While the trend with most companies today is to block employee use of social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, Edmunds.com, Inc. recently launched a program to educate and reward our employees for using their social networks to share our content. Employees who participate are entered into a drawing where every 2 weeks a ‘winner’ is awarded a $100 gift certificate to tisbest.org – a web site where they can spend the money on their charity of choice. This effort is exposing more people to our brand in a personalized way while increasing employee engagement and improving their knowledge of our products at a relatively low corporate investment.

Context

Edmunds.com Inc. publishes Web sites that empower, engage and educate automotive consumers, enthusiasts and insiders. Edmunds.com, the premier online resource for automotive information, launched in 1995 as the first automotive information Web site and hosts the most established automotive community online. InsideLine.com is the most-read automotive enthusiast Web site. AutoObserver.com provides insightful automotive industry commentary and analysis. Edmunds.com Inc. is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, and maintains a satellite office in suburban Detroit. Edmunds.com Inc. is a private, family owned company with approximately 500 employees.

Edmunds.com is a market leader in the Automotive Online Media industry, one where recent innovations in Internet technology have lowered the barrier to entry, resulting in increased competition. Several competitors exist in major business areas like new cars, used cars, etc. Other players in the market include: Kelly Blue Book, AutoTrader, Cars.com, and TrueCar.

Triggers

A Publishing Machine… Nothing Personal About it

When we first began our foray into social media, we knew these platforms would be a great way to expose our brand to a new audience, though we weren’t quite sure how to get started. Our initial approach was rooted in what we do best, which is publishing content. We treated Facebook and Twitter as another channel to distribute our content. A handful of employees from our Public Relations, Editorial, and Marketing departments would determine what content to publish, and schedule the posts using Co-Tweet. There was no personality behind the posts, and little to no interaction between Edmunds staff and fans or followers who responded. We were acquiring a few new fans and followers on these platforms each week, but not at the rate we were hoping. Something was missing.

Making it Personal

We quickly realized that what we were missing was the opportunity to create a relationship with our audience using social media. Providing informative advice articles and statistics serves a purpose– but as a company that strives to help consumers find the car that meets their every need (it’s our mission statement), we needed to do more. We needed to use this medium to connect with our audience on a personal level and provide help when they need it most.

As an initial step, the team trained our entire 35 person Editorial staff to Facebook/Tweet for Edmunds.com to personalize our message. This change drove follower/fan growth on both platforms so we knew we were on to something.
Next, we identified the enormous social marketing potential we could tap by expanding this strategy to all employees. We have an entire workforce that is passionate about helping people find the right car, so why not educate and empower our own employees to help the people they know?

Key Innovations & Timeline

In January, 2011 we initiated a corporate challenge around Social Media, committing a budget and a team of dedicated resources to focus on this priority. The team’s challenge was simply, “how can Edmunds enable consumers to leverage online/offline social networks to get car-related advice they need from the people they trust and when they need it most?” The team quickly mobilized, beginning their efforts by interviewing real consumers. Consumer research confirmed the need for Edmunds to get personal, which drove the following actions:

We created Social Media Guidelines

The guidelines were crafted to not only convey how employees should represent Edmunds, but also to provide general advice for how to responsibly participate in the social media landscape. These guidelines were distributed to the entire company, and we offered a catered lunch training and discussion session for anyone interested in learning more.

http://www.edmunds.com/about/social-media-guidelines.html

We launched @EdmundsLive Twitter Stream

We dedicated 2 new employees to launch the @EdmundsLive Twitter Stream – a service where consumers can reach car shopping experts in near real-time when difficult car research/shopping questions arise. In addition to answering inquiries, the team proactively seeks conversations on Twitter to offer help.

EdmundsLive Twitter

EdmundsLive Twitter Example

We Launched a Social Samaritan Program

With the guidelines in place, we turned our focus to encouraging more employees to become part of the conversation. We launched the Social Samaritan Program, which incentivizes employees to participate by offering them a chance to win a charity donation. Here’s how the program works:

Every two weeks, we highlight a different feature on Edmunds.com.
Using a brief YouTube video, we show employees how to use this feature.

Example: We invite you to watch this short instructional video, which will highlight the My Car Match feature - http://bit.ly/lb4Y1F

We encourage employees to play with feature: Try out the feature on your own, by clicking here: http://www.edmunds.com/car-match/

3. Each employee is provided a custom bitly link to share with their car shopping friends. The bitly link is tracked within a system where every employee is assigned a random number.

4. At the end of this two week period, a contest ‘entry’ is created for every time a unique link was clicked, and we perform an electronic drawing. The winner receives a $100 tisbest.org gift card, where they can choose from a list of over 250 local and national charitable organizations. Employees have access to all popular social networking platforms at the office, so they can share the links anytime – tweeting, face-booking, emailing, instant messaging, blogging, etc., it’s all fair game!

Challenges & Solutions

Challenge: How do we encourage employees to participate in the Social Samaritan contest?

