For around five years, Deloitte has been garnering a reputation for progressiveness, behind which has been its embrace of social media, from the boardroom to the mailroom.

Organisations have reacted to the rise of social media in starkly different ways. Some have blocked access to sites over security and productivity concerns. Others, as demonstrated in this case study of professional services firm Deloitte, have embraced it. In Australia, Deloitte has emerged as a ‘rock star’ of social media and found more than A$20 million a year in benefits.

Social media comprises collaborative online networks and technology such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, wikis and Twitter. But unlike traditional telecommunications, social media doesn’t just connect communities, it creates them.  Users of these tools can collaborate with peers, friends and colleagues on social and business networks. They can review, share photos and comment on articles, posts, products and services, as well as form online communities around areas of common interest.

Some corporates have been attracted to social media as a way of tapping the knowledge pool of their staff and building client relationships. Others have seen social media as a way to differentiate their organisations in the market and in many cases are now effectively using social networking sites, some dedicated to marketing and business development (BD), to spread word of their products and services. However, others have been tentative in their approach or even downright fearful of it.

Professional services firms in particular are by nature conservative, and it’s fair to say that for some managing partners and CEOs, social media remains an unknown intangible full of alien terms and daunting technology. They might know that one in three Australians now use Facebook, but they don’t want their employees using it in office time. The biggest worry is its potential to become a PR disaster. Then there’s concern about the potential for lost productivity, not to mention return on investment – will there be one and what’s it all going to cost?

Deloitte believes these concerns are largely unfounded and that there is genuine business value in using social media; from building brand awareness, finding resources and facilitating internal and external communications, to generating revenue.

“People already juggle their work and personal lives at work,” says Deloitte partner and Chief Marketing Officer David Redhill. “They take work home with them and work until midnight and they connect with their friends at work. You have toaccept that is today’s work pattern. There are no half-way measures. You either embrace it and help people as grown-ups understand how to use it to their benefit, or try to suppress it, and that won’t work.”

The use of social media at Deloitte Australia is fully supported by CEO Giam Swiegers, who also leads Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu’s global initiative on social media and innovation. It has not replaced more traditional communications tools like email, although Deloitte Digital CEO Peter Williams believes it eventually will.

“Email creates a never-ending tsunami of obligations to respond,” he says. “I find it very difficult to  manage. It’s much easier to get into a rhythm with social media, and not every tweet that a follower posts creates an obligation to respond. It is a much more ambient way of communicating.

Peter Williams, Digital CEO, Deloitte

“Also, with social media you find that someone who gives you an answer to something isn’t necessarily the person you expected it from. It allows you to broadcast and tap into the right connection, simply because there are more connections out there. What this will mean is less reliance on email, more social technologies in the workplace and much more agility and speed in terms of getting things done and building ideas.”

Deloitte’s use of social media accelerated in 2008 when the firm began to realise the potential business applications of Yammer.com. Initially, Yammer was just a kind of in-house Twitter, or social chat room for staff, but before long the imperatives of conducting business seeped into conversations, with staff using it to exchange ideas, ask questions and solve work-related problems.

The tipping point came when Williams put out a voice memo for staff to sign up to Yammer and come up with videos and taglines for a new Deloitte advertising and marketing campaign, known internally as the Green Dot campaign. The firm has documented (visit deloitte.com.au) how this prompted more than 1,000 Deloitte Australia staff to join Yammer, forming 38 groups (everything from mums’ groups to bike riding groups) and creating 1,184 original marketing concepts.

Today there are 3,620 members of Yammer at Deloitte Australia (it employs around 4,500 staff) and 346 different groups. At the time of writing, 35,000 messages had been sent via the system.

“Yammer has helped to deliver a number of new products, a host of new insights and learning for management and staff, as well as a raft of incremental, revolutionary ideas through tapping into the wisdom of our staff,” says Williams. “It has delivered a sense that everyone is important and can make a big contribution, flattened the management hierarchy, broken down silos and made communication within the firm far more fluid.”

Internal and external uses

Internally, Yammer has delivered many benefits that will never show up on a balance sheet, and helped inspire some significant external services that do. In fact according to Williams, Yammer, along with other tools in the social media mix, have cost little to implement but are contributing more than A$20 million per annum to Deloitte’s bottom line.

The revenue comes from Deloitte Consulting’s online practice building social media into products or applications like Vote Victoria and the recently launched business continuity application (‘app’) for smartphones, called Bamboo.  It also comes from Deloitte Digital selling products that incorporate social media, such as its Online Accounting offering. Then, of course, there are ideas for new innovations sourced via Yammer. In terms of dollar value, Williams says it is about an even split between the three sources.

Within the firm, there is a direct correlation between staff retention and Yammer use, with a 2010 progression analysis revealing that those who use Yammer don’t tend to leave because they feel part of a community and are able to communicate across silos as well as up and down the hierarchy.

Other social media initiatives include the establishment in 2008 of a dedicated YouTube channel (visit youtube.com/DeloitteAustralia), which to date has generated well over 40,000 views. It’s all about building brand awareness, with staff trusted to come up with their own ideas for videos that present an authentic impression of Deloitte for prospective job candidates and clients.

Then there’s the JoinMe@Deloitte Facebook application, which links the firm’s employee referral program to employees’ Facebook networks. The idea saves money as it leverages employees’ existing networks and mobilises them to act as recruiters. To date more than 25 per cent of Deloitte’s employees have added the application to their Facebook profile and around 3,000 potential referees have viewed the application, generating more than 150 requests for hire.

The original idea for linking recruitment and social media, and the subsequent Facebook application, came through Deloitte’s innovation (ideas) program. This is also a social media tool, designed to capture and rate ideas on an in-house version of one of Deloitte’s best-selling products for clients, Innovation Academy.

