For managers in matrix organizations and virtual environments, acumen in social media will go from being a trendy “nice to have” to being a “must have.” Those who cannot harness these tools will be less competitive than their peers. This shift in paradigm and its democratizing power is revolutionizing how teams can influence their stakeholders and add value to their organization. This white paper will help you empower your team, influence your organization and serve your stakeholders within a virtual and global environment.

1. March 2012
November 2012
NEXT GENERATION MANAGEMENT-
SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY FOR TEAM
EMPOWERMENT
How Dell’s EMEA Business Intelligence team used Social Media to “Do
More”
A paper by Elizabeth Press, Vanessa Galvany and Margo Smale

2. Social Media as a New Dimension of Modern Management
How managers can embrace the democratization of information
Managers in matrix organizations and virtual environments face unique challenges to empower teams and
engage employees. This paper is for business leaders who want their teams to thrive in today’s complex
organizations by leveraging the latest social media technologies and collaborative platforms to achieve
teamwork, visibility and impact.
Global presence and multi-site locations add to modern organizational complexity, often resulting in
matrix organizations spanning continents. Virtual teams where employees never meet face-to-face and
rely on communication technologies are becoming ever more common. At the same time, organizations
are expecting the same level of collaboration and synergies that they would from traditional-or non-virtual
teams. Meeting these expectations present a substantial challenge for today’s managers.
New technologies are evolving the information sharing paradigm, shifting from a send-receive (traditional
email) to a publish-subscribe model (blogs/social media). This shift in paradigm is substantially changing
how teams can influence their stakeholders and add value to their organization. Social media will become
an essential dimension of all management disciplines. These tools lead to a democratization of
information; team members no longer depend on the formal team hierarchy structure to reach out to new
groups or for all information needs. Team members can use these tools to improve their influence and
empower themselves across an organization.
This paper presents how the application of new collaboration tools helped one team in the Dell EMEA
organization, Business Intelligence (BI). The BI team was able to gain increased visibility and recognition
throughout key internal stakeholders in EMEA and worldwide, as well as improve the level of influence of
this team across the company.
The Last Milestone in Business Intelligence’s Transformation
Social media’s role in taking BI from reporting to thought leadership
In the span of a couple of years, Dell’s EMEA Business Intelligence team developed from a reporting
function into a team of thought leaders who create their own metrics, conduct statistical modeling and
impart strategic insight to executives.
At the same time as this transformation was taking place, the number of stakeholders was increasing
manifold due to reorganization. Meanwhile, team headcount remained the same. Business Intelligence had
to find a more effective and efficient way to operate and communicate, in order to reach out and
influence this wide audience formed by the regional sales and marketing teams.
Social Media and collaboration provided the team with the ability to communicate widely to all
stakeholders and to influence the organization by sharing the key insights and recommendations from the
various strategic analyses in a common platform. The team was becoming empowered as they were no
longer simply providing data, but adding value to the data as thought leaders.
The last milestone was to become a true thought leader to the organization and here is where social
media and collaboration play an important part.
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3. High and Broad Expectations on Business Intelligence
Social Media tools were used to empower the team
The team had to overcome obstacles to meet the high expectations:
 Enabling team work despite never having met: Despite lack of personal acquaintance and
geographical distance, the team needed to work well together.
 Providing thought leadership to a diverse group of stakeholders: Business Intelligence’s
stakeholders were located not only across functions, but also across time zones.
 Merging of teams from two business areas: The new team needed quick knowledge transfer and
sharing of best practices.
 Promoting cross-functional cooperation: The analysis Business Intelligence was providing would
benefit a broader audience within the organization than was being reached. A means to crowd-
source insights from sales, product and other teams was needed.
 Reducing email clutter: Email traffic proliferated as the team grew. Documents were buried and
answer times were slower.
 Getting feedback from the organization: Business Intelligence needed to be able to understand
how to best help stakeholders and thereby the company.
Social Media Tools Enable Business Intelligence
Online tools help Business Intelligence proactively add value to stakeholders
The content management portal and share drive were used to support knowledge management and
enable self-service of presentations and large documents. At first, the social media platform was a means
of driving traffic to deliverables on the content management portal. As its function as a front office tool
evolved, the social media platform became a medium of engagement with the wider organization.
