Does Social Sell?
Feb 15, 2010
H&R Block: Taxing Problems
When H&R Block launched an ambitious social-media outreach campaign in 2008, it followed some textbook advice: fish where the fish are. So it went on Twitter looking for frustrated taxpayers, offering them help. Instead, the company found reticence among potential customers who didn't want to air their problems on Twitter.
This year, H&R Block changed course, abandoning one-on-one Twitter contact in favor of building a Q&A community site, Get It Right, which replaced a more standard blog the company did last year. The Get It Right site required H&R Block's social-media team to recruit and train 1,000 tax pros to answer questions. It looked to local managers to nominate tax preparers to participate. Early results are promising: Get It Right has signed up 65,000 members and answered 50,000 questions, with the big tax push still to come.
"We're outpacing where we thought we'd be," says Zena Weist, director of social media at the company.
The challenge will be tracking these queries back to sales. H&R Block, after all, makes most of its money by getting people into its offices. Weist only recently joined the company. With few internal resources, the company has needed to pare back its social programs, emphasizing Twitter and Facebook less, for instance. The decision was hard but necessary, Weist says, since H&R Block can't promise to answer tax questions posed on Facebook. Instead, it is using Twitter and Facebook mostly as broadcast vehicles, hoping customers who have come to Get It Right then tell their networks they were helped.
H&R Block is trying to steal a march on competitor TurboTax, from Intuit, which has a team of experts dubbed Team TurboTax answering questions on Twitter. "A community wants a one-to-one relationship where they can continue to come back," Weist says. "That's not what Twitter is. You don't have continuous dialogue."
To figure out if the strategy's working, Weist is tracking visits, time spent, registrations and questions asked. The company will conduct Dynamic Logic surveys to gauge brand favorability changes in visitors. It's also trolling social sites for the number of brand conversations in social media and their sentiment. There's also value in knowing many of the people contacting the company online wouldn't call in, thereby saving H&R Block money. The metrics can, at times, be "squishy," Weist says, but the opportunity in social is worth the tradeoff.
"If your word of mouth isn't positive, forget about brand awareness and consideration," she says. "If word of mouth is bad, there is no consideration."
See also:
"The Tweet Hereafer"
"Brands Seek Fans on Facebook"
"Social Media Tactics Help Drive Brand Searches"