IMV52: Facebook in the Corporate World

The following is a transcript for IMV52: Facebook in the Corporate World. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast, brought to you by MindComet. Now, here's your host, Paul Lewis.

Paul Lewis:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo. I'm your host, Paul Lewis. Today's topic is Facebook in the corporate world. Our special guest today is Lee Aase. He's the Manager for Syndications and Social Media at the Mayo Clinic. Lee, can you start us out by giving us a little information about yourself?

Lee Aase:

I'm really glad to join you today. I'm, as you said, Manager for Syndications and Social Media. I previously worked for national media relations at Mayo Clinic, and had social media and research communications as other parts of my portfolio. But as we've seen this area growing, whether it's in podcasting and Facebook and other areas, we just see that it's necessary to devote additional resources to that, so I'm glad to be with you today.

Paul Lewis:

Great. Let's start out by talking a little bit about why should companies be thinking about using or leveraging Facebook?

Lee Aase:

Well I think the first thing to remember is that they're in Facebook whether they know it or not, if they have any number of employees. Mayo Clinic has 50,000 employees, and without any real promotion on our part, we have 1,500 employees and students at our graduate medical school and medical education programs that are in Facebook. And so, it isn't a question of whether they're going to be in Facebook, but how they're going to be in Facebook.

Paul Lewis:

What are some of the benefits of Facebook versus other business communities or applications that a company might have? Why should they be thinking about Facebook in particular?

Lee Aase:

Well I think the biggest advantage is the network effect. I mean Facebook has 64 million members today, just the ability that you have to connect really easily with interested stakeholders and potential employees, potential customers. And it's just as easy as them clicking another link to be connected with you, as well. As opposed to setting up your own password-protected Web space, where a user has to remember a unique user ID and password, in this case it's just painless and effortless once they're in Facebook, and 250,000 people are joining a day, it's really easy to create that connection, and it's becoming, from my perspective, a social utility like the telephone, where people will be connecting in this way, and particularly as the younger demographics are aging and moving into the workforce.

Paul Lewis:

When you talk about connecting in this way, are you thinking of both from a recruiting standpoint, as well as for internal communication and people speeding that communication within the organization by understanding and linking with each other? What are the primary benefits of that connectivity?

Lee Aase:

What it enables is... just that it's a platform for people to connect in a way that's useful to them. And so, yes, it's a good way to recruit. There are targeted advertising and things like that that you can do within Facebook - and maybe we'll get to that a little bit later - but also it takes a minute to form a group and to invite your friends to join a group, and to send out invitations to others who are in Facebook to join that group. And so whether they're within the organization or external collaborators, you're able to get connected with them and have a discussion space and a way of connecting.

Paul Lewis:

Facebook obviously is a great utility that's available to these companies without that development cost or investment cost, but what kind of ongoing upkeep and investment should a company think about when they're going to begin to leverage Facebook? Are there some things that they should keep in mind there?

Lee Aase:

You do need to have somebody be responsible for it, and it's not a full-time job - but it means part of my job now. But someone needs to be listening and engaging, and it's not just another way of pushing out more information. But if people are interested and want to just go to Facebook and search for Mayo Clinic, the good thing is that our official Mayo Clinic page will show up first in the rankings, and you can see the kinds of things that we've put there.

Again, I want to stress we haven't promoted this externally. It's been just completely low-key. We're looking in the next few months to be rolling this out to our employees and to our patients. But whatever you see there is free, and it's just using existing resources that we've had. That would just give you an example of the kind of things you can put into a Facebook page.

Paul Lewis:

Sure. Now, Facebook allows a lot of different forms of content, including video. What sort of material should a company think about including as part of their Facebook information?

Lee Aase:

I think absolutely the video sharing is the really big benefit, and that's something that we've included. You can put in an RSS feed from your news releases or other new stories. There's a free application out there that'll let you put up to three RSS feeds on your page. That actually helps keep the site fresh, because it's just automatic material that you are publishing anyway.

