Pete Blackshaw, the global head of digital and social media at Nestlé, opened Ad:tech 2013 in New York last week with a keynote addressing issues surrounding digital transformation for their global operations.

Blackshaw believes now, more than ever, content is king and that your employees can be the most potent source. He spoke of the power of ‘visual ROI’, and using it to inspire and engage your customers and employees alike. Listen and engage with your consumers, create data and then join the dots to bring that data to life for your teams, he said. Use the passions and experience of employees to create content, and use it as internal currency.

In his presentation he exposed the internal digital culture of Nestlé, via global digital acceleration teams (DAT). His DAT members have ‘hack-a-thons’ to solve problems, anticipate trends and search for ideas. He leveraged the power of social networking internally by creating a Facebook-style intranet called NestChatter, and social networking is encouraged to create new ideas and recognise innovative staff members. Blackshaw called it ‘digital darwinism’ and publicly ranked the staff on their social network popularity to boost viral effects.

Employees as content was taken a step further to include collaborations using the DAT model across the globe. Monitoring the successes in different regions brought valuable learning to the DAT model and scaled easily with the power of NestChatter.

His takeaway line: trust your inner consumer! When you are trying to figure out the approach to engage your consumers socially, think about your own social media reactions, what makes you engage? Embrace core branding. Listen. Engage. Inspire and Transform. Then ask how digital can make it even better.

@pblackshaw @Nestle @missmaplestone #adtechNY