Social media use by EY.



Life at EY

The McKinsey report published by McKinsey Global Institute (2012), identifies professional services firms as being innately social organisations, relying on confidential and trustworthy interactions with colleagues and clients, often in different locations. The necessity to collaborate by sharing knowledge internally and externally therefore makes them a service sector able to see significant return on investment from implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools. Wikipedia describes the big four audit firms, as international professional services networks, offering a range of knowledge based services.  The global and networked attributes signal to me that these firms would benefit from McKinsey value lever 9: "Use social technology to improve intra- and inter- organisational collaboration and communication.", and are therefore worth a closer look.

In INN346 lectures Callam Porch and Jamie Turner have provided interesting insights into the way Deloitte takes advantage of social medial tools, and speaking to a colleague in KPMG I understand they also extensively use blogging, a corporate version of yammer, instant messaging and other Enterprise 2.0 tools. Therefore, for this blog I've chosen to investigate the third largest of the big four audit firms, Ernst and Young, or EY as they brand themselves. I have elected to investigate the global EY, rather than just the Australian division.

As an external potential customer - how can I tell if I will trust Ernst and Young?

EY have an inviting home page which immediately provides evidence of extensive use of social technologies for them to interact with their customers. Relevant, current information is constantly changing, an events calendar provides webcasts of changes to standards, and issues to inform customers, and there are links throughout to several blogs from their newsroom, such as the "Analyst Relations" blog, and their webcasts.

EY extend an invitation to connect via email alerts, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Google +, EY Webcasts and EY Insights Apps. There are 12 apps for iPad and iPhone alone, covering tax insights to business reports and forecasts.

The richness of information provided on the webcasts alone, from broad general guidance, to specialist information, is impressive.

EY are extensively using value lever 5. "Use social technologies for marketing Communication/interaction.", and value lever 3, "Use social technology to distribute business processes."


As an existing customer - how can I collaborate with EY for maximum mutual benefit?

So much information! But if I am an existing customer - what additional Enterprise 2.0 technologies are available?

There is an EY Client Portal that offers more. Apparently collaborative services are offered in protected online