Brand Marketing

By adaptive - October 21st, 2013

Kelli Carlson-Jagersma leads Wells Fargo enterprise collaboration efforts and the group focused on educating teams on ways to utilize social media both internally and externally. Kelli's passion is enhancing the culture of collaboration with emerging tools to increase team member engagement, team productivity, and overall efficiencies on how Wells Fargo services it's customers.

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

Social isn’t a business on it’s own, it ought to compliment and amplify existing business strategies. You need to identify what problem you are solving and the objectives you aim to drive before measuring. Our internal social business pillars include:

• Team member engagement: People-to-people connections
• Efficiency and productivity: Simple benefits of having networked individuals
• Diversity and inclusion: The core to our vision and values, not just a common purpose but a shared purpose
• Innovation: Drives how we do business differently
• Sales and service: We want to help our customers succeed financially

How is social media organised within your company? What organizational models do you use and why

We have a centralized team at the enterprise, responsible for a consistent strategy and governance but it takes a true hub and spoke model with the business to execute in a way that supports our teams and customers. Most importantly, we establish a social governance approach. Social is like a marathon. You can’t train and run it in one go.

Our internal social media team sits within the same organizational structure as our external social media group within Enterprise Marketing. Our overall mission is to co-create value by using social to amplify business strategy, not just marketing or communications.   

Plan for the right teams from HR, IT, legal, etc. to be on a steering committee and to build social into the existing business models. Then practice and adjust. Social media takes time and resources. And, my favourite quote of late is from the social media trainer on my team is ‘vision without resources is a hallucination.’

As a corporate user of social networks, how does your company value the networks it has a presence on?

Our environment is pretty risk averse. It is really important to understand the purpose and intent, and being deliberate about staying close to our brand and our relationship to the customer. The myth is social is free and easy. The fact is it takes a small miracle to do it right with proper resources and approach.

Can you outline a recent initiative that included a social media component?

Every October, Wells Fargo holds their community support campaign. It’s an opportunity for our team members to volunteer, give back and get involved in our local communities across the nation. For example, my team is supporting the local food banks. This year, we provided guidance to our team members to share their experiences via social media both inside and out of the company.

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

Our top goal for roll out is engagement. We believe the more engaged team members are, the more productive and efficient they become. And quite frankly, our hope is that internal social will help create a closer sense of community and foster networks formed on a common purpose across our geographically dispersed team member base. 

How are you currently supporting your social business objectives?

Our volunteer network excels on a common purpose – volunteering! Creating a wide open network for them to surface up Q&A helps add support to programs that are engrained in our vision and values but often don’t have the expanded resources to help support. More focused teams, such as sales and product teams are already very collaborative in nature. Sharing in a more transparent way is a different way of working, but starting with small teams that are used to sharing builds trust and confidence.

Kelli Carlson-Jagersma is speaking at this year's 3rd Annual Corporate Social Media Summit San Francisco. She will be presenting on how to leverage internal insight for better communication, knowledge and best practice. Find out more about this session and more here