Our first social media strategy document for EMBARQ, a spin-off of Sprint, circa 2007. Presented to the VP of Strategy and then the C-Suite in November 2007. Special thanks to Rick Murray, Jeremiah Owyang and Chris Brogan for providing assistance without charging me as I was building this case at night and doing my real job during the day.

1. Social Media Roadmap
November 16, 2007
“Modern companies are already integrating efficient social tools in every
announcement, launch, and event. The savvy strategists learns to use them in a
holistic way” | Jeremiah Owyang, Sr Analyst Forrester

2. Table of Contents
The EMBARQ Social Media Roadmap
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Mission
Strategies
Objectives
Potential Tactics with Roles & Responsibilities
Next Steps

3. Social Media Roadmap
Corporate Social Media Mission:
Develop, implement and cultivate social media
strategies with an evolving tool kit to enhance
communications and brand perceptions among
employees, customers, prospects, stockholders
and the media – aka: “multi-influencers.”

4. Social Media Strategies
Delivering on our Practical Ingenuity brand promise, we will leverage social
media to communicate with our multi-influencers with the following:
1) EDUCATE: Train to create breadth and depth in our employee base to give
them the tools and opportunity to actively engage in social and emerging
media.
2) SEEK & CULTIVATE: New employee talent and corporate resources to
better position EQ as a “thought-leader” in this emerging space while
tapping external influencers.
3) INTEGRATE: Create conversations that are media agnostic and evergreen;
ensure all marketing and communication strategies are interwoven to
create consistent messaging.
4) RESEARCH: Invest in socnet-specific research to identify emerging trends,
shifting EQ from followers to leaders; monitor brand perceptions to
identify positive lifts and capitalize on them.
5) MEASURE: Use media appropriate metrics to evaluate performance against
best-in-class examples.
6) INNOVATE & EXPERIENTAL: Utilize the socnet opportunity to evolve the
brand into one that is dynamic, interactive and relevant; leverage
practical opportunities via networks and conversations to position the
brand for future growth.

5. Strategy 1: EDUCATE
Overarching Objectives for Q1: 1) Identify and educate key
stakeholders and 2) Roll out high level training for all associates
Potential Tactic
Lead
Partners
Status
Notes
Open access to socnet sites
HR
IT, Corp Comm
Complete
Develop online employee communications guidelines for
ALL employees, allowing them to participate in the
conversations
Corp Comm
HR, Brand, Legal, ECM
Ops
Complete
Identify key socnet stakeholders to create a strategic
task force
Corp Strat
Socnet task force
(engage Portal SMEs)
Identify socnet immersion training customized for socnet
task force and key marketing teams
Brand
Corp Comm
HR – Training
Brand
Develop interactive socnet educational session for all
employees and post to i-learn

6. Strategy 2: SEEK & CULTIVATE
Overarching Objectives: 1) In Q4 ’07, identify internal SMEs and
gaps, 2) In Q1, where appropriate hire social media SMEs & extend
depth/breadth of knowledge and 3) Hire best-in-class socnet partner.
Potential Tactic
Lead
Partners
Seek corporate executive level champion to lead socnet
taskforce and ensure strategies are prioritized and met
Corp Strat
Target new hires via socnet media and include socnet
skills in preferred job skills
HR
Brand
Brand
Corp Comm, IMCC
Brand
Corp Comm, Bus
including Marcom
Status
Notes
Culivate SMEs to become socnet leaders:
•Identify appropriate opportunities where SMEs can
growth strengths
•Provide socnet education within their organizations –
internal blogs, webinars, etc.
•Take leadership roles in industry organizations:
WOMMA, Social Media Club, AMA, etc.
•Encourage participation in local & national industry
conferences:
Web 2.0, Ad:tech, Von.x, WOMMA Summit, Mixx,
Podcamp, etc.
Evaluate current agencies, resources, costs, contracts to
identify gaps and opportunities.
Funding

7. Strategy 3: INTEGRATE
Overarching Objectives: In Q1, integrate social media into all
communication, marketing and advertising initiatives.
Potential Tactic
Lead
Partners
Roll out PR plan using holistic offline/online
communication elements including social media tool kit:
traditional offline with socnet, blogs, microblogs, social
bookmarking, etc.
Corp Comm
All marcom teams
Aggregate all monitored traditional online and consumergenerated media findings & provide conversation pulse
dashboard
Status
Notes
Listening to the
EQ conversation
Initiative #2
June White
Paper
Corp Comm
Manage corporate blog initiatives: EQIP and web
Target socnet SMEs for internal first, then external
blogging and other social media communication (wikis,
podcasts, etc.) helping to cultivate industry thought
leaders
Develop and maintain a list of relevant and influential
social media outlets including blogs, podcasts and video
podcasts. Treat them as members of the traditional
analyst/journalist pool and provide them with updates
and access to similar company information. Monitor
third party blogs, wikis, etc. develop relationships with
influencers to provide information regarding posts,
comments.
Corp Comm
Corp Comm
Initiative #1
June White
Paper
Syndicate all company information on embarq.com with
RSS feeds. This includes press releases, investor calls,
upcoming events, conference presentations, and more.
Corp Comm
Initiative #1
June White
Paper
Draft and roll out general response strategy and process
including development of educational components to
push to organization
Corp Comm
ECM Ops, Socnet
task force
Corp Comm
ECM Ops
Prepare, test, roll out a crisis-situation communications
strategy, including proactive and reactive scenarios;
test plans prior to crisis to ensure feasibility

