This presentation showcases the steps needed to develop a successful social media strategy. It focuses on building a good process for listening and engaging with key stakeholders across the Social Web.

1. Deirdre Walsh
Listen Up: Tips for Social Social Media & Community
Program Manager
Media Success National Instruments
My name is Deirdre Walsh and for the last 5 years I’ve managed the social business program
at National Instruments.

2. Agenda
• Brief Introduction
• Social Media Management Overview
• 6 Pillars of Social Media Success @deirdrewalsh
• Discussion and Debate
During today’s session, I’ll be giving a brief overview of the social media program at NI, share
with you some best practices for how to build or improve your current program, and then
open it up to some great discussion and debate.

3. National Instruments
• Established in 1976 in Austin, TX
• Sells to a broad base of more than 30,000 different
companies worldwide
• More than 5,200 employees; operations in ~40
countries
• No one customer representing more than 4 percent of
revenue and no one industry representing more than 15
percent of revenue.
• $873M Revenue in 2010
• Fortune’s100 Best Companies to Work For 12th
Consecutive Year
First, I want to provide a brief overview on National Instruments. Headquartered in Austin,
we sell hardware and software into more than 30,000 different companies worldwide. No
industry represents more than 15 percent of our revenue. So, it’s essential for us to have a
strong community that connects like-minded engineers and scientists so they can provide
each other support and share best practices for their specific application.

4. Integrated Social Business Properties
Developer Community NI Talk Social Media
Engage Engage Engage
Customers Employees the Social Web
• Community-Based Support • Innovation Acceleration • Product Launches
• Customer Innovation • Sales & Channel Enablement • Community Recruiting
• Event Communities • Corporate Communications • Social Brand Management
• Account Management • Expertise Location / Corporate Directory • Service Everywhere
• Social Commerce • M&A Integration • Social Selling
• Marketing • Contact Center Enablement • Competitive Intelligence
To do this, we utilize Jive Social Business Software, we have integrated tools to engage with
customers, employees and all of the conversations on the social Web. The best part is that all
of these platforms are integrated and this is unique. Often at enterprises today you have
product marketing or support teams in charge of branded communities, HR or employee
communications responsible for internal collaboration, and PR or marketing teams driving
strategy for platforms like Facebook and Twitter. But with Jive it becomes less about the
technologies and more about connecting the right conversations to the right subject area
experts.
Our social business efforts have won us two Forrester Groundswell awards for supporting and
embracing our customers. For today’s presentation, I’m going to be focusing on the third
area - Social Media.

5. Questions We Want Answer
• Where are our customers online?
• Who should participate in conversations on the social Web?
• What platforms should be participating on?
• What are the digital profiles of our prospects?
• Who are the influencers and who trusts them?
• What is the sentiment of our products and brand?
• How do we measure success?
As a social media manager, there are a number of questions I want answered - where are our
customers? who are the key influencers? what is our brand sentiment?

6. 6 Pillars of Success
Listen
Define Integrate and Build Activate Analyze
Engage
Don’t be an
Set clear
island.
goals that Monitor and Grow social Reward and Track and
Connect to
align with respond to community amplify key report impact
internal
overall actionable membership & influencers & across
structure,
business conversations engagement evangelists business
process,
objectives
plans.
Across the Social Web
To help address all of these areas, I’ve come up with the 6 pillars of social media success.
The three in light blue are internally focused. It’s really important to get alignment internally
before engaging externally. The other blue rainbow items will three teach you how to best
interact with your customers. Today, I’ll be walking through each of these six areas.

7. 1 Define. Set clear goals that
align with overall business objectives
Utilize a planning framework (like
Forrester’s POST method) to
determine audience, goals,
strategies, and technologies.
- Support: Ensure Customer Success
- R&D: Obtain Product Feedback
- Sales: Drive New/Repeat Business
- PR: Increase Awareness and Manage
Reputation
- Marketing: Increase Loyalty
- Web: Increase Online Engagement
The first step to any social media plan is to set clear goals that align with your overall
business objectives. At NI, I’ve developed our social media program to help meet core goals
around support, development, sales, and marketing.

8. 1 Define. Set clear goals that align with overall business objectives
Understand one size doesn’t fit all. Sam
ple
Support - Real-time news updates
Marketing - Demonstrate thought leadership
Awareness - Provide help and collaborate
Awareness - Create emotional connection through
visual storytelling
Training
- Provide how-tos
Support - Product reviews
Lead Generation - Sales contact management
Product Development - Prospect insights
Marketing - Corporate recruiting
Support -Insight into personal interest
Marketing -High engagement
Community Building -News dissemination
Marketing -Thought leadership position
Lead Generation -Share multiple types of content
Awareness -Search engine optimization
Community Building -Visual aids to increase awareness
Awareness -Humanize brand
Additionally, I’ve setup best practices for how to use each social media platform to
accomplish these objectives. I’ve found that it’s not a one-size-fits-all model. A site like
Twitter is great for real-time customer service and news updates, while a platform like
LinkedIn is better for lead generation and even getting product feedback. It’s important to
really spend time understanding these ever-changing technologies and how your audience
wants to interact with you on them.

