Nestlé took a different approach to its Chinese social command center than it did in other countries. Nestlé China used the firm’s global digital acceleration team (DAT) framework to create a centralized social command center in its Beijing headquarters.

The four Ps — purpose, people, process, and platform — are all important to establishing a successful social intelligence capability. My recent case study, entitled "Succeed With Social Intelligence In China", shows how Nestlé localized the four Ps to establish a successful social intelligence capability in China. The company:

  • Set measureable goals for social activities. One of the major challenges that Nestlé China faced was how to use social to manage precampaign customers and how to measure the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns. When Nestlé China built its social command center, it set a detailed goal to improve precampaign customer management, including A/B testing of customer usage hypotheses, customer feedback on marketing content, and spokesperson selection satisfaction rates.
  • Hired experienced employees with both global and local social marketing experience. The person that Nestlé China chose to head its social command center was involved in the creation of Nestlé's first social command center outside of China. The company allocated dedicated resources to the platform who had a keen noise filter and could determine which actions the business should take based on the data. It developed regular training sessions for its lines of business and assigned the social expert to share social intelligence findings with the rest of the business.
  • Selected the right listening partner. Nestlé chose Kantar Media CIC’s social listening platform and services primarily because it can deliver the right data. Kantar Media CIC could effectively listen to and analyze social events on Sina Weibo, a platform that has a much larger scope of customer interactions than Twitter in China.
  • Established a formalized method for handling data and sharing insights. After Nestlé created processes to manage incoming data and identify insights, its social command center started working across teams to distribute insights — often in real time — to ensure that each role can benefit from social media data.