An interview with the Head of Social Media at Belgacom's Consumer Business Unit

Here the first of a series of interviews with "people like me" - passionate about communications, public relations and social media.

Up first is Frederic Herzeele, Head of Social Media at Belgacom's Consumer Business Unit.

The Belgacom Group is the largest telecommunications company in Belgium, headquartered in Brussels. Belgacom Group is primarily state owned, with the Belgian state holding 53.3% + 1 share.

The company's offerings include fixed line communication through the Belgacom brand, mobile communications through the Proximus brand and ICT services to the professional market under the Telindus brand.

Q: Can you describe your position at Belgacom ?

As Head of Social Media, I’m reporting to the Consumer Business Unit's Communications/Branding Director.

I see my role as a “Chef d’Orchestre” to coordinate all the different initiatives in the different departments of Belgacom, using the “Hub & Spokes” organization model.

Today I am a solo player interacting with cross functional teams. My main focus is on embedding Social Media in our day to day marketing mix but also help, guide and support other departments as HR, Internal and Corporate Communications, the Enterprise Business Unit Marketing/Comms and others.

Q: What is the Belgacom strategy behind social media communications ? What are the main objectives ?

Social Media has drastically changed the way we interact and communicate with our customers by giving them platform to express themselves loud and clear about their experience as customers.

Word of mouth gets a new dimension versus classical marketing/communication approach. Comments from peers are becoming more and more important in the decision making process.

We see Social Media as an interactive media and channel but not, (yet ?), as a pure sales channel. We started in 2010 to help our customers via Eva. (an online persona which helps Belgacom customers through online forums).

Today, our main objective is to create a permanent dialogue with our customers trough Social Media. To do so we:

• Listen actively to conversations about Belgacom
• Help our customers via Eva, our virtual customer service operator
• Inform about our products and services when it makes senses: primeur, innovative product or solutions and special actions (servicing).

We're also interacting with our customers by involving them into product launches, beta-testing... Reaction speed, quality of answers and coherence in the messages cross channels are key.

Q: Are you taking the centralized (a social media team being responsible) or the integrated approach (embedding social media throughout the company)

As Social Media is a media/channel used by different departments to reach different objectives and as Belgacom is a quite large company, we are trying to work in an integrated approach, embedding Social Media usage where it makes senses.

Our approach is to decentralize the conversations in order to ensure speed and quality and to manage coherence trough centralized guidelines and weekly coordination meetings.

Q: how are employees engaged in the process ?

We have launched several initiatives regarding employees but today only employees directly using social media for work have access. We are testing a more open social media policy allowing more employees to access these platforms.

The key there is to educate our employees about the best way to use it for the company and themselves. A pilot with 200 employees has been launched two weeks ago and we will launch a new HR project using employees as ambassadors in the coming weeks.

Q: What are your biggest challenges ?

To find the good balance to manage my time between structural and strategic projects versus day to day actions. Move faster and industrialize our approach as our customers are there talking about us, asking for more support, information and ways to engage with us.

Speed up our reaction time but ensure coherence of the messages in the same time. Find the right balance between centralization and decentralization.

Q: Any tips you want to leave us with ?

Move step by step, by trying things without forgetting to work to embed structurally the Social Media evolution in corporate culture.

You can follow Frederic on Twitter @fherzeele

Public Relations get's serious and other take aways from Davos

After 2 days at the Top Communications Conference in Davos it is clear that the Public Relations industry is willing to take itself (more) seriously.

With a hundred delegates from countries as far as India, Japan, Russia, Malaysia and the Middle East the conference was again a success in the way that it gave a great overview of how senior PR professionals see their function and industry evolve.

Some take aways which I have highlighted in my notes:

• We're ready for the C-level function.

Although most delegates admit that we need better education and more management skills, most agreed that Public Relations needs to have a place on the board in any kind of organisation.

Being responsible for "ongoing relations with all constituents that can influence an organisation" gives us the legitimacy to influence top decisions.

We had some great examples where this is the case already. I very much appreciated the speech of Roma Balwani who was on my panel about the role of the Chief Communications Manager.

Roma is the Senior VP and Head of Corporate Communications at the Mahindra Group in India, one of the biggest organisation in the country and beyond.

She explained how her role evolved and how she's currently managing the global brand an reputation of the company. Support from the CEO, adding value to the vision and values of the organisation and being focused on return on investment where some of her key aspects with regards to her role.

• We are ready to own internal and employee communications.

This was a very interesting debate where Paul Holmes, Founder and CEO of "The Holmes Report" and Nettie Buitelaar, CEO of Leiden Bio Science Park shared their views on the question who should "own" internal and employee communications.

Again here, while there were some nuances in the discussion, most of us present agreed that we can not have good external communications without fantastic, open and honest internal communications.

Employees will and are talking about the company they work for and by definition influence the image of the organisation. Therefore there should be no discrepancy between internal and external.

While some advocate the principle "all employees are doing PR" - there was a consensus on the need for a context in which this could happen. Overall, transparency and trust towards employees were mentioned as the key ingredients for strong overall PR.

• We're still struggling with social media integration.

Maybe I am biased but I had the feeling that social media was again presented as "another channel" where clicks & likes played a too important role.

On two occasions I had the uneasy feeling that the Egyptian revolution was being hijacked by companies to create social media campaigns. One example was the Vodafone "Power to You" campaign.

I am glad that together with Gianni Catalfamo from Ketchum Pleon I was not the only one to feel this uneasiness.

Still on social media I was amazed to find out that reporters are still struggling with the intake of online sources and that FP7 projects from the EU are being set up to create "online monitoring and analysis tools" like Sync3.

As for my own part in the conference:

I promoted the Emergency 2.0 Wiki - a volunteer engagement with many others across the globe to create an open and free platform where all information is gathered on the topic of the use of social media for emergency management.

You are very much welcome to join our effort online. Below my presentation.

Emergency 2.0 Wiki at Davos Conference

View more presentations from Philippe Borremans

There were many other topics discussed as you can imagine.

I can not cover them all here but let me say I was amazed at the professionalism of all PR colleagues present and the will to engage in life changing and transparent communications for a better world.

It was great to meet up with like-minded colleagues from across the globe and am looking forward to next year.

Very best wishes for 2012

Dear readers,

First of all a big thank you for being a reader of Conversationblog.com...

I will do my best to bring you new insights on public relations, social media communications and crisis communications in 2012 as well.

This year has been great at Van Marcke Group; the launch of a new intranet, the roll out of a full scale internal social media platform, first steps into online video, QR codes and a social media enhanced newsroom in the works...

Several universities and schools allowed me to share my experience with the next generation of communications professionals this year, something I love to do and I always learn from.

On the personal side, my wife and I where lucky enough to see more of our little globe and had some fantastic travel adventures and encounters with great people. Our house also became (finally) a home and we're really enjoying it.

I wish you all the best for the next year; enjoy quality time with your families and take care of each other !

Kind regards, Philippe Borremans.