9. 2 Integrate. Don’t be an island. Connect to internal structure, process, plans.
• To be successful on the social Web, you must first align internal roles,
processes, policies and stakeholders.
• Organizational Structure and Business Planning
NI Executive Social Business Council
Marke-ng
Product
Marke-ng Web
and
IT Business
Support
and
R&D
Communica-ons
-­‐
Intelligence
Regional,
Sales
Virtual Social Media Team Community Team
(off domain - ie Facebook) (NI Communities)
- Includes each one of the marketing - Internal and external collaboration
functions (Ad, PR, DM, Events, etc)
- Regional Representation
- Connection to Sales
The next step is to integrate social business. You must align with internal roles, processes,
policies, and stakeholders. In 2006, I setup a cross-functional, social business steering team
that is still working today. This group of executives helps finalize the plans, metrics and
targets for our overall program. And really this group helps our entire company evolve and
embrace collaboration technologies.
We also have two working groups that are in charge of the day-to-day execution. One is the
Virtual Social Media Team. It includes representatives from across marketing communications
in areas like advertising, PR, events, etc. It also is our connection to the branches globally
and to our sales organization. This group focuses on platforms off our domain like Facebook
and YouTube and their purpose is two fold 1) integrate social into traditional outlets and 2)
work on social media specific projects. So for example a writer who sits on our content team
and writes articles for our e-newsletter also is repurposing that content for Twitter.
On the other side I have the Community Team - a great group of folks that are responsible for
the NI Communities both internal and external.

10. 2 Integrate. Don’t be an island. Connect to internal structure, process, plans.
• Policies and Process - ie. social media guidelines, listening process
• Training - enable employees and build core competencies for social
Once I had the organizational structure setup, I started working over the last few years to set
clear policies. The center of this is good social media guidelines. And this isn’t an easy
process. It took me several months to get the guidelines written and approved by the various
stakeholders from HR, legal, etc.
I’ve also created several training options. It ranges from formal programs like NI Blog
College, which take a few hours to complete, to simple how-to tutorials on getting started on
Twitter. Of course, all of these things are stored on our employee community and really
enable the entire workforce to successfully join in the conversation.

11. 3 Listen and Engage. Monitor and respond to actionable conversations
The social web provides insight into what is being said about your company,
products, markets, and the competition. Social media management is more than
just mass media. It’s about building valuable relationships.
Re-active monitoring - tracking
important wikis, forums, blogs, and
other Web content for customer
sentiment, service problems, leads,
market trends, and competitive insights.
Critical notion of Service Everywhere -
we can now engage customers and
prospects to quickly identify
opportunities and threats, broadly
share them in real-time, and
collaboratively respond.
Once you have defined your plan and integrated it into the business, you’re ready to start
listening and engaging on the social Web. Beyond your corporate Website, there is a vast
amount of information about your company brand, products, markets and even your
competition. Often times people see social media management as just another mass media
marketing tool, but if used correctly it can give you great insight and allow you to build
meaningful relationships that impact the business.
You can see by the example on the left that the first step is to listen. On a daily basis, my
team is using Jive to monitor for both opportunities and threats on the social Web, share
them with key stakeholders in real-time and collaboratively respond. In this case, we heard
what the customer was saying, invited them to participate on our support community, and
changed their perception of our company. Not bad for 140 characters!

12. Ethics and Standards
• FTC Guidelines for Social Media Outreach
1. Create social media policies and training programs.
2. Require disclosure and truthfulness in social media outreach.
3. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements.
http://www.socialmedia.org/disclosure/
Listening is no longer just a nice to have. The FTC now has 3 main guidelines for social
media outreach - like we discussed you should create social media policies and training
programs (if this is done well the company will not be held liable for social media mishaps),
like our mother’s taught us we must be truthful in our outreach and finally we must monitor
the conversation and correct mistakes.
Now, for some companies, this is extremely difficult. As I mentioned in the beginning, no
industry represents more than 15 percent of NI’s revenue. Therefore, on any given day our
customers our talking about topics that range from robotics, to medical device design to
aerospace. So, I had to create a process to manage all of these conversations on the social
Web and engage with key stakeholders internally who could help with the response. There
was no way that one person or even a team of people could know that answers to all of these
topics.
The problem was most social media listening tools from both a technology and a pricing
standpoint were built for small team use and not integration across the enterprise. But Jive
was different.