And then, I guess, the other thing is just with the Facebook page there's the Wall, and the Wall is kind of the common space communication platform. It isn't necessarily you creating the content, but it's your stakeholders creating the content, talking about their experience with your brand. And that's going to carry more credibility than a highly polished testimonial that you hired a freelancer to write.

Paul Lewis:

Right. Right, you want that authenticity and the actual employees getting up there and posting. And speaking about that, should employees be encouraged to join, or potentially even required to join as part of being part of an organization?

Lee Aase:

Well I guess I probably wouldn't require it, but I would certainly encourage it. For Mayo Clinic, we are developing guidelines for internal education programs on not just Facebook, but other social media, and what's the right way to engage. We have 50,000 employees, and have been on the Fortune 100 Top Best Places to Work for the last five years. And a lot of that is based on employee satisfaction. Having these 50,000 employees, who are our greatest asset, out there just engaging voluntarily and letting them know that it's okay to do it, but giving them some guidelines to keep them from stepping in a mess, is a great way to create some leverage, and then you add that to half a million patients every year. It does provide a really strong way to build connections with our brand, with people who have had a personal experience of it, with people they know.

One of the things we've found on our main Web site is that the patient stories are among the most visited and most interesting elements of the site. It's one thing to hear somebody talk about their story or have that sort of highly-polished story. It's another thing to have somebody you know tell the story, and that's what's so powerful about Facebook and other social networking sites.

Paul Lewis:

Oh, absolutely. I completely agree. I want to also jump back to your point on guidelines. I thought that was very relevant for the audience. I think that this whole new world of social media, and personal blogs and podcasts, and everything that's just happening on the Internet has kind of opened Pandora's box from an HR perspective of, "Hey, what is our stance? Can our employees blog? Can they list things in Facebook? What type of information should be listed? What's appropriate? What's appropriate as far as pictures that are posted?" and a lot of other things, because eventually there does become some reflection.

As you mentioned, your strongest asset is your 50,000 employees. Your employees become a reflection of your company, so at what point is there a difference, and where should guidelines be established? So I think that's great that you're doing that, and it seems like that's a specific focus of your function, because it is so new.

Lee Aase:

That's exactly right. We can't hire enough communications professionals to go out and tell our story as we'd like to have it be. But if you can give the good people that you're hiring, who you trust to take care of patients every day, some guidelines and make sure that they know that when they're posting something on a blog, they need to identify themselves as a Mayo Clinic employee if they are commenting in medical matters, so that there's that expectation of transparency, but then also to stress that, "This is my personal opinion."

That's more probably on the blog side of things, and yes, within the social networking sites there would be some other things to work through. We are developing a core curriculum, or some training that we'll be able to probably have on our intranet, but then also have some in-person classes, where you have an opportunity for people to interact. But we just really feel like this will be relatively easy to distribute across the organization because you almost can kind of use social media to do that.

Paul Lewis:

Right. You can use social media to teach people about -

Lee Aase:

To train them...
[Laughter]

Paul Lewis:

Yeah. Absolutely. No, that's great. Tell us a little bit about how Facebook can be leveraged from an HR perspective for recruiting. We've talked about what are the new things that HR has to take on as part of this with their employees, but how can they use it to reach out and help recruit new individuals to the organization?

Lee Aase:

Well, everything that I've talked about so far is free, but one of the elements that isn't free would be targeted advertising. Part of what's the benefit of Facebook is that people put a lot of information about their schooling, about their college majors, where they went to school, as well as previous employment as part of their Facebook profile. You're able to target advertising to many of those elements, target based on keywords, target based on college majors. It does give an opportunity to reach, not just a nationwide, but a global group, a global potential employee population. And you're only paying for clicks on the people who actually see your ad and go visit your HR site.

Paul Lewis:

So it's highly targeted, and it benefits from - you mentioned that you were one of the top employers to work for for many years now - and so that positive karma and feedback within the Facebook community also probably assists as people see these targeted opportunities that apply to them, that they realize this is a place they may really want to work.

