Please meet Roland Hulme, our March Customer of the Month! The Customer of the Month series profiles the movers and shakers in enterprise social, as they champion and move their Yammer networks forward. Self proclaimed Digital Don Draper with a Hemingway Complex, Roland is the social media manager at Tyco, where he is in charge of Yammer’s health. Here’s what Roland does in his own words:
I’ve been at Tyco since June of 2012. I was brought on to help roll out Yammer as the new means of communication and collaboration within our company – introducing a social, boundaryless communications platform that was radically different to the traditional “top down” forms of company communication. Previously, I’d been a manager of external facing social media accounts, and my boss hired me believing that the experience I had producing successful social campaigns for an external audience would also work internally – and they did.
My outlook on Yammer and ESNs in general is that they’re the future of how companies communicate – in five years time, email will have gone the same way as pneumatic tubes. The old model of having seperate tools for seperate tasks – Outlook, Communicator, Dropbox, Word etc. – will be forgotton, and everything that we need to do to get our job done will be located within a single social platform. Because Yammer is owned by Microsoft, this will be an easy transition for companies as they’ll be using the same tools, just accessing them in a different way.
I personally beleive that we’re about to enter a new era of social media – as companies start looking at the bottom line instead of just the shiny bells and whistles. Companies used to be on social media “just because.” Now they realize they have to invest in it; but want to see a return on that investment.
Yammer is the best example of a social media-driven “tangible investment” because it actually offers measurable ROI in cost savings (for example, with a reduced IT burden) and can also contribute to revenue generation – for example, the Tyco Yammer Network has allowed colleagues from South Africa to share their tips with colleagues in North America and score sales they might not have done anyway.
Being able to actually see a financial benefit to a social solution makes “selling” Yammer to dubious employees and executives easier; and in the long run will help legitimize social media as a whole; allowing companies to actually see how they can put a dollar figure on previously esoteric concepts like engagement and amplification.
Want more Roland? Make sure to check him out in today’s webinar “Driving business value with enterprise social” with Charlene Li and Bryony Cole.
Want even more Roland? We can’t get enough either! Check out his Customer of the Month profile:
About Roland Hulme:
Roland Hulme was born in the cathedral city of Winchester, England and moved to New York in 2007 with the ambition of becoming Hemingway in 140 characters or less. Working at Tyco has been a very exciting social media opportunity.
He broadcasts an exciting narrative driven by tens of thousands of highly engaged employees, who each contribute something genuinely tangible and valuable to the world. He enjoys working at a company where people take so much pride in what they do, and he loves being able to use tools like Yammer to share that passion.