The online ecosystem served the following purposes:
 Knowledge management  Team Collaboration
 Enabling self-service  Cross-functional collaboration
 Visibility
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4. Knowledge Management & Enabling Self-Service
The content management portal and the share drive made access to information easier and more
available
Because all key deliverables and dashboards were stored on the content management portal, it
served as a library for the management teams that Business Intelligence served. Large reference
presentations and data cubes were stored on the share drive with links to the content management
portal. The share drive served as a tool to better manage ad-hoc requests by sending the requestor
a link to the appropriate document on the share drive. Ad-hoc requests were greatly reduced,
because eventually stakeholders went directly to the share drive for their data needs.
Team Collaboration
The content management portal and the share drive allowed the team to work on common
documents
The team often had to prepare deliverables collectively and was able to store drafts on private
folders in the content management portal, where only team members could access the contents.
The social media platform enables real-time collaboration, cross-functional collaboration and
visibility
In a virtual organization, the type of real-time collaboration made possible by in-office presence is
hard to replicate. Social media was used as a means of enabling a more casual and spontaneous
interaction.
Cross-functional Collaboration & Visibility
The social media platform enables proactive and transparent collaboration with other teams
Social media served to build rapports, synthesize the information and educate the organization
about important issues. Public conversations on social media had a positive impact on improving
the employee knowledge base, as the insights could be addressed in the long term and on a larger
scale.
From analyst to CEO, employees at all levels of the organization were able to receive the team’s
deliverables, interact with the team members or follow a specific person’s activities on social media.
The team’s influence increased manifold with more people using its output.
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5. A Focused Social Media Strategy Amplifies Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence implements a targeted social media management strategy
Business Intelligence created a framework to capture the type of social media groups (collaborative, think
tank, deliverable, news) and mapped them against the type of engagement by the users (observe,
conversation, share, collaborate) that they saw necessary to achieve specified goals.
Collaboration groups addressed geographic spread and the merging of multiple teams. Think Tank groups
provided a platform for thought leadership. The Deliverable and News groups helped to reduce email
clutter, as well as to promote cross-functional cooperation with crowd-sourcing.
Five major user profiles emerged based on the type of posts and the frequency of posting. Communities
needed a healthy balance of
all poster types.
Three phases of group
growth were identified,
along with the critical types
of posters needed at each
stage. Business Intelligence
team members who
managed groups were encouraged to identify
and collaborate with different types of posters
in order to fulfill their goals.
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6. Challenges Encountered by the Team
Changing collaboration methods created challenges that needed to be addressed
With each of the collaboration methods, three core challenges emerged that the team had to address:
 Organizing the data
 Onboarding stakeholders
 Building and maintaining momentum
The table below outlines the challenges, solutions and the result.
The internal social media platform was only beginning to be promoted within Dell. The adoption of the
new tool was in the early stages. Not all team members were sure of the purpose and benefits of social
media, as such this lead to some unique challenges encountered by the team.
Making Social Media Searchable
The chronological nature of a feed-oriented social media platform makes searching for documents
very difficult once a group has been active for more than a couple of weeks. In order to make content
more searchable for both team members and stakeholders, Business Intelligence used hashtags (#).
Specific Deliverable hashtags: These were used for specific types of deliverables. Usually, a
deliverable was placed on the content management portal and posted as a link on the social media
platform. In the post, the hashtag would be placed, along with the date for easy access in the
future.
 #BI_Ops_Review
 #ContinueTheConversation (used for follow up to meetings)
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7. Team Marking hashtags: The team would often post insights and updates on work streams relating
to specific topics or exact teams. These hashtags were used to make team activities more trackable
to the organization.
 #GermanyBI
 #CountryConsulting
Making Deliverables on Social Media Visible
In order to build the reputation as thought leaders, Business Intelligence team members sought to be
visible on hashtag searches regarding specific hot topics. Because employees across the organization
used hashtags as a means of getting information, product specific and hot topic hashtags were very
helpful for not only gaining visibility, but becoming influential as well.
 #BigData
 #Server
 #Applications
Measuring for Success in Social Media
Tools to encourage participation and optimize time and effort
As usage of the social media platform increased, the team wanted to make sure to set appropriate and
meaningful goals, as well as to create a system to manage the activity and measure success. A set of
process and output KPIs was defined for each type of social media group, from a quantitative and a
qualitative perspective.
Quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboard
Process KPIs
 Member count: This is the number of members in a particular group. For most Collaboration
groups and News groups, this was fixed respectively to the team and management group that
was targeted as stakeholders. However, Deliverable groups and Think Tank groups were more
impactful as their member count increased.