13. Social Media Monitoring Process
Social Media Monitoring Employee Listening Network
Finds content online about supplements monitoring tool
company, products, or key
topics of interest
Social Media Coordinator
Checklist
Objectives: Support, Product Feedback,
- Business Objectives Alignment Sales, Awareness, Loyalty, Reputation
- Network Activator Management, Community Building
- Historical Relationship
- Valuable Linking (SEO)
Post “Actionable Conversations” in Employee Community
- Coordinator responds or alerts internal experts of relevant, new posting and includes direct link
- Employees collaborate on most valuable response using content evaluation flowchart
- Member of “core team” or topic expert responds on original platform and links to valuable content
- Conversation is tracked and recorded
Tadah. So, here is our formal social media monitoring process. I have a social media
coordinator who acts like a old school telephone operator. He uses the monitoring tool in
Jive as well as collects information from our 5,000 employees about they key conversations
about our brand, products, etc. He then applies a filter. He looks to see if the conversation
helps us meet one of our core social business objectives, which I shared earlier, he looks at
the source to see if they are influential or if we have a historic relationship with them or if it
would be good from an SEO standpoint.
If it meets one of the items on the checklist, he posts the link to the “actionable conversation”
directly into our employee community. We can then have a private conversation about the
best response and pull in topic experts.

14. Response Workflow
Take reasonable
action to fix issue
and let customer
know action taken
Positive Negative
Yes Yes
No Assess the
Do you want Evaluate the Does customer need/
to respond? message purpose deserve more info?
Yes Inquiry
No Is it a Unhappy Yes Are the facts No Gently correct the
Response support Customer? correct? facts
No issue?
Yes No
Yes Can you Yes No
Can you add Dedicated Are the facts
answer in <2
value? mins? Complainer? correct?
No Yes
No Yes No
Answer or Is the Explain what is being
Respond in Thank the Yes
point to Comedian? problem done to correct the
kind & share person
resource link being fixed? issue.
No
Yes
Direct to
Encourage Post in
*Modified from Altimeter Forums Let post stand and Idea Exchange
Presentation monitor.
Since I work at an engineering company, we’ve even modified a common response flowchart
from Altimeter to determine next steps.
Then, all of these conversations are tracked, recorded and searchable for inclusion in metrics
reports as well as future reference.

15. Sentiment Scoring
Somewhat Somewhat
Negative Neutral Positive
Negative Positive
widespread
a low level influencer
a high level influencer a low level influencer complaints, a high
and/or a member of
and/or a member of posts that carry no and/or a member of level influencer and/
a low ranking
a high ranking emotional a low ranking or a member of a
medium makes a
medium makes a connotation medium makes a high ranking medium
positive post
positive post negative post makes a negative
post
The final step is to assign a sentiment score. This helps us keep track of our overall brand
perception on the social Web. Now, sentiment is subjective, but we have developed ways to
use sentiment to help track the online attitude, opinion or intended meaning of a writer and
their message. I first created a 5 level approach that we can use with Jive.

16. Sentiment Analysis
• Subjectively aims to determine the online attitude, opinion, or intended meaning
of a writer and their message.
• In evaluating sentiment, you must take several things into consideration:
- Context, Location, Keyword, Degree of Emotion, Author vs. Disseminator
• There are also a few different types of influence to consider:
- User in our community
- General trust rank
- The medium/outlet
- Content of the mention
• Exclude certain types of postings, as they add little to no value to the
conversation:
- Job postings, Torrents, Press releases, Spam sites
To dig a bit deeper, I wanted to share with you some of the things we consider and omit.

17. Sample Analysis
It also helps identify potential crisis situations if we see huge dips in a given timeframe.
According to Visible Technologies, which manually scored more than 8 million social
web mentions, 80% of the conversation is neutral. Therefore, it’s really important to
take action on the outliers.

18. Proactive Conversations
Source: Corporate Executive Board
But the social Web isn’t just about being reactive. Since you have unlimited keyword searches
in Jive, you are able to join in on the conversations you really want to be a part of. Here is an
example. Emilie Kopp is our internal subject area expert on robotics - a market that we are
fairly new to and still trying to establish credibility in. She was listening to a blogger talk
about robotics, and even though it didn’t mention NI and was able to add value to the
conversation and even link back to her own blog and targeted discussion space on our
community. This simple task opened up dialogue and helped us build a relationship with one
of the topic subject area experts in the world.

