Walmart’s Lisa Thurber presented her internal social media platform called mywalmart.com at the 2011 blogwell session which took place in New York City.
Walmart, social media and change management
Walmart social media numbers
More than a million of registered employees engage on that platform and the site delivers something like 12.3 million page views a month and rising and mobile accounts for 50% of the traffic. Associates are talking on this platform 24/7 Lisa added.
Walmart using social media to answer questions
Healthcare and coverage are one of the very hot topics on the platform. Subject matter experts respond to employee questions online and Walmart has witnessed a 20% drop in calls to the call centre. Lisa adds that she is not certain that this programme is the reason for 100% of these drops in calls but she is sure that it did contribute to it.
Social media seen as not that negative by Walmart
Walmart was anticipating a lot of negativity but in fact, it wasn’t the case unless responses didn’t come fast enough. Walmart does not edit anything that is negative when it’s posted by an associate. The team is trying to engage with the associates when they are at work if they have a very serious issue.
Mobile usage doesn’t have to be encouraged, it happens most naturally because everyone’s got mobiles and in the retail industry it’s so much easier to use the mobile phone than sitting behind a desk.
Social media best practices according
having open conversations with the parties involved is seen by Lisa as the best practice. Besides, Lisa’s partnership with her internal legal teams proved very profitable and they raised the threshold of acceptability in order to make things possible.
selling this management
Walmart has a media team of 9, of those 9, 2 are moderating on a daily basis, including Lisa herself. Because Walmart is not filtering negative comments, there are no particular requirements to have more people. As to selling this to management, Lisa said that the fact that opinions were expressed more openly was actually a selling point to management as opposed to finding these conversations posted somewhere else. Users are only recommended not to post personal content, but this is for privacy protection purposes.
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Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique.
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