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By Judy Mottl
With everyone twittering, updating their LinkedIn profile and talking business on Facebook, pundits have declared 2009 the year that social networking will take root as an enterprise business tool and marketing venue.
What, though, does that mean for CIOs who want to implement formal social networking strategies but are more than a bit wary of the security issues that come into play?
IT leaders know how powerful a blog can be for marketing and corporate branding efforts, and how Twitter can generate revenue -- Dell made $3 million in less than a year from its adoption. But all it takes is one comment, one slip of a data nugget or proprietary technology mention and a CIO can find himself or herself explaining a huge stock price drop and negative headlines to an irate company board.
The trick to success, as one company has discovered, is to take a measured, monitored and tightly controlled approach.
Entitle Direct Group, a 30-year-old title insurance firm, kicked off its social networking effort in the last quarter of 2008 after launching a consumer-focused Web site as part of a new sales effort.
Like most insurance companies, Entitle was selling through traditional agent channels but then veered into new marketing territory last August with a direct-to-consumer offering across 32 states. CIO Fred Kauber, who is responsible for his company's search engine marketing and social media strategy, said the company then began using public Web blogs as a communication channel as well.
"In addition to using traditional media, it is more effective to raise awareness among consumers online where they gather to discuss related topics rather than try to drive attention to a central forum that would be under our control," notes Kauber.
So the company began a formal effort to begin commenting regularly on public blogs related to title insurance issues and subjects. The interaction led to "an opportunity to educate consumers not just about our offering but to give them a more fundamental understanding of title insurance and its role in their lives as homeowners," says the CIO.
While the blogging drove meaningful and interactive conversation, it was limiting, explained Kauber, and commenting on multiple industry blogs required strict monitoring as well.
"It poses a challenge to marketers as conversations that need to be monitored are distributed across multiple sites and take place at different paces in an asynchronous fashion," says Kauber.
And as blog comments tend to attract the attention of other bloggers, which is what companies want as a brand, it also magnifies the challenge of maintaining disparate conversations. That's why Entitle Direct decided to implement a policy that only senior management team members do the blog work.
"We feel that it is very important for our management team to engage directly with our consumers and business partners to convey the passion and authenticity we feel for transforming our industry, but we also feel it's important that our messaging be consistent in maintaining the highest degree of professionalism for our brand," Kauber says.
The monitoring effort has been successful, he says, as his company has avoided the kinds of embarrassing scenarios that other companies have encountered. For example, a Twitter page of a competitor's employee extolled the virtues of that company's recruiting effort in one tweet and the staff member's drunken weekend adventures in the next. "That is clearly not the context one wants their brand placed in," says Kauber.
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