 Number of posts, comments and likes: These were mechanical counts of the activity. These
activities are tracked in groups and allow for mangers to monitor team activity. The more posts,
comments for a group the higher the engagement and empowerment. Likes are important for
News and Think Tank, so the poster knows the information was well received.
Output KPIs
 Comment/post ratio: This is the primary measurement on the effectiveness of comments to
initiate conversation.
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8.  Like/post ratio: This measures the passive audience. Liking something is a form of passive
consumption.
 Post participation: This measures the percentage of the membership who are posting. Posting
is the highest form of participation; thus, this metric measures the highest form of engagement.
Posting shows that members proactively input.
 Response Participation: This measures the percentage of the members who are responding to
posts in the form of comments. Comments are an active form of communication that show
members read and react to content.
Qualitative key performance indicators showing different levels of engagement
While quantitative KPIs show level of engagement on the community itself, qualitative–or offline-
measurements are necessary to show the amount of buzz and offline engagement the groups are
creating. Qualitative KPIs tend to be subjective and more difficult to measure than quantitative KPIs.
1. Awareness happens when there is general knowledge that the group exists. People in the
office start to mention the group and its contents in conversations.
2. Engagement is when actions result from posts. Most of the time these actions are meetings to
follow up on an idea somebody read in a group.
3. Influence occurs when activity in a group affects how people view the business and shapes
their opinions about activites and occurrences. Three primary types of individuals are integral in
achieving influence: Authority figures, multipliers, implementers. They each have their role to
play, and subsequent analysis of how they are contributing to the influence of a group differs.
 Authority figures are key to gaining influence. Once they start mentioning the group,
others tend to take notice.
 Multipliers are needed to spread the word. They are not necessarily high in hierarchy, but
they are visible and/or heard through different layers and sections of the organization.
 Implementers might not necessarily be high up in the organization or well networked. They
are the individuals who can take an idea and make it reality. These individuals take an idea
from the drawing room to the sales floor, and are necessary for any initiative to be taken
seriously.
Engagement Level KPI
Awareness People talking about the group
Engagement Meetings resulting from posts
Influence – Authority figures Links to and from authority
Important followers
Important people posting and liking
Influence – Multipliers Sharing, reposting
Appearing in #hashtag searches
Influence – Implementers Work streams resulting from posts
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9. The power to Do More
Social Media will evolve from a trendy “nice to have” to a competitive “must”
Social media and evolving collaborative platforms will add a new dimension to all management disciplines.
Acumen in social media will go from being a trendy “nice to have” to being a “must have” to survive in
multi-national matrix organizations. Those who cannot harness these tools will be less competitive than
their peers.
While management vision allowed Business Intelligence to evolve into thought leaders, social media and
collaborative technology enabled the function to amplify its impact. Internal social media enabled visibility,
collaboration and the breaking down of silos to empower the Business Intelligence team.
Working behavior and processes will adapt to a more fluid and entrepreneurial way of working rather than
discrete working patterns. The shift of sharing information from send-receive to publish-subscribe will
contribute to the fluid and dynamic working patterns. These tools will continue to be used for more
proactive endeavors, such as change management and innovation. As globalization causes industries to
become more competitive and dynamic, the added efficiency and effectiveness won through usage of
these tools will become a necessity.
The power to do more will be determined by how individuals and organizations use new technologies
rather than by the technologies themselves.
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10. About the Authors:
Elizabeth Press (Elizabeth_press@dell.com) is the Global Business Intelligence Lead for the Telecom, Media,
Entertainment & Web industries and is based out of Frankfurt, Germany. She has a BA in International Relations
from Tufts University and an MSc in International Economics and Business from the Stockholm School of
Economics. Before coming to Dell, she worked in strategy consulting focusing on the finance & technology
industries.
Vanessa Galvany (Vanessa_Galvany@dell.com) is working on marketing transformational initiatives and based
out of Barcelona, Spain. She has a BA in Business Economics from the Open University of Catalonia and an
Executive Master of Business Administration of the IESE Business School. She has worked in Business
Intelligence at Dell and CRM marketing analytics and in strategic consulting in the airline & technology
industries.
Margo Smale (Margo_Smale@dell.com) is a Senior Advisor in the EMEA Public and Large Enterprise Marketing
team, based in Dublin, Ireland. She has a BS in Advertising and Marketing from Syracuse University, Post-
Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing from Dublin City University and an MBA from Trinity College Dublin.
She has worked in media planning and strategy in the fast-moving consumer goods, fashion and retail industries.
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