Brand Marketing

By adaptive - September 23rd, 2013

This week we ask Jennifer Lashua, Social Media Strategist at Intel, the ins and outs of her role and future trends

Jennifer has 12 years experience. At Intel she sets strategy and manages Intel's global presence on social networks. Her primary focus is to connect and engage with Intel’s consumer fan base and communities worldwide.

What are the key drivers behind your organization’s use of social media?

We use social media to connect with people in a way that previously we were never able to.  As an ingredient brand, social media gives us the rare opportunity to engage in a direct conversation with the millions of people who use Intel technology – to talk with them listen to them, hear what they think about our brand.

How is social media organised within your company?

Our Social Media Center of Excellence is within our Corporate Marketing Team. We also have local social teams in each geography and in many countries around the world.  We develop global strategies and global content, which are adapted as needed by geos and countries, so they communications, creative, and language are relevant.

When creating content, we really think about the audience and the network first – then design the content to meet that audience’s needs and to integrate seamlessly with how people want to use that specific social network. A ‘one size fits all’ approach to content is very outdated.  We know that consumers expect and brands to speak to them authentically and on their terms so we tailor our approach for each network individually.

How does your company value the social media networks it uses?

Intel uses many social networks globally; we are proud of and grateful for our approximately 35 million fans and followers across networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, RenRen, Weibo, Tumblr, etc.  We’re fortunate to have so many brand advocates and we truly value those relationships.

How much pressure is there to show ROI with the social media you use?

Most brands are required to demonstrate the business value of their social media initiatives. Intel is quite data-centric, and we measure everything! We constantly track key indicators including social relationships, social engagement, message resonance, and how our social activities shape our fans’ and followers’ impressions of our brand and our products. 

We use data from dozens of sources, and have created reporting mechanisms where data doesn’t exist, so we can effectively track our use of social media and our investments here. It’s smart for our business and smart for our fans – by tracking indicators like social engagement, we can tell immediately what content is resonating and create more of this type of content and stories to share with our audiences.

What is your advice to organisations that are beginning to map their own corporate structure with the view to embedding social media activity within their enterprise?

You can’t do it alone. Instead of social media, think about social business. Social should be an embedded part of business across not only marketing and PR but also HR, recruitment, customer service, sales, events, etc.  Developing a model around a Center of Excellence that helps enable the rest of the organization to be social is what’s really helped us scale. We now have 400 employees practicing social media on behalf of Intel, in 50 countries around the world. We often say: “It takes an army!” and it truly does.

How do you see the management and development of social media in your company evolving over the next few years?

I am seeing social media becoming more and more a part of the DNA of how our organization works. I was at a conference on social media recently and I remember thinking to myself how outdated social media conferences would be a few years from now. Can you imagine going to an ‘Internet’ conference now? The Internet is not a topic anymore, it just is. This is where social media is going – it’s inextricably intertwined into how businesses operate.