Xerox has 140,000 employees and over 100 lines of business.
I think a lot of people think that if you know how to do social media personally, you can automatically do it for a company.
“There’s a lot going on,” says Falynne Finagan, their Head of Global Social Marketing. She leads the corporate team and oversees social strategy and activities within their lines of businesses. That includes 66 branded accounts to manage globally.
Her small corporate team works closely with agency partners, PR, and social practitioners in the business lines. She sets the stage with community best practices, sending assets for the teams to share, and lightly overseeing their work.
Their social media core team consists of anyone at Xerox who owns a branded social media account.
They get on calls to go over new platform updates and new channel features to walk through it together. They also have different social media managers present their work by sharing a tradeshow or case study.
“Because we’re such a big company and everybody’s located all over the world, we’re not always privy to what everyone else is doing. This helps us put forth an effort to always work together and learn from each other,” says Falynne.
Like many SocialMedia.org members, Falynne was a hand-raiser.
Social media is the epitome of big data, and there is so much rich information that can be mined to impact business results.
After working in PR for Xerox for five years, she was ready to try something new that was still close to her area of expertise, and social media was just taking off in the corporate world. At the time, Xerox didn’t have a dedicated social media team, and Falynne was ready to help build it while learning to do the creative work and advertising along the way.
“I think a lot of people think that if you know how to do social media personally, you can automatically do it for a company,” Falynne says. “But it really is an important piece of any marketing strategy and takes dedicated resources to do it.”
“It’s important to not only publish and share, but also to listen and learn from our audiences.”
Even though we want to talk about something, it doesn’t necessarily mean our audience wants to hear it.
“I want to see the day when social metrics truly evolve beyond what I’d call vanity metrics — likes, comments, and shares. Social media is the epitome of big data, and there is so much rich information that can be mined to impact business results,” Falynne says.
She says that can be a challenge working within such a large company. With so many lines of business, Falynne says she works hard to maintain a clear and consistent message on social media that pays attention to what their audience wants.
“That can be tricky when everybody’s coming to you saying, ‘Promote this on social media,’ or ‘We’ve got news, put it on Facebook.’ I’m working on internal education on how social media works. Even though we want to talk about something, it doesn’t necessarily mean our audience wants to hear it.”
Falynne says the instant feedback you get in social media is one of the draws to the jobs.
“The social team is really on the front lines when it comes to communicating with our stakeholders, and it’s fascinating to watch how our audiences respond to the content we share,” she explains.
“We live in an impatient world where people seek instant gratification or feedback — and social media is about as instant as it gets!”
Follow Falynne on Twitter and ask about her latest adventure in motherhood. She’s been a member of SocialMedia.org since 2012.