement of efficiency / effectiveness of task completion now put the intranet at 8^th out of 36 FTSE companies. Also, these usability metrics, matched against the traffic reports for how much time was being spent on the intranet suddenly gave me some real figures to show, in terms of what time employees were spending on the intranet was productive time.

The result showed a saving of 73 man years of intranet time or £8m/£13m in avoided salary costs for paying people to use the intranet and fail – check out the figures for yourself. 

While this demonstrates a definite and positive reclamation of wasted employee time, avoided cost is an intangible benefit and questions like ’so how much headcount can we lose?’ don’t really work. The point here is that each employee was wasting time each day on the intranet (never mind the additional time wasted calling some else to find the answer and have them look into the issue). This is reclaimed time for them to use on the work they’re employed to do. It’s like having a leaking water pipe. If you leave the holes, you lose water; if you plug the holes the pipe can’t carry more water than it was supposed to, but it does work to capacity.

And if employees aren’t working to capacity already, then you’ve bigger management and workload issues to worry about.

Back to the numbers, £8m/$13m is a considerably larger sum than I cost (no, really, it is) or was spent on the improvments, so not a bad little ROI methinks.

The Long Dog