0% staff turnover? 400% ROI? Dollar return? – Use social media says Deloitte Digital CEO
How do you measure an ROI on Social Media???
It’s not always easy to measure an ROI on Social Media, but, as a part of my interview with him in Sydney, Deloitte Digital CEO Peter Williams (@rexster), says:
“Generally being a firm of accountants we measure it based on how many dollars we get back and the answer is: a sh!tload.”
Without wanting to give away too much here are a couple of highlights:
3 measurables they’ve tracked:
- Deloitte have dropped their recruitment agent fees to nearly zero using a Facebook app called “Join me at Deloitte” they developed for their employees.
- Innovation program generates 400% return on investment per annum for technologies they’ve developed in-house
- They have virtually 0% staff turnover of those that are frequent users of the Deloitte internal social media tool, Yammer.
They’ve also boiled down their policy (pdf) into a single sentence: “What would your mum say?”
Hope you enjoy the interview!
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TRANSCRIPT:
1. Why and how do you use social media at Deloitte?
Deloitte use social media in quite a range of ways:
- Internally, we have heavy users of Yammer. Yammer really allows us to break down silos in the organisation, share knowledge, find resources, manage projects and build social communities – we’ve got a Deloitte Mum’s group and we’ve got a Deloitte bike-riders group. But it really allows us to keep in touch and also allows us to tap into the tacit knowledge of the rest of the organisation. If someone’s got a problem, working on a client, wants some ideas for a client or wants questions about what people think about something, we just put that out on Yammer. I’ve got a program that uses social media at its core to capture or filter ideas so we ask our staff all the time to put in ideas around various business topics or sometimes for client-weeks. We ask our staff to put their ideas in and we’ve got a voting system and a comment system. We use that to identify new opportunities in the market or alternatively, how we can improve our processes and agility.
- There’s a whole raft of stuff we do internally but externally we are heavy uses of Twitter. There are some official Deloitte accounts but also a number of our staff are prominent Twitterers and we encourage them to do that on behalf the firm.
- We use Facebook for recruiting but not just a Deloitte Facebook group, we actually have a little application that our employees plug into their website called “Join me at Deloitte”. We view that the networks of our employees are probably the best talent pool that we can find because they went to university with these guys or may have been colleagues and previous employers. Then if something comes through our Facebook app, that has saved us millions of dollars because we are paying lots of money to employees and not much to recruitment agencies.
- We use blogs, we have the Youtube channel and we use the iPhone to deliver business education.
There’s a million and one things we do with social media but the key thing for us is that we’ve come up with this word, Clomosoda – Cloud, Mobile, Social, Data. Whatever we are doing we’re always looking at how we use Cloud, how we might get mobile, how we incorporate social and what are we going to do with the data. For example, one accounting product is social accounting where you do your accounting, you can invite people in, you’ve got chat features in there and then we use the data to do benchmarking – that’s provided in the Cloud. That’s a bit of an example of Clomosoda.
2. How do you measure the success of all the social media activities you do?
Facebook recruitment app
Being a firm of accountants largely, although we’ve obviously got one of the biggest web companies in countries with Deloitte, we look at the number of referrals we’ve got and we compare that to what we were paying a recruitment agency. Again, we can measure direct dollar benefits. The innovation program generates a return of about 400% PA – that’s based upon what ideas we’ve taken to the market and executed and what profits their making.
Yammer
Yammer’s pretty hard to measure although what we can say is we know that we’ve improved knowledge sharing and we know that active Yammer users have virtually no staff turnover – it’s a great retention tool. In terms of finding the right expert, I think it’s a big time-saver. At the end of the day, being accountants, we measure it based upon what dollars we get back and the answer is – a shitload.
3. What is your social media policy and why did you formulate one?
The social media policy was formulated mainly because there was so much activity in social media in Deloitte. If you wanted to boil it down into one sentence – What would your mum say? The policy isn’t any different to what we do from a cultural point of view – don’t slag off your colleagues, don’t slag off your firm, don’t slag off your clients, don’t put confidential information in public forums, don’t give up your day job. And if you’re not sure about what you should or shouldn’t do – What would your mum say?
Really, the reason to formulate it was because we’ve always had an open internet access policy at Deloitte. We’ve never banned anything, unlike most of the other firms that we see around. We’ve got this sort of aggressive adoption model of – this stuff’s not going to go away, it’s changing how society and business works. If we want to be innovative and the leaders in our field we’ve got to aggressively embrace and learn, so we have a learn-by-doing model. To enable people to do that, we present our policy but we encourage our people to tweet about what they are doing. Of course we suggest that if you want to take photos of the spa party, naked, in Vegas, use common sense. We’re not sure we want Deloitte to be associated with that. We are an old firm with younger people and I think with how young people live their life more out in the open and if they’re thinking “what happens in Vegas stays on Facebook”, we ask them to use common sense. We haven’t had any incidents that have worried us. We also find the internal stuff (Wikis, Yammer or the innovation program) self-regulates. We take 24,000 messages and we never have to moderate one or admonish somebody for putting it on. I think it really goes down to the culture of the place.
4. I loved the philosophy in your social media policy that ‘The price of entry is relevance.’ Could you explain that a little further?
That’s a bit like the notion – don’t give up your day-job. Social media can be a little bit addictive and if you want to do social media in the firm, we’re not interested in hearing about someone having a cup of coffee or going to the gym. Say stuff that’s relevant. Add some value with what you’re doing. Be interesting, share interesting information and use it in interesting ways. Try new things and don’t just flood all the channels that we use with many meaningless stuff that nobody’s interested in. That really goes down to the heart of it. We think that these tools allow us to amplify the message way beyond what we could’ve been able to do before, but if we are able to do it, let’s make sure to do it well. Say stuff that people are interested in. In a firm like Deloitte (because it could be about weird technology like XPR), it’s ok if it’s a bit nichey but don’t make comments about nothing. It’s really about using these channels in ways that push ourselves forward. Share what we’re thinking, share what we’re doing and put it out there but don’t flood it with crap.