19. Competitive Advantage
• Real-time insight into competitors
• Brand sentiment, media distribution, key influencers, news
You can also proactively get great real-time insight into your competitors. You can score
their brand sentiment, look at where they are being discussed, who their key influencers are
and even just stay updated on their news all in one place.

20. 4 Build. Grow social community membership & engagement
• Pro-active marketing - value-added content creation and syndication for
social networks, blogs, ads on social outlets, etc. Creating special incentives,
activities, and information just for community members.
• Sometimes this means joining a strong community or centralizing a presence
(does 1000 Facebook groups ring a bell?).
• More about “actionable conversations,” activity, and engagement (RTs) than
just fans and followers.
Beyond monitoring, the next step in any social media program is to build or joining a strong
community on these platforms.
By creating and syndicating specialized content for social networks, you move from becoming
just another marketer on Facebook to a trusted advisor. To be successful, at least 50 percent
of your content should be things written by others and conversations you are having with
your audiences. You’re metrics become more about the value you are adding to conversation
and less about the number of fans or followers.
But this takes work. You can see a screenshot here of our content editorial calendar. Just
like we would with other marketing communications tactics, we have a strategic plan and
track performance of our messages as well as high-level themes.

21. e-newsletter Facebook Community
Integrating messages across all
community platforms
But these messages don’t have to come from thin air. While it is good to create some content
just for social outlets. We also make sure that our messages don’t live in a silo.
JUST TALK TO THIS: For example, we are playing off March Madness right now and created a
coding competition for our users. This relevant Facebook content links directly to our robust
developer community, where we have greater platform capabilities as well as control over the
data.

22. 5 Activate. Reward and amplify key influencers & evangelists
• Utilize knowledge
gained from your
listening activities to
amplify the voices of
key influencers.
• Beyond spreading
positive information
about your brand,
educated
evangelists can be
your frontline of
defense. It’s very
important to reward
and recognize them.
The next step is to activate your audience by rewarding and amplifying key influencers and
evangelists. For example, in our bi-monthly print and e-newsletter, we feature content
directly from our community and social media outlets. We showcase individuals through
things like our “member of the month” program as well as content like their top 5 product
ideas from the community. In fact, our top story last year was “Why Should Engineers Care
about Social Media.” So we are even using this as an opportunity to educate them about
social business.
Beyond spreading positive information about your brand, educated evangelists can be your
frontline defense on the Web - often doing a better job than marketing or PR in responding
to negative comments.

23. 6 Analyze. Track and report impact across business
• Metrics should align to business objectives - support, marketing, sales, etc.
• Sample Metrics: Reach, Activity, Engagement, Content, Actionable
Conversations, Net Promoter Score, Customer Loyalty Survey, Sentiment
Daily
/
Weekly Monthly Few
Times
a
Year Never
Satisfaction
and
Loyalty
Metrics
by
NI
Community
Usage
Extremely Satisfied 10 9.0
/Likely 8.8 8.5 8.6
8.2 8.2 8.5 8.2 8.4 8.2
8.0 7.8 7.7 7.6
7.2 7.2
Not at all Satisfied / 1
Likely OVERALL
satisfaction
Recommend
Repeat
purchase
Purchase
new
products
The final step is to analyze. It’s so important to track and report metrics across the business.
I know this is a key topic and there are lots of debates on what are the important KPIs. And
really it depends on your business goals. It’s also really easy to get stuck in the weeds. I
have evolved my dashboard dramatically over the last several years. I used to track
everything under the sun. Now, I have a comprehensive social business dashboard that
combines social media and community metrics at a high-level like audience reach and
community health. Really high-level, impactful numbers. We use these numbers along with
loyalty data to report to our Board.
So, today 41 percent of our domestic customer base engages with NI communities on a
monthly basis. And it’s not just our longstanding users. Last year, 72 percent of new
customers utilized our community. But what’s cool is that the more actively engaged with us
they are, the more likely they are to recommend our products, repeat purchase and purchase
new products.

24. 6 Pillars of Success
Listen
Define Integrate and Build Activate Analyze
Engage
Don’t be an
Set clear
island.
goals that Monitor and Grow social Reward and Track and
Connect to
align with respond to community amplify key report impact
internal
overall actionable membership & influencers & across
structure,
business conversations engagement evangelists business
process,
objectives
plans.
Across the Social Web
To summarize, there are 6 pillars of social media success. You must really internally prepare
for the best way to engage on the social web and continuously analyze your efforts.

25. For More Information...
Deirdre Walsh
Jive: deirdrewalsh
deirdre.walsh@ni.com
@deirdrewalsh
/in/deirdrewalsh
Now, I’ll hand it back over to Candice for the questions and comments.