Computer company Dell is at the forefront of social media, as NMK explored in its recent exclusive interview with the firm. Dell recently organised its Dell B2B (business-to-business) huddle – or meet-up – for leading social media practitioners and writers. NMK’s Chris Lee was invited along to meet with the likes of HSBC, Transport for London, BBC, Google and others.

Dell was an early adopter of social media and now operates a round-the-clock social media “Command Center” to deal with customer queries and manage buzz – online conversation about its brand.

Dell’s communications director Stuart Handley kicked off the round table debate by posing the question: “How is social media changing the way we do business? Not just the changing nature of the dialogue but how is social media changing the way we communicate within our organisations?”

Banking on social

Aden Davies is responsible for social media strategy at leading high street bank HSBC, and he underlined that for him social media presents both external and internal opportunities and threats. The key challenges for HSBC in devising its social media strategy has been to get parties from across the group together to achieve a consensus on what it wants to achieve with social media.

HSBC – and its competitors – also face regulatory issues when seeking to engage in “Social CRM” – customer relationship management over social networks.

“We’re not allowed to disclose that you have an account with us,” Davies said. This presents problems when customers tweet relating to their service from HSBC; even if the bank were to respond it would inadvertently confirm that that user did indeed hold an account with the bank and therefore breach laws dating back to the 1920s.

HSBC has already run a number of social media campaigns, including its 100 Thoughts competition run via its Twitter feed, to great effect, Davies said, although the ongoing challenges tend to be resource and regulation.

“People want two-way, public and semi-public dialogue with their bank,” he said. “There’s a hunger for that.”

London calling

For Ruben Govinden, Digital and Social Media PR Lead at Transport for London (TfL), social media is a 24/7 challenge, especially with mobile communications becoming ever more important. Implementing a programme within a traditionally conservative organisation also presents its challenges.

“We had to ask ‘what do people want from us?’” Govinden said. “For example, what did we want to use Twitter for?”

Govinden admitted that a great deal of tweets aimed at TfL were vitriolic in nature, but that passengers’ views were always taken on board.

TfL was thrust into the headlights due to social media in late 2009 when a member of its platform staff at Holborn underground station was caught on camera abusing a passenger, which later went viral online.

“We dealt with that as we would a traditional PR story and went to where the conversation was happening: YouTube and Twitter,” Govinden told NMK when quizzed on the incident. “We managed to shift the perception of responsibility away from London Underground and TfL and onto the individual.”

TfL looks set to engage further with social media both in a proactive as well as reactive way.

“We would like to be more human as we are currently faceless, but we’ve got things we want to blog about,” Govinden concluded.