The lifeblood of any consulting organization is their people. Deloitte views their recruiting pipeline as a funnel, similar to any other B2B lead management process. They receive nearly 147,000 applications per year. These are reviewed and screened and 4,000 candidates are interviewed. This yields approximately 1700 new hires, which is just over 11% of those who applied. And assuming that this percentage is constant, and the number matches the new hires needed, Deloitte’s challenge is to make sure to fill the funnel with applicants.

And the response to the challenge is social media, which allows them to target individuals by school and degree. For example, it is now easier than ever to connect with MBAs from Cornell. Deloitte has not tried to reinvent their approach to social media, but they have followed the examples of employees who have already been doing it. They found their own internal champions of social media.

They are using a variety of social sites to connect with candidates where they are, and the intent is to drive traffic back to the main Deloitte site where more and relevant content can be provided. LinkedIn is used to post job openings that spread through networks. These are also posted in targeted groups. Twitter is used for short messages and links to job postings and other content on the site. Since many of their prospective employees are recent college grads and MBAs, they have a large presence on Facebook. They post invitations to job seekers, connect with alumni, post videos, publish podcasts and provide mobile content. They have even created interactive games and campus microsites within Facebook for targeted universities.

The other side of recruiting is employee retention and Deloitte is using social media for that as well. They understand that employees who are happy in their jobs, not only stay longer, but become advocates for their recruiting efforts. They have an internal social network called D Street, which is similar to Facebook. This lets employees build an internal social profile and connect to other Deloitte employees. These connections are important in a company where many employees spend time at clients’ sites, rather than in the office.

They also created a Deloitte Film Festival on YouTube, which has 400,000 views. And in a survey after this film festival, 33% of employees indicated an improvement in their connection to the office.

The first-ever Deloitte Film Festival invited all people of the Deloitte U.S. Firms to make short videos that answered the question “What’s your Deloitte?”. Teams comprised of one to seven people submitted films about their lives and experiences at the organization. Nearly 400 submissions were received and more than 2000 participated in the filmmaking process.

Deloitte’s social media practices are targeted, professional and focused and have been successful in managing the employment funnel that is such a key part of their business.

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The following summary of the presentation is from the event website.

In 2007, DuPont launched five videos on eight web blogs in a marketing program designed to increase share of voice for DuPont on the Internet and to introduce DuPont science to a younger, wired and online generation. The videos were made specifically for online audiences looking for stories told through video which are different and interesting. Tapping into over 40 years of video archival footage, each video showcases how science from DuPont helps to protect people and how innovations developed by DuPont enhance people’s lives. The blogs offered a mix of general and targeted interest audiences. Blogs were selected for this project because they reach a devoted, targeted audience and their audiences tend to talk to others about their interests, encouraging word of mouth. Completing DuPont’s marketing pilot to the blogosphere, videoblogger Amanda Congdon was the on-screen host for the five videos. Amanda is best known for her work on Rocketboom, a popular news and entertainment videoblog. BlogAds and FM Networks assisted the project in distributing the videos. The campaign delivered on three key objectives: (1) increasing awareness for DuPont science, (2) increasing positive sentiment for DuPont and (3) creating stories sufficiently compelling to generate word of mouth. The DuPont Science Stories campaign was one of three national finalists for the Online Media Marketing and Advertising (OMMA) Best Campaign in Social Media Award 2007.

Here is one of the five videos in the series. You can view all the videos in this series at stories.dupont.com, however, I cannot find any link to this anywhere on the DuPont website. I would like to think that if they hold up a two-year old social media program as a success, they would want to continue to tout that success by providing access to the video. Additionally some of the links no longer work, which is another indication that this campaign has been relegated to the backwater of the DuPont website. If you are presenting a case study of an old program, make sure you check all the links on an old page.

In a post launch survey of video viewers, 93% indicated that they learned something viewing the videos. This was huge win for the program, as 85% of the content in the videos was unique to DuPont.

The program was launched on a series of blogs and resulted in 6,000 visits to the DuPont site where the videos are hosted. The average visitor remained for 8 minutes, which is a long time on a site. This means the average viewer watched at least three of the videos. That is a great response, which is also measured by 50,000 video streams.

In the end, the videos helped DuPont generate some word of mouth about its brand message of contribution through science. It probably generated more awareness with the PR surrounding the campaign and its nomination for Online Marketing award.

