“Starting with our CEO, we recognize the importance—especially in this world of social—of building an environment that allows us to engage with people in the world we operate in today. In February, we launched our first global Facebook page, and we gained nearly 400,000 followers in the first five weeks. In the early days, we were simply listening to people and responding to their issues. If you go into Facebook on the Shell page, it is very transparent. It is a significant challenge we've had to overcome—getting the business to accept and embrace social is significant.”
“To really drive social adoption inside the company, we have come at it from the top down and the bottom up. On the top-down side, it's not just about educating senior leadership about social media but also having them support social media. On the bottom-up side, we activate and reward employees for desired behavior. We have a social champions program, which had hundreds of employees in the first few weeks. If you become a social champion, you get a badge you can put on your LinkedIn or Twitter profile. It's also important to identify people in your community who could potentially become advocates and nurture those relationships. We find people who can tell a good story and put them in the spotlight.”
“There are three things we do: Make it engaging, make it social and make it count. To make it engaging, we have contests, such as word grids and quests for scalability. You have to think about your brand as something that has the potential to be extremely socially engaging and have fun with your brand. To make it social, we organize sessions [for example, at events] so our executives are talking to people including bloggers and influencers. To make it count, if a tweet helps enable a sale, that can pay for my entire social media program. It's about that central piece—having a conversation that can enable a sale.”