Connecting employees at every level at Mars with Yammer and Swoop analytics

Summary

Mars is a global food company. It is the sixth largest private company in the United States. It has more than 85,000 employees and boasts $35 billion in annual sales from six businesses: pet care, chocolate, Wrigley gum, food, drinks and Symbioscience with world famous brands including Milky Way, Snickers, Twix, Pedigree, Whiskas and Uncle Ben’s.

“Provide people with their analytics and empower them.”

Using the SWOOP dashboard, every associate in the Mars Yammer network can view their personal behaviors and SWOOP persona, see who is their strongest connections, which of their posts attracted the most attention, how they can improve their collaboration.

SWOOP Personas classifies people based on their interaction patterns. Within a group, everyone can see who is collaborating with whom, what are the hot topics, what time of day people are posting, who are the influencers, what posts have drawn the most attention, who are the most influential people.

All of this can be viewed at a whole-of-enterprise level along with sentiment analysis on posts, insights into which departments are connecting, the health of the community, how groups compare, what is the distribution of personas.

Providing analytics at a personal level through SWOOP had been incredibly effective for Mars.

Challenge

When Mars initially went live with Yammer there were 8,000 people signed up to the network, with only 14%t actively using it. Fast forward two years and there are 30,000 people on the network but the percentage of active users continues to stay about 25%.

Two years into the Yammer journey, Mars has hit a plateau.

However, Mars’ Digital Collaboration Senior Manager Mark Parkinson says they are working on the engagement.

The change is coming from leveraging a successful community through good management, making use of community champions, using analytics to show people their own behaviors and cross-company behaviors, using sentiment analysis and bots – all with the purpose of providing the right information and connecting the right people.

Strategy

Mars stresses the importance of community members engaging, connecting and consuming content on Yammer to ensure a successful business while community managers and champions spread the word about the value of the community and manage content. All of this is supported by analytics.

“Analytics underpins everything to make a successful community,” said Mr Parkinson.

Mars relies on SWOOP Analytics to provide data to every employee from the forklift operator in The Netherlands to the senior manager in Argentina. Using the SWOOP dashboard, every Associate in the network can view their personal behaviors and SWOOP persona, see who are their strongest connections, which of their posts attracted the most attention, how they can improve their collaboration.

Results

Mars creates guidelines and examples for what to measure and what success looks like for different types of communities. They don’t believe success is one size fits all. They encourage the community manager to decide.

Mars gives community managers a framework in which to operate, and determine what will be achieved with the community? Mars also uses SWOOP data to make scorecards to drive collaboration in Yammer groups.

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