Lee Aase:

Yeah. Exactly. And the other element is that with the whole fan pages and the way that that I'm a fan of Mayo Clinic - it shows up prominently on my personal profile - there is that sort of background effect, I guess, and that's maybe what you called karma.

Paul Lewis:

Right. [Laughter]

Lee Aase:

If a friend of yours was a fan of Mayo Clinic or a fan of MindComet, that's going to make you tend to feel more positively, whether you're a potential patient or customer or employee.

Paul Lewis:

Absolutely. Flip back to the side where we're sharing information, and we've created these groups that are out there. Are there some concerns about employees beginning to discuss or share confidential data? And what steps can they take to make sure that the information is shared just with the right individuals?

Lee Aase:

There is a distinction between Facebook pages and Facebook groups. Facebook pages are sort of your brand's public face out to the world. Those are open to anybody. Facebook groups can be either open or closed, or secret. Even with a secret group, I would not be putting bank account information and personal Social Security number, or in our case, patient identification information that's protected by HIPAA.

Paul Lewis:

Right.

Lee Aase:

Yet we also have other electronic means of communications within Mayo Clinic, where you don't put that material, either. A Facebook group can be, if you have it as a secret group, I mean one way that we are using it is for quality focus groups, and to have our patients in one particular specialty interact with some of the quality improvement leaders in that specialty. And they can have this discussion group to offer their honest feedback. They have some in-person meetings as well, but it lets that conversation continue, and yet we don't have to give them VPN access behind our firewall to be in this secure site. That probably goes back to the education on the kinds of things that you can share externally with key stakeholders.

I just spoke with somebody in the last day or so who had heard a presentation that I'd made, and she was interested in using it to manage her PR agencies. She's got a global company that has several different PR agencies that are working on her account. Instead of giving them access behind their company firewall, she is going to be forming a secret Facebook group and getting these people together.

Paul Lewis:

And is there any concern when someone does that, that they're going to share their PR information before it goes out anywhere else, about Facebook and kind of who owns the data and things like that? Any concerns on that level?

Lee Aase:

I suppose you could be really paranoid and be concerned about that. I could post, and probably will post on my blog, a link to a Facebook group that I will form in response to this question today, and ask people to try to get into it, and see if you can get into that data; if I don't give you access, you won't be able to get in, so maybe I'm calling this the Hacker Challenge.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah.

Lee Aase:

I don't see it being a huge problem. Frankly, with Facebook being the top photo-sharing site in the world, with all the data that's going there, the information that's in your little Facebook group and your little secret Facebook group isn't going to be the kind of material that Facebook's gonna be using in its marketing, and its targeting of ads and things like that.

Paul Lewis:

Well let me ask you one last question, too. Is Facebook equally applicable to business-to-business customers as it is business-to-consumer type organizations?

Lee Aase:

I don't know whether it's equally applicable, but my gut reaction is yes, just like the telephone is used in business. It is a means of communication, and it does have somewhat of a younger skewing demographic, although the 35-and-up demographic is the fastest-growing segment within Facebook. That's because 85 percent of college students already are in Facebook, so the growth opportunity is elsewhere. I really see, as I mentioned, the person using it for managing PR agencies, it does create an opportunity to have interaction. And as the uptake continues to grow, I think it'll be just another way that people communicate.

Paul Lewis:

Just to kind of summarize some of the things that we went over, it seemed like, first of all, that Facebook is an excellent tool to leverage to get your information out there, to create better brand exposure for your organization, both in those connections, as well as targeted recruiting and other capabilities. It also seemed equally relevant, though, that specific guidelines are set up for employees in how we're going to use this; where information should be kept secret or where it should be public, and that it probably made sense to potentially dedicate some individuals, or an individual, to spearhead this for an organization because there are a lot of nuances and variations that the individual needs to be aware of to be successful in this.

Lee Aase:

Yeah, I mean I think that's a really fair summary, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about this. Actually, on my blog, I have set up a Facebook business section, and also kind of just re-branded my blog in the last couple weeks to call it Social Media University Global, or SMUG, for short. And the idea that I had with that is that as I go and speak at different conferences, I have people asking specific applications or, "How do I get started with this?" and mainly, I just say it's important for anybody involved in sales and marketing or PR, to actually personally be in Facebook. So that would be the first takeaway that I would have with this.