Solution: An all-employee email was sent, and we also used our internal micro-blogging platform (Yammer) to advertise the program. The training was attended by about 50 employees (in-house and offered remotely via WebEx).

Challenge: Overcoming employee fear of not knowing enough about our products.

Solution: Provided training and an on-demand YouTube video explaining the product. The program is also explained on our corporate intranet site (a wiki).

Benefits & Metrics

Continued growth in customer engagement on key social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Increased employee engagement and trust. By empowering our employees to represent our brand, we are educating them about self-moderation and also displaying our trust in their judgment since their social networking activity is not moderated.
- Approximately 10% of our employees (50) participated in the first round of the Social Samaritan Program
Increased employee knowledge of our products.
- Most employees do not have the opportunity to engage with our websites on a daily basis due to the nature of their role. The Social Samaritan program provides a fun, inspiring, and easy way for them to:

Learn about key products

Help their friends and family have a better car shopping experience

Support a charity

Managing the Social Samaritan Program is easy and inexpensive. We use bitly to quickly generate and manage unique links for each employee.

Lessons

Consumers want a conversation. Personalizing our posts on social platforms, rather than simply republishing links to our web site content, drives more consumer engagement.
Our employees have more extensive and established social networks than we thought.
Our employees were already actively engaging with their social networks about our brand. It was up to us to harness the potential of this activity.
Our Social Media Guidelines were specifically written to act as guideposts – not to create additional policies. Creating simple, easy to understand guidelines helps employees feel comfortable being brand ambassadors.

Make it as easy as possible for our employees to participate in social conversations.

You can’t force it. Those who were already talking will continue to talk. Those who wanted to talk but weren’t sure how will talk if you provide them with support. Those who have no interest, probably can’t be swayed.

Credits

Carolann Kowalski, Director of Knowledge Management, Edmunds.com, Inc.

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July 17, 2011 at 1:36pm

Jeff Mackanic

Hi Katti:
This is great. The custom bitly link with each click creating an entry in the drawing is a fantastic idea. I am thinking about how I can apply this!

July 19, 2011 at 11:39am

Katti Fields

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your comments. We were very happy with our bitly Pro account for this purpose. Only recently have we upgraded the Enterprise version as we were exceeding our daily shortening limit because we were also using this tool to shorten URLs for every page of our website. For nearly all marketing purposes a bitly Pro account should be sufficient. I would recommend getting a custom short url - for example our links are edmu.in instead of bit.ly.

Best of luck!

Regards,
Katti

July 17, 2011 at 9:38am

Jon Ingham

It's great to see you using social media, but I have to say 282 twitter followers doesn't suggest that much in the way of relationships or conversations. However, I do realise that since there may be years between when people change cars, this might be difficult to achieve. Did you think about any other ways of encouraging employees to tweet other than incentives eg through changing the culture of the organisation? How do ensure the best person picks up on a conversation with a consumer (eg like @twelpforce)?

July 19, 2011 at 12:12pm

Katti Fields

Hi Jon,

Thanks for your comment. Our @EdmundsLive Twitter account is a little bit different with respect to follower behavior than our @Edmunds Twitter account where we have about 22,000 followers. The post volume is more than double on @EdmundsLive than it is on @Edmunds, and most of those posts are outreach to people who may or may not be familiar with our brand. When we get a response back and engage in a conversation on @EdmundsLive, they don't necessarily follow us because in 1-2 replies they get answers to their specific questions (i.e. is this a fair price to pay for a Honda Civic in my area) and then their interaction with this service is over until the next time they need our help (which to your point, could only be every couple of years for purchase, or more frequently for ownership information). We have also begun surveying people who have engaged in conversations with @EdmundsLive to measure their satisfaction and help shape the direction of future conversations. Again, one of the main goals of our social media efforts is brand recognition. So if they had not been familiar with our brand or web site before, we hope through @EdmundsLive or @Edmunds that they found the experience helpful and will come back to our services/ web sites when they need car shopping information or assistance in the future.

With respect to additional ways that we encourage employees to tweet and post on Facebook about our brand - we are definitely taking a cultural approach. We are trying to make everything at the company be more social. For example, we have an internal social media platform called Yammer (like Twitter, but a closed system) where employees are able to post, form groups, engage, etc. Our Human Resources Department is piloting the use of Rypple.com, which puts a social spin on the employee performance review process allowing real-time feedback year-round. These organizational changes are helping to make people more comfortable with being social in a professional capacity, and should help increase employee's willingness to participate in our social marketing efforts.

With respect to ensuring the right person engages with consumers, we only have a few people dedicated to our @EdmundsLive account, but they are supported by a broad network of employee subject matter experts (SMEs) to ensure they have the right information to report to consumers. Employee's engaging with their own social networks can also leverage these SMEs via our Yammer platform or other internal means.

Hope this additional detail helps answer your questions.

Regards,
Katti