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E.ON is one of the UK’s leading integrated power and gas companies – generating and distributing electricity, and retailing power and gas – and is part of the E.ON group, one of the world's largest investor-owned power and gas companies.
At a time when the demand for energy is on the increase, the threat of climate change has never been greater. Renewable sources of energy aren’t reliable and they’re expensive, especially for thousands of families struggling to pay their energy bills. As an energy company, E.ON needs to ensure that energy remains affordable, reliable and lower carbon.
But achieving these three things isn’t easy. We call it the ‘trilemma’.
Brief
At the beginning of 2009, E.ON recognised the importance of not only communicating the ‘trilemma’ but also engaging customers and other stakeholders in the energy debate, discussing the challenges that we, as a country face around energy.
The first step was to launch a YouTube channel (youtube.com/talkingenergy) as the destination for a series of national press adverts, and a series of advertorials with The Daily Telegraph, aimed at an ‘opinion former’ audience. YouTube was chosen as the initial launch into social media for its neutrality and credibility, believing that by using this platform we could get a better understanding of the willingness of the audience to engage with E.ON.
Following the successful launch of the YouTube channel, E.ON decided to extend the use of social media to an E.ON platform to continue the debate in more detail but also to demonstrate the actions it was taking to address some of these key challenges.
Strategy
The strategy was to build on the existing YouTube channel which started the debate to deepen the involvement for a wider audience and give more details around the issues in an engaging and informative way.
This resulted in a new microsite, eontalkingenergy.com, which provides the platform for a genuine and honest debate on energy, enabling people to share their views on a wide range of energy related topics through their own videos or comments. We also ran Talking Energy Live events at venues across the Midlands to take the debate offline and engage people face to face. In addition, we used Twitter to support the events by allowing direct tweets and feeds during the live debates.
We saw this as the perfect platform to share our approach to sustainability and corporate responsibility. We therefore developed ‘Our Responsibilities’ as an integral part of the talkingenergy microsite. ‘Our Responsibilities’ supports the Talking Energy campaign by showing the actions we were taking to tackle the issues we face as well as being a more accessible and engaging report than the brochure we previously published. Moreover, it validates E.ON’s leadership position in terms of being prepared to host an honest and open debate on what are quite often seen as contentious issues.
Being open and honest was a key part of the brief as we recognised that some stakeholders might not want to engage with us on these issues. Therefore, we developed a highly innovative issues tracker of online energy conversations, providing transparent dialogue of the key energy issues for a wide range of stakeholders.
Execution
The microsite was an integrated project and joint effort between Grand Union and SalterBaxter. The consumer digital capability of Grand Union was used to develop the YouTube channel and the Talking Energy microsite while SalterBaxter’s expertise lay in developing Our Responsibilities and the Issues Tracker.
We developed Talking Energy as a stand-alone site to allow use of a social media platform. The site features a video wall displaying a wide range of conversations, pulling embedded video from YouTube. In line with our efforts to be transparent and honest, all videos and comments are post-moderated.
Our Responsibilties was developed by SalterBaxter and then fully integrated into Talking Energy’s platform and CMS. The Issues Tracker was built by reapplying a simple but effective open source social media search engine (ContextVoice) to filter topics, tweets and videos that are relevant to E.ON and its audience.
Results
So far, E.ON’s strategy has meant we’ve been able to engage thousands of our stakeholders in the debate around energy issues – many of whom we would probably not have reached through any other channel. More than 130 000 people have viewed the YouTube channel, making it the top 100 for both the most viewed and most subscribed sponsor channel. Talking Energy and Our Responsibilities have had more than 100,000 visits and our Issues Trackers reports on more than 4,000 conversations in real time every day.
Our innovative and integrated approach was also recognised externally as we scooped the Digital Impact Awards with our Issue Trackers in the Social Media category - Best use of existing social media tools/sites - with E.ON beating off competition from Centrica and the BBC to win. We also received a Clarion Award which recognises best practice in communicating the importance of CSR, diversity, ethical, and welfare issues. We won in the category ‘Best Corporate Website’ with the judging panel praising the clear navigation and the integrated approach with other channels such as YouTube.
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