Deloitte’s Innovation Academy is a managed and edited platform designed to foster learning, idea generation and collaboration within and across business and government. Among other things, the subscriber-based service includes an idea platform that allows collaboration, learning content on innovation, access to trends and market insights, and business case templates.

Within Deloitte, ideas from staff are captured on the interactive tool, which in turn leads to some being commercialised into marketing offers and solutions for clients. People can vote on the ideas posted, comment on them and add to them. The aim is to use social media to foster innovation that directly drives revenue – an inextricable part of which is introducing new ways in which to collaborate with clients and provide them with the lessons Deloitte has learned.

One such example is the staff-inspired, subscription-based Leadership Academy. This is now a multi-million dollar business for Deloitte Australia. In fact, since its Australian launch in December 2007, the online version of Leadership Academy has been accessed by over 4,000 executives in 14 countries, including the UK, South Africa, Malaysia and Hong Kong. More recently, it was made available to over 50 million BlackBerry users around the world through the BlackBerry App World distribution service.

David Redhill, Chief Marketing Officer, Deloitte

As Redhill notes, Deloitte’s innovation program, formalised in its Innovation Academy, has many key benefits. These include driving organisational change towards commerciality; tapping into the diverse tacit knowledge of staff, customers and partners; developing and nurturing emerging ideas; boosting responsiveness by creating more distributed learning; accessing trends and predicting which are worth pursuing; building repositories of ideas and tools; and increasing speed to market via a fully hosted, managed and edited platform that is quickly deployed.

In Australia, Deloitte was also among the first of the Big Four professional services firms to use Twitter, with its official presence launched in two ways: by a firmwide Twitter stream as @Green_Dot in May 2009; and at the same time by the media team to cover the Federal Budget on Twitter.

Bottom-line benefits

Promoting thought leadership on a range of issues is a major benefit of Deloitte’s social media platform, with its @FederalBudget Twitter ‘handle’ having been followed by the Prime Minister, several state premiers and leading commentators. On Budget night, the media team tweeted every 20 minutes and successfully drove 13,589 unique visitors to the firm’s website, on which 26 Budget-related media releases were posted.

Meanwhile, @Green_Dot, managed by the firm’s recruitment team, tweets every day about activities and events at Deloitte, and has around 4,300 followers.

Williams, who engages extensively in public speaking and has a 3,000-strong Twitter following, says he picks up more new clients through Twitter than any other source.

“People hear about me and they contact me via Twitter,” he says. “Once you build up a big Twitter following you can really start to drive revenue opportunities and connections. Recruitment is also a lot cheaper because all you need to do is send out a message, instead of paying to advertise.”

It’s also a lot more efficient, as demonstrated a few months ago when he tweeted that he needed a developer to work on the new Bamboo app.

“A guy in Deloitte South Africa who follows me on Twitter responded saying there was a BlackBerry developer who had worked at Deloitte there, but he’d married an Australian girl and moved to Melbourne and had landed the previous day. I contacted him on Twitter and he took the job because apart from being a BlackBerry developer, he had a background in risk and business continuity. He was also from the Deloitte family.”

According to Williams, social media also benefits the firm through such things as new product promotion, whereby people can get a better understanding of the skills at Deloitte. In other cases, it’s just about getting things done and finding resources, such as when a client had a spreadsheet that needed to be translated into English from Thai. Through Twitter, Williams found someone within Deloitte who could use Excel and speak Thai.

The deal-breaking issue

The hard question for many organisations remains whether they, as Deloitte is, are willing to “empower and trust” their employees in the use of social media at work.

“In a lot of organisations the people making decisions about this are not people who use it – they don’t understand it and they don’t look at it as a potential benefit,” Williams says. “I was talking to a recently appointed executive chairman of a major architectural firm who said the firm trusts its people to design buildings worth hundreds of millions of dollars, yet won’t trust them when it comes to using YouTube or Facebook.

“People often ask me if I’m worried about my staff doing Facebook in work time. I’m more worried about them doing work in Facebook time. These tools are not something that hinders them. They allow them to connect and to maintain networks. I maintain most of my alumni relationships through Facebook, and have developed a lot of client relationships through Facebook. Professional services firms have all these highly engaged, intelligent go-getter type people, and everyone in PSFs says that their staff are their most important asset – except, that is, when it comes to any technology tools because then the staff are a pack of scammers who can’t be trusted.”

Of the 35,000 messages sent on Yammer so far, not one has required moderation.

More than a game

When the 2010 FIFA World Cup kicked off in South Africa, Deloitte was already online and offering everyone the next best thing to being there – its very own World Cup Fantasy Football League.

The game was free to play and accessed via an interactive website loaded with features such as statistics on all the real-life players, leadership boards, and comprehensive game rules, just to name a few. Better still, in addition to competing in the overall competition, you could battle it out with your friends, relatives, clients and business colleagues – anyone you wanted to, in fact – in your very own Private League.

“It was not meant to be a clear and tangible benefit to clients as much as a way of engaging with audiences and undiscovered communities more effectively,” explains Deloitte partner and Chief Marketing Officer David Redhill.

The firm had undertaken a similar online game during the previous World Cup, but mainly just for its employees.

“We found that a lot of our clients enjoyed playing the game too, so this time around we had a more orchestrated strategy to work with our global colleagues,” Redhill says.“We also had a Twitter feed on the home page of the site. Basically, we set out to expose people to some of Deloitte’s messages but in a lighthearted way aligned with the spirit of the World Cup. Mainly, though, it was just a forum for people to connect with their clients and colleagues, friends and family online.”

By the time it ended around 45,000 people in 150 countries had played the game. Deloitte’s Facebook presence soared – more than doubling in the space of four weeks.