Webinar higlights: Using social media beyond branding

This webinar is now available for on-demand viewing.

While “authenticity” continues to be a staple approach to social media when it comes to brand involvement, setting up organisations to deliver on this consistently is a problem faced by many brands.

Dennis Owen, group manager of social media, Cathay Pacific said that a majority of tweets the company receives on Twitter are customer service related. “Right now our social media team sits in marketing but the best people to respond to these kinds of customer engagements is our  service people,” said Owen. “We’re looking at spreading our social media out to other departments.”

In the past, social media used to be the job of a single team but the present dynamics are changing that and social media is increasingly touching on every part of an organisation.

 

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“Now you really need to look at how to develop social media skills across the board in an organisation,” said Dee Anna McPherson, VP of marketing at Hootsuite.  “It’s not about just having a social media team because to truly maximise, it helps to have all your staff on board about social.”

Owen agreed, stating that Cathay Pacific has adopted this approach in its most recent campaign 'Life Well Travelled', not only as a means of extending the Cathay's organic reach, but also to see how well ideas resonate with staff,  their friends and family. 

"We can also involve our staff to build internal engagement and in many cases our staff are some of our biggest brand ambassadors," Owen added. 

Joe Nguyen, senior vice-president, comScore Asia-Pacific sees that even in Asia where television is still popular in many markets, everything will eventually be digital and social media will be the main means of interaction between brands and consumers. 

Driving this trend are countries such as Indonesia, India and China, which are "mobile only" or "mobile-first" countries. In China particularly, apps such as WeChat are setting the bar with personalised, one-to-one interactions with brand and consumer.  

“I believe that social will be the front face of CRM,” said Nguyen.  “The challenge will be how brands can integrate social media with CRM to better understand the people that are already their advocates.”

Owen also commented that ,obile should be the top concern for most organistations. "At Cathay Pacific, we're definitely seeing a lot of bookings coming in through mobile and its an area we are concentrating on when it comes to upgrading our existing tools and platforms," he said.  

For more on the discussion to take a deep dive into how to use social platforms, chat apps, influencers as and set social media KPIs, catch the full webinar.