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Many approaches to social media involve generating leads and ultimately sales, but Pitney Bowes looked to social media as a way to save money. Combining the $10 cost of each customer support phone call with a spike in calls surrounding the annual postage rate change that surpasses 400,000, Pitney Bowes had tremendous incentive to develop more cost effective solutions. They developed a fully social customer forum located at forums.pb.com and promoted it on their home page. Users build their reputation on the site through other user feedback of kudos and best answer tags. Using metrics for call savings based on research in Groundswell, Pitney Bowes estimates savings based on views of specific answers and general answers. The savings in one month, granted the biggest customer service month of the year for postage related companies, was more than 2-3 times the annual cost of forum.

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The concepts of inbound marketing allow a business to get found. While businesses think of leads and customer sales as a funnel, inbound marketing occurs above the funnel. These techniques brings prospects to website, and it is up to the website to move prospects through the process to make a sale. A well-considered blog is a huge traffic-driver to a website when it addresses potential questions. These posts are found in searches, the primary way all people interact with the web. In the presented example, the business supplied materials to make fences for commercial applications. A blog post about the size of holes in fence mesh brings prospects to the site because it answers a question contractors have about what to purchase. Facebook and Twitter pages featuring information about and photos of fences also helps drive traffic to the company’s website.

The inbound marketing program saved money that was not spent on advertising, plus each blog post gets indexed in search engines and continues to drive traffic.

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Video is an effective medium for creating awareness to a message or a brand. As the above video entitled The Art of the Sale shows, video, and especially humor, can be used by B2B companies to share a message.

As with any new corporate marketing program, you must first get agreement on the rules. A team of bloggers, marketing, public relations and legal gathered together to establish guidelines. In the early days of social media, employees were encouraged to experiment within the firewall. This IBM mainframe program was conducted in 2006, so there was a lot more latitude to be creative and there was much less understanding of social media on the part of management. It was also still the early days of YouTube, so much of the sharing was done via email. And as the program got some big hits, they promoted that success.

There are a variety of approaches to video in a business setting, but you must start by finding your most compelling stories. This is coupled with having you most compelling experts tell your story. These stories can be presented in a news format or in the reality show/ documentary style that has been popularized by shows like The Office. The sample video is in this documentary style. In an attempt to “go viral,” or spread widely beyond your company’s network, you can use nonsense, humor or absurdity.

The objectives of the Art of the Sale campaign, and these were business objectives of the mainframe division, were to create awareness for a new mainframe value proposition. IBM had a new, more efficient mainframe available for $100,000. This was significantly less than the $1 million price tag customers were used to. The other objective was to increase awareness of IBM mainframes with college students.

The video was posted on YouTube for easy embedding on IBM blogs. Blog traffic increased 25 times, and the campaign received mainstream press coverage. It showed that story trumps messaging and targeting. Social media is the perfect medium if you have engaging stories to tell about your business. IBM is now using video to tell its stories about a smarter planet.

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This post is the first recap of the case studies presented at the recent B2B Social Communications event held in New York City. Marcella Shinder (@marcyshinder), Vice President of Brand Strategy & Marketing, American Express OPEN, discussed the launch of OPEN Forum, an online community of small-business owners.

American Express’ marketing strategy is to promote their belief in entrepreneurs as one of the keys to economic growth. Their central brand promise is dedicated to helping business owners grow their business.

The website OPEN Forum is a tactic in the strategy to drive pull marketing. The three points of their pull marketing strategy are: Have something differentiated to say, get influencers to say it, and use social media to allow it to scale. This follows research which shows more older and affluent small business owners are using social media in the running and promoting of their businesses.

The site contains two main areas. The first is the idea hub, which is a space for business owners to blog about topics they are passionate about. The categories include innovation, lifestyle, managing, marketing, money, technology, and the world. This is a good environment for a small business owner to take the first steps into blogging, without committing to their own blog. Posts include the usual social media sharing buttons, and other registered forum members can give a post a thumbs up or leave a comment.

The other section is the connectodex, which is a creditialized community of business owners, as they have been approved for an AMEX business card account. Each profile must include a photo of the owner. This is a safe way for small business owners to connect to other business owners and begin to understand the power of social networking.

The new version of OPEN Forum just launched a few weeks ago and the numbers point toward success. They had 164,000 weekly page views and 4,000 business profiles.

By creating this community, American Express has found a way to engage and connect to their community, while both allowing their customers to connect with each other, and driving conversions to additional products and services.

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