Rod Strother on unifying Lenovo’s leap into social

“One of the great things about social media is that anyone can set up an account, and one of the worst things is that anyone can set up an account,” Strother told Campaign Asia-Pacific.

Strother got his job when Lenovo grew increasingly aware of the importance of social media and digital marketing and decided that it was time for a more robust strategy, according to Howie Lau, vice-president, marketing and communications, Lenovo Asia Pacific & Latin America, who hired Strother to set up the centre last July.

Based in Singapore, one of the centre’s first duties was to track down the varied collection of local brand accounts each office had created and develop a unified voice for Lenovo. “A lot of the geographies had their own social-media practitioner and in terms of worldwide organisation, the lights were being kept on by just four guys in the US.

“The challenge then was to get people to used to doing something differently from what they’re used to," Strother said. "We had to prove that our way of doing things added value internally and externally.”

Getting Lenovo to embrace social media has never been a struggle, he said. “It’s been a no-brainer for senior management as a lot of them are already on Facebook and Twitter. Gina Qiao, our global head of HR, has over 2.5 million followers on weibo.”

This rampant enthusiasm has been a bit of a “malediction” as well as “benediction” for Strother and his team. With a new platform launching nearly every week, the 20-member team at DSCoE has its work cut out staying ahead of the curve.

In the case of Pinterest for instance, within a week from when the site hit the public consciousness, the DSCoE was briefing Lenovo's markets on how to use it, with pros and cons and directions.

To formalise guidelines and best practices across the brand, the centre has been working with global social-media agency We Are Social to develop the Social Media Cookbook, a 102-page tome that provides strategies and guidelines for each social media-platform.

Since its founding the centre has evolved to have three main teams and functions:

• A web team that works closely with the team in the US on Lenovo.com, handling the creation of all the global pages that go out for local deployment.
• The digital team, a group of virtual trouble-shooters that handles everything from building websites to driving social campaigns locally.
• And, as previously described, a team dedicated to discovering new platforms and establishing best practices.

Strother’s role has also expanded to taking care of Lenovo’s social media globally as well as running the centre.

Since its establishment the team has been responsible for growing Lenovo’s total community size on Facebook to nearly 2 million fans across 41 global and local pages. Early this month, Lenovo’s YouTube subscriber base surpassed rival manufacturer Dell, mostly thanks to the success of its Ultrabook “Book of Do” campaign.

“I’m proud of the work we did on that campaign because it’s the first global marketing campaign that the social-media team has been a key part of, with a place at the table,” Strother said.

On social media, the campaign reached more than 10 million Facebook users and increased engagement on Lenovo’s Facebook pages by 160 per cent, while clickthroughs to Lenovo.com from Facebook grew by 243 per cent.

More recently, the team was involved in the launch of Lenovo’s “Yoga” Multimode Ultrabook. The ongoing campaign has so far driven YouTube subscription up by 16 per cent.

Strother’s philosophy leans towards community management more than just driving numbers. “We want to be part of the conversations that are going on. Ninety-two per cent of people say they trust peer recommendation before they trust brand advertising, so we have to be part of these conversations, to facilitate and generate them.”

To that end, the team has recently appointed a community manager who is tasked with not only maintaining the groups built around Lenovo but with helping to get the brand talked about in groups that are related to the brand but that Lenovo is not currently part of. This of course includes groups that are to do with PCs, but also to do with smartphones, smart TVs and tablets – part of Lenovo’s PC+ Four-Screen Strategy, Strother explained.

The team aims to achieve this by being authentic, credible and adding value to the conversation. “If you were in a cocktail party, you wouldn’t go about saying what you wanted at random," he said. "You want to have great content, be contagious so people will pass on the information and procative—because people will want to talk about it.”

Sometimes, opportunities to be part of the conversation come along and it’s up to the brand to recognise them. In one instance, Lenovo received an email requesting a Thinkpad to accompany a group planning to climb Mt. Everest.

“This was completely in line with our Book of Do campaign—this guy was clearly a do-er," Strother said. "So we said, tell you what, we’ll give you the machine, but we want you to tell us about the progress of the journey. After all, if a Thinkpad is good enough for NASA, it’s good enough for Everest!” 

The idea worked out better than he could have hoped. “The guy, Eric Remza, blogged lots and Tweeted as well, so people could follow his journey up the mountain," Strother said. "We got amazing amounts of engagement because this was authentic and credible.”

Looking back, Strother views these highlights as “small victories and milestones” but believes there’s a lot more that can be accomplished. “I’m never that happy because I’m Scottish and we tend to be quite dour,” he quipped.

The next step for the team is to hire a full-time technologist to help it think even bigger. “While developing the Yoga campaign on Facebook, we were discussing the possibilities of letting users put themselves into the TV commercial and then generating a cinema poster with the user in it," Strother said. "It was then that one of guys said, after a period of silence, ‘I think we’ve reached the boundaries of our technical knowledge,’."

“There’s always a need to be continually improving,” Strother added.