We are happy and excited to introduce our first Social Story on Actionly with Chris Dowsett from Quantum. This will be a part of our on-going series of Social Media Stories from actual users sharing their learning’s and best practices.
Tell us a little bit about Quantum?
Quantum is a data protection, data storage and data archiving company. It’s pretty exciting to be part of Quantum at the moment because we are in what I’m personally calling ‘innovation mode’. Our DXi6700 series for example, which is a disk based backup appliance, recently broke the record for the most successful product launch in Quantum’s history.
How is social media helping you? What is your social media strategy?
Our overarching strategy is really focused on providing helpful content and not bombarding people. So we approach social media in a couple ways of different ways:
The first is to make sure we’re connecting with our customers and potential customers in locations where they might want to chat with us or have a conversation. It’s basically about being as accessible as possible by answering questions, helping people who might be having product issues, listening to feedback and sometimes just giving out some high fives and gift cards.
We also think social media is a great platform for offering up helpful content. We try to put information around topics that our audience wants to know about.
We were relatively new to the social media space about 15 months ago and since then we’ve tried a number of different social media channels and different forums to gauge our audience’s interest. So it’s been a lot of trial and error and learning – which we continue to do. We get some great questions and feedback on Twitter, for example, so we make sure that we give that channel a lot of attention.
What social strategies have worked and what hasn’t? Any Social Media challenges you have experienced?
We started out in all the networks you might expect – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a few others. Early on we pushed Twitter and Facebook and got some great early feedback but I personally thought Facebook might get some more engagement than we did. By looking at the metrics and watching feedback, Twitter came through really strongly where as Facebook was less successful. YouTube has been great from a viewing numbers stand point and helping us deliver some great ‘how to’ videos.
We also tried some aggregating sites around our launches like Storify which we used to bring together all of the different social media assets. Unfortunately, Storify worked better in theory than in practice and didn’t get the viewers or engagement – we tried it out, realized it didn’t work as well for us as thought and went back to the drawing board.
We also discovered new places that performed really well for our content like SlideShare. SlideShare has been great in terms of giving us a social network to offer new product information and helpful presentations as well as collect information from people who want to know more about Quantum. For a B2B company like ours, that functionality is brilliant.
Any Social Media learning’s or success you want to share?
I think we’ve had some really good examples of things that didn’t quite work (like aggregating all our social media content onto a Storify page) and some places that went well beyond our expectations like SlideShare.
One good lesson I’ve learned is that you almost can’t collect enough metrics to measure how well you’re doing on social media. We collect some 50+ metrics every week and I can still think of more that would be worth monitoring. Collecting all those numbers might sound a little over-the-top but it means that we can quickly and easily see when something isn’t working or when a social media project is really successful.
I think the other lesson is that it’s worth spending time internally to talk about social media and get the buy-in from as many people as possible who might be interested. It’s always great when we launch a new product because a group of people in Product management, PR, Marketing and other areas get together to put together good, useful content for channels like SlideShare, YouTube, Twitter and our blog. Without that teamwork, we’d really struggle to have any sort of social media presence. And that internal effort is an ongoing project because I think a company’s social media efforts need to include people from across the organization.
If using Actionly, what are some of the features that rock your boat?
Actionly has been awesome for us. I regularly check in to Actionly to look at metrics and alerts from product searches on Twitter, for example. I like that I can get all the metrics from across our social networks in one very easy-to-understand dashboard.
We looked at a bunch of different social media monitoring platforms and chose Actionly because it was very easy to set-up which can’t be underestimated. It allowed me to get our company’s social media monitoring set up in no time, compared to some of the other platforms that took hours. I’ve also found the alerts to be very accurate and it really delivers all the information you need. It’s not over-complicated – it gives you the data, it’s easy to use and just works. Plus the team is very friendly and helpful.
Any other pointers for success?
I think a lot of our success comes from the fact that everyone at Quantum works hard to listen to our customers and develop the products accordingly. I think the success behind the launch of the DXi 6700 was based on the fact that we spoke to the customers, found out what they wanted and developed a product to meet those needs.
Quantum’s twitter is: 
https://twitter.com/#!/quantumcorp
If your company would like to be featured in Social Story’s, please email support@actionly.com
