The Social Media MBA in Practice: An Essential Collection of Inspirational Case Studies to Influence your Social Media Strategy

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F5 – Social Across Departments

Developing Function-Based Social Media into Executive Importance

Not all companies start social media as an all-encompassing greenfield project. This case study is a reflection of reality: social media adopted for specific reasons to serve tactical purposes, developed into an essential communications channel.

Executive summary

Overview

F5 is a B2B tech company that adopted social media as an essential tool in various different ways, for different reasons and at different times. This case study spans three departments and several years, examines success factors and looks at logical points of convergence that can and should apply to other similar organizations.

Key findings

• Members of F5's community have at least 10 per cent higher product satisfaction than non-members.
• Net Promoter Score for customers that are community members is 100 per cent higher than for non-members.
• LinkedIn has yielded over 100 on-boarded employees for F5 in 2011/2012.

Recommendations

1. Find out if social media is being used elsewhere in your organization; examine why, learn from it and apply it to your efforts.

2. “Scale” does not equal “quality”. Advocates are much more effective than gaining thousands of Twitter followers.

3. Content is incredibly important, and that starts with knowledgeable people. Don't do anything that requires multi-language expert content without ...