And then secondly, to look through what I've done with the SMUG university little shtick that I have going, is to create a Facebook 101, 102, 103 sequence for how to get started with it, and what are some of these issues of groups versus pages, advertising applications. That's one element that we didn't get to. There just is a lot to learn, but I think your key point about developing the employee education programs to be able to bring your greatest asset for your company into this mix is really right on.

Paul Lewis:

Great. For our listeners, from Internet Marketing Voodoo I will link to your blog, but could you just give us the URL for the listeners who are not going to the Web site?

Lee Aase:

Sure. The URL is leeaase.wordpress.com, and that's L-E-E-A-A-S-E. Otherwise, one of the benefits of blogging is if you just Google me, Lee, last name is spelled A-A-S-E, it'll come up first in the search rankings, then you can go there.

Paul Lewis:

Nice. Nice. One of the benefits of all of that. That's great. Well, on a closing point, what do you feel is the biggest change about how leading businesses are expected to represent themselves in social media in the coming couple of years? What's the biggest change that companies need to really think about and embrace?

Lee Aase:

I think the biggest thing they need to know is that this isn't just a push medium. It isn't just another way to do what they've always done in bombarding people with marketing messages, whether they want it or not. Part of the power of social media, and the information that Facebook and MySpace and some others gather about consumers, is that they're able to get target-relevant advertising. But beyond that, it's an opportunity to engage. Having some people dedicated toward engaging in that conversation and spreading the positive word-of-mouth, is going to be really powerful and important.

And then you asked what's the biggest change. That is in some ways a change, but the change is that it's online and that it's really available to everybody. From the Mayo Clinic perspective, we've never done any national advertising, and so it's all been based on stories in the news media and word-of-mouth, with word-of-mouth of satisfied patients being the most important factor in building our brand. And I think the news for 2008 is that that really is going to apply more and more to everybody.

Paul Lewis:

Great. I think those are great words of advice, and I think this has been helpful to our listeners. Are you ready to play Truth or Marketing?

Lee Aase:

Let's give it a try.

Paul Lewis:

All right. First thing, right now there's a big campaign on about accessing Facebook from your iPhone. And so, by 2009 - so looking out just a little bit - 25 to 30 percent of all visits to Facebook will come from a mobile device.

Lee Aase:

I'd say that's truth.

Paul Lewis:

Truth? Good. I think that there is a real distinct possibility of that. There's definitely some acceleration that's happened with the depth of capabilities of mobile devices, certainly the iPhone, but there's others that are very capable. And I think people are just getting plugged in all the time. I tend to agree with you on that one.

Lee Aase:

And you know, part of the reason I say that is that I have a mobile application on my cell phone. When I get a new message or somebody writes on my wall, I get a text message and that drives me back to Facebook. So I end up using the computer to get back there, but it's the -

Paul Lewis:

The mobile that's driving it.

Lee Aase:

...text message that drives me there. Yeah.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah. All right. Let's go out a little bit further. By 2010, Facebook will overtake MySpace to become the largest social media site on the Internet.

Lee Aase:

That is truth, and I think it'll be before that.

Paul Lewis:

Great. Great. Well, we will see. And the last question that is kind of on a number of peoples' minds this week, and I'll put it to you, Yahoo will become part of Microsoft.

Lee Aase:

Well, if the Department of Justice says yes, I think that will. Yeah. I think that's truth.

Paul Lewis:

Okay. Great. I appreciate your predictions, as do the listeners. I'll just also mention one more time that the URL for your Web site is leeaase.wordpress.com, or just do a search for you on Facebook, right?

Lee Aase:

That'll do it.

Paul Lewis:

All right. Great. Well, for Internet Marketing Voodoo, I'm Paul Lewis. I hope you've enjoyed the podcast. Thank you very much.

Announcer

For more information on this week's topic, visit InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]


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