Social media in Europe

Or rather in Finnish context

Matti Rossi, Aalto School of Business

Enterprise social media

• Starting to gain traction• Digital media companies are willing and able• More traditional companies less so

• Huge interest in formal social media tools– Yammer, SalesForce Chatter

• Facebook, Twitter etc. often sanctioned– E.g. our school policy does not allow me to keep an FB page for

our master’s program

Some research statistics

• 40 % of Finnish companies have a social media strategy• Facebook by far the most popular social media, 60 % of

companies using social media use FB• YouTube second by 50 %, Twitter 30 % and blogging about

20%• Most companies in a testing phase

• Source: Finnish advertisers union http://www.mainostajat.fi/mliitto/index.asp

Example: Finnair

• Small, regional airliner reinventing

itself• “Finnair Runway” Blog: Contributions from Finnair

employees and invited outsiders – Little customer discussion

• Departure 2093 Campaign: Five Visions for Future Air Traffic– Purpose: to convey Finnair values of quality, freshness, and

quality

• Facebook for Service Delivery During Crises– Very useful during the Icelandic ash crisis

Ref: Company Tactics for Customer Socialization with Social Media Technologies: Finnair's Rethink Quality and Quality Hunters InitiativesJarvenpaa, S.L.; Tuunainen, V.K., HICSS 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2012.166

Quality Hunters

• Purpose: use socialization agents to signal what quality is in air travel and engage customers in discussions

• Outcomes: • 5300 applicants from 90 countries, much local PR• Over half a million blog visitors during two months• Many active participants were repeat (and from

Finland)• Very few actual ideas for new product development

Viral vs. official

• Many companies have official policies etc. for social media

• Most interesting things happening recently have been viral and usually not sanctioned by companies

– Nestespoil.com is a Greenpeace site that mocks Neste Oil, a Finnish oil refiner

– Neste tried to use Wipo to claim the web site– Huge backlash in social media– See:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120622/08055119434/greenpeace-parody-site-censored-using-copyright-infringement-claim.shtml

And then something completely different

• More than 1000 Angry birds cake videos in YouTube• 21 million FB fans…