8. Key Strategy: INTEGRATE – cont.
Overarching Objectives: In Q1, integrate social media into all
communication, marketing and advertising initiatives.
Potential Tactic
Lead
Partners
Status
Notes
Develop consistent EQ socnet presence(s), plan for
creating content, apps, marketing efforts to reach,
connect, and build communities around EMBARQ, take
part in communities in EQ territory:
MySpace: Maintain a corporate profile on MySpace to serve as
a corporate marketing, customer service and recruitment tool.
Facebook EMBARQ Network: Employee only, Shows
authenticity – walking the walk
Consumer led
MySpace
launch – ends
1/15/08
Facebook EMBARQ Groups:
HR: Geo-targeted recruitment groups
R&D: Collaboration
Brand
Consumer & Business
Marketing, Corp Comm,
Portal Team, HR, ECMOps
Brand created
Facebook
EMBARQ
Network
Brand
External Affairs – PAMs,
Portal, Corp Comm
Brand: Cause marketing groups/Collaboration
EQ Customer Service: Answer questions group
Local Participation: PAMs, etc. engage in local groups
MySpace
Launch
Initiative #3
from June
White Paper
Funding, Owner?
Become active members in online communities in
EQ territories to elevate brand and increase local
presence
Integrate modest social network and media features
directly into the MyEMBARQ portal
Portal
Create user forums for support and other Embarq-related
issues.
Portal,
Ecommerce
Initiative # 4
from June
White Paper
Leverage localized content and develop customized
socnet applications/widgets (allow customers to embed
EQ widgets & media players on their personal websites)
Portal
Consumer marketing,
Business marketing,
ECM-Ops
Initiative #2
from June
White Paper
Initiative #2
from June
White Paper

9. Strategy 4: RESEARCH
Overarching objective: In Q1, evolve current ad hoc
social media research into best-in-class.
Potential Tactic
Lead
Partners
Evolve current research strategies to include social
media:
Develop social media research dashboard
Develop social media research wiki to keep internal
team appraised of new socnet, Web 2.0 trends
Corp Strat
Socnet task force
Identify emerging socnet and new media brand research
methodology to evaluate brand awareness
Brand
Corp. Research
Aggregate all monitored traditional and consumergenerated media findings & provide conversation pulse
dashboard
Corp Comm
Commission social media primary research w/i our
footprint to identify:
•Usage
•Trends
•Messaging
Brand, Corp
Research
Status
Notes
See Educate

10. Strategy 5: MEASURE
Overarching objective: In Q1, Shift from annually, quarterly, monthly
measurements to NOW – hourly, daily, weekly.
Potential Tactic
Lead
Brand equity and awareness on SNS (pre/post launch),
brand attributes
Partners
Brand
Research, All
marketing
Socnet task force
Socnet task force
Corp Comm
IMCC, Socnet task force
Conversation pulse:
Track interaction measurement
standards:
•Content contribution (volume
of comments/reviews/posts)
•Content use/Web mentions
•Social bookmarking/sharing:
del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg,
trackbacks, etc.Subscriptions
(RSS feeds, email)
Measurement Dashboard: Internal 360 view of all
communications, campaigns, etc.
Notes
Funding
See Research
tactics
All Marketing, socnet
task force
Corp Comm
Define engagement with social media included in the
mix.
Engagement: Unique visitors, page views, time spent on
content, depth and frequency of visits
Status

11. Strategy 6: INNOVATE & EXPERIENTAL – Company-wide
Overarching Objective: Create a culture that encourages, enables and empowers an
ongoing dialogue between and among EQ and its many stakeholder groups.
Potential Tactic
Lead
Partners
Continue to monitor social media trends, agency and
corporate resources to ensure alignment with overall
corporate goals
Corp Strat
Socnet task force
Evaluate social media initiatives to ensure alignment
with business and brand strategies.
Corp Strat
Brand
Corp Strat
Socnet task force
Analyze social media trends and recommend social
media tool kit evolution:
Tool Kit Options:
Monitoring
Blogs
Micro blogs
Wikis
Social Network Sites (SNS)
Podcasting
RSS
Social bookmarking
Video
Status
Notes

