Ferrero’s social media strategy deconstructed [Interview - Live at LeWeb '11]

I caught up with Guillaume du Gardier, Head of Digital Media in Western & South Europe for Ferrero, about how they use social media to communicate with their customers, but also how they are using it internally, to organise across the organisation and communicate with their employees. Guillaume shared a lot of insight into the social media strategy and in particular, what it’s like to work for a brand online that people seem to have a deep love for, making the job somewhat easier! The strategy at Ferrero seems to be largely based around letting the fans drive the direction and focusing on conversations as opposed to scalability of social media accounts.

Who owns social media?

Given that Ferrero is such a large organisation, having to manage localised pages and 800 employees in the Italian arm of the business alone (the headquarters and birthplace of Ferrero), I was interested to see how social media communication is managed internally. Ownership of social media is currently falling under the digital team in the business, but Guillaume was keen to emphasise that social media in the organisation is completely traversive. Rather than remaining silo’ed within the digital department, they allow it to factor in other departments. For example, they ensure their customer service reps are trained in social communication, so they can efficiently respond to people firsthand, rather than having to go through the digital department directly.

As for the social media teams themselves, these are relatively small. Despite having close to 50 million fans to manage across various brands on Facebook, there are just a few people in each regional market that are dedicated to social media. Guillaume explained that for them, social media is very much a work in progress and that they are by no means champions. Although the company has been active in social media for 5 years (coincidentally the same amount of time that Guillaume has been at Ferrero for), Guillaume sees them as very much at the beginning and finding their way. This should demonstrate to other brands the enormity of a successful social media strategy and how much learning is still to come. 5 years in social media for a multinational brand and by their own admission they are only at the beginning…

Managing locally

One thing that many brands are getting their heads around, is to how to effectively implement a strategy that will support regional markets’ efforts on social media while also allowing them to be autonomous. Guillaume gave an insight into how they manage this process. Each market has as much autonomy as possible, with their own Facebook Page, but they are also given access to the main Ferrero or brand Page, to target updates through the wall specifically. This is no doubt a huge resource issue, particularly given that as well as running across different countries, Ferrero also has 25 individual brands to manage. It seems that is very much a collaborative approach between countries, allowing local knowledge to proliferate in the strategy.

On growing fans

The individual brand pages for Ferrero are incredibly popular, as it seems that Ferrero products are just products people happen to love. This passion for their brands is translating into numbers for them. Although Ferrero’s measurements of success go beyond simple numbers, when I asked Guillaume how many of their 50 million fans had come from investment in Facebook advertising, he said it equated to around 10%. It seems that Ferrero haven’t actually focused on growing their fans at all and while social media isn’t exactly an afterthought for them, it’s an area of the business that is growing exponentially without much stimulation needed from the brand level.

Return on engagement

 

I quizzed Guillaume about how he is currently measuring the success of their efforts and specifically ROI. He replied that he was unlikely to get that answer into a single interview (!). But he did explain that rather than focusing on return on investment, he prefers to look at return on engagement. Guillaume is very much the champion of social media in the organisation and is inevitably having to constantly justify the value of what he’s doing online. By looking at return on engagement, he is more effectively able to translate this success to the business. He has to look at more indirect return on engagement and he also said that he is yet to find a single piece of monitoring software that could effectively track activity, instead having to use a combination of tools. None of which seemed to be adequately doing their job.

On location services

I was interested to see how a brand like Ferrero would look at location services, particularly as they are not a direct to consumer brand, instead going through distributors to reach the consumers. He said that they had first looked at location 3 years ago, with the launch of an iPhone app that relied on geo-location services, for Kinder. They are also using Facebook locally to organise corporate and brand events. But it seems that there is still a long way to go for Ferrero in the location space, but he explained it was certainly an area of interest. Whether location is actually right for a company such as Ferrero however, I’m still not convinced. While you can see a natural tie with the distributors, it seems there is more value in Ferrero working with these distributors to develop a location service, rather than offering it themselves.

On internal communication

I’m always interested in how larger brands use social media tools to communicate efficently internally, if they use it at all. This is something that Guillaume seemed particularly interested in, and he explained that Ferrero France was the first market in the company to launch a communications strategy internally, using social media, 4 years ago. The strategy has developed to offer an internal blog that is used to communicate with people across the business. It’s owned by the HR department as opposed to the communications department, but it also a collaborative effort. Any employee can comment on the blog, anonymously if they want, as well as contribute articles.