Nortel VP: We Embrace Social Media

For anyone who closely follows Nortel (NT), you may have noticed that the company has been enthusiastically embracing social media with a growing number of blogs as well as the use of podcasts and streaming video.

It got me thinking, why is Nortel using social media and what’s the big-picture strategy? So, I fired off an e-mail to Bo Gowan, one of Nortel’s PR people who co-writes the Nortel Buzzboard blog. He was good enough to arrange an interview with Ronald Alepian, VP, corporate communications.

Why has Nortel been so enthusiastic about embracing social media?

Depending on the audience you are speaking to, social media is emerging as having more influence than traditional media or even some of the direct one on one communications. Customers and other influential stakeholders in the online space are looking at product and services, thinking about sharing knowledge, kicking the tires, and you have to be present in that conversion.

The game is going on. You can choose to sit and watch or participate. There are risks in participating but not participating is a mistake. That is where stakeholders and people who are important to us are, and we want to be part of the conversation, debate and part of the dialogue.

Do you feel like Nortel is on the forefront when it comes to large companies using social media?

I am not trying to set a record. What I am trying to do is participate in a conversation that will take place with or without us, and engage our audiences more and more. You can throw a lot of budget against these kinds of things. There are some companies that spend seven figure budgets and try to buy mind share. To me, it is about engagement.

Are we being aggressive about it? No, I think we are doing what we need to do and to be a part of the community we want to play it. It is about engaging people in a meaningful dialogue. We are shifting from a company that sells boxes on a network to one more about services, solutions and applications. This type of dialogue is important because when you engage, you get educated.

Was there any resistance internally in this social media strategy?

I wouldn’t say there was resistance to doing it, unless you talk to our lawyers. But they understand what we are doing and why. I don’t think there was resistance in doing it but an educational effort was required to explain to people why we are doing it. When you have people such as industrial scientists and R&D leaders and some business unit leaders, it took a little bit of explaining about what’s going on. Once we got the education level up, it became almost instinctive for the company to endorse what we are doing.

What has Nortel learned so far from its social media initiatives?

I don’t think there is anything that surprised or shocked us by what took place. What was interesting to watch is the speed with which that world works, and we have to change our ability to move and give people like Bo and others a lot more flexibility than an official corporate spokesperson in the traditional world. The reality in a very viral world can turn into an entire conversation literally overnight.

Can you talk about what happened at Interop after Nortel made it Energy Efficient Calculator?

What took place, in additional to the buzz on the trade show floor, was a bunch of people starting blogging about it and talking about it online. It created almost overnight a buzz that started hitting the mainstream world. We were able to handle it because Bo and others injected ourselves into the conversation the second, it broke. Had we had not had that capability, the conversation would have happened with or without us. We were right there smack in the middle of the conversation over a two-week period.

Can you talk about education and structure when it comes to social media? Do you have policies, for example, about who can blog and what they can blog about?

We do have a blog policy within the company that basically says "here are the dos and don’ts." It’s not rocket science or different from any other companies' blog policies. One is don’t talk about forward looking projects and financial things like that because it opens whole complications for a publicly traded company. The second one is that I personally hate anonymous blogging when done by employees of a corporation. It contravenes the unwritten rule. We are out there as front as we can be.

Do you encourage internal bloggers?

Yes, although I will never a see a communication from us to 30,000 employees, “Ladies and gentleman start your engines and go blog.” I have no issue and quietly encourage it. We certainly can’t stop it. Good luck to the company that tries to stop it. People are aware of our policies – they’re straightforward. They are aware of the fundamental principles: don’t talk about financial and don’t pretend to be someone who you aren’t.

As this world progressively moves forward and as we put in place programs internally to educate employees about the direction of the company, I hope to see that type of conversation online. If you try to impose censorship or control in that environment, it’s a losing battle, so you try to guide people to do it responsibly. People in the rank and file organization, in the business that gets the product and speaks to customers, are best positioned to talk about it. I think the number of people that do it will continue to grow.

How to you reach out to bloggers and other social media people?

There is a general premise in the blog world that is different than the media world. Journalists are bound to a great extent - and we hope they remain bound - by fact. There needs to be a source or proof point of reference to what they are talking about. It needs to be based as much as possible in fact, records and sources, etc. That means there are different rules on how you speak to media because you can engage people based on factual conversations.

In the blog word, it is an editorial world, a commentary world where people express opinion. They don’t necessary need to be based on concrete resources, they can express things as opinion. The engagement with that environment needs to be more about debate and argument, and more about delivering compelling thinking than arguing fact. When we go on those sites, people argue whether Nortel will make it or not, or whether Nortel will be worth $50, they are expressing an opinion. We need to come to the table with compelling arguments.

Finally, when Mike Zafirovski start blogging?

He did blog on an internal [blog], and he did a video blog where he talked to employees that got a lot of good feedback. He did a second one when we launched our advertising campaign. Our executives are using the platform to engage employees. We are letting those folks blog internally. Externally, it will come down to commitment. We would love [Zafirovski] to blog, if only a couple times a week. His engagement with customers is very direct – he will speak to hundreds of customers in a given year, and right now, that is the best place for him to be. I don’t think you need a CEO blogging for a company to be credible if that person has embraced it internally in terms of having a dialogue.