12. Next Steps
Commitment
– Champion
– Role of socnet task force
– Which of these strategies, objectives are we going to tackle? – Need
team’s input on priorities
Review/revise tactics, decide priorities - test, learn, & roll
out
– Evaluate and provide your team’s potential funding needs
– Evaluate and provide your team’s potential SME headcount needs
Present to senior management

13. Addendum

14. Social Media Case Study – Integrate/Measure
Unilever
– All Unilever brand building programs are designed to surround and
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engage the consumer across all media – paid and unpaid; and in all key
touchpoints – online and offline.
A typical program will devote roughly 70% of marcom spend to
advertising, and 30% to less traditional activities including PR (where
community engagement also lives), experiential, in-store, and so on.
Once briefed on the “job to be done,” agencies work together to
develop the uber idea, and then channel-appropriate strategies and
plans.
Increasingly, the company is eschewing standard metrics for ones
based on engagement. Each type of engagement is assigned a value
(e.g. Live = 4X the value of TV), and the agencies are then held
accountable for setting and hitting mutually agreed targets.
Dove OnSlaught: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaH4y6ZjSfE

15. Social Media Case Study – Integrate (response system &
RSS feeds)
Wal-Mart
– After initial bumpy road entry into social media, Wal-Mart is taking positive
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steps…
The key to staying current in this space is active listening
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To what people are saying about your company, brands, people, etc. as well as to the
issues (or opportunities) that are most important to you
Need to approach it with both a defensive (reputation) and offensive (brand marketing)
mindset
– Wal-Mart has a team of people (Edelman) that use a combination of free and
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paid monitoring tools, and then apply the “human factor” to weed out
irrelevant data
Real-time reporting and a formalized response protocol have now been refined
to the point that WM can respond to any post it deems worthy of response in less
than 60 minutes
This “urgency” is a real asset when engaging in online conversation:
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Several potential crises have been averted before they hit the mainstream news media
The brand gets “props” for paying attention and caring enough to get engaged. Google
will always show that post higher in its results than the one that we found with the
complaint, negativity, etc.
http://www.walmartfacts.com/

16. Social Media Case Study
Wal-Mart - continued
– Created an external network of 150,000 bloggers, grouped by
common areas of interest
•
Sustainability, healthcare reform, etc.
– Keep this group informed with WM’s latest developments in
each area
No strings attached
• Empowered the network to share the information with their
network (or not) on their own terms / in their own words
•
– Identifying a similar group of SME’s from within WM’s 1.5M
associate universe
•
Each SME will be posting a story on their area of expertise (e.g.
wine, fishing, etc.) to a public facing blog
– WM is also actively engaged in social networking initiatives
with Facebook.com – using the platform to connect with
netgen consumers around key retail drive periods

17. Social Media Measurements
WOMMA & ARF
– WOMMA
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association, has an
incredible body of knowledge housed on its site:
– http://www.womma.org
• Roughly 10% (40) of the group’s members are researchcentric organizations, tracking everything from online
conversations to developing norms around how many times
a “good” topic is talked about by influential individuals
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– ARF
The Advertising Research Foundation, has an active task
force working towards the development of what they hope
will be adopted as a standard metric for “engagement”
• ARF Membership also includes many WOMMA members,
including Keller Fay Group and Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
•

18. Who’s bringing Social Media into the foreground?
The key innovators in the Marketing & PR 2.0 space fall into
six buckets:
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Technology companies: Such as Google and Facebook; they’re creating the
platforms that enable mass adoption; further, their “open” approach is
bringing that innovation to market with lightning speed.
Consumer products: Thought leaders within blue chip marketing
organizations who are taking risks  experimenting  learning by doing.
Examples include Babs Rangaiah at Unilever and Stan Joosten at P&G.
Holding Companies: Such as Mindshare within WPP; who are broadening
their capabilities and extending into the content creation business
Large PR agencies: like Edelman, as well as smaller PR boutiques (e.g.
Shift Communications) with one thing in common – a CEO / leadership team
that believe in this new direction
Boutiques: Emerging “word-of-mouth” specialist shops like BZZAgent and
Zocalo Group are exclusively focused on this space (but don’t offer any
other services within the 360 idea world)
Consultants: Finally, there are a number of self-taught “experts,” who are
selling themselves to the highest bidder on a day rate or project rate basis.

19. EMBARQ MySpace Profile Highlights – Kim Wilt
MySpace launched Oct. 30. To date, we have 319 friends and less than a
dozen submissions to the contest. Two articles have appeared on EQIP.
Key learnings:
– As a group, our employees are not familiar with the space nor do they
understand the nuances of being a part of this community.
– Employee education is key.
– We should depend on viral communication, rather than push
marketing, to spread the word internally.
– We have had no negative comments posted to our wall; but it still
remains critical to have an online response team (Linda O’Neil)
Contract ends Jan. 15. Do we want to continue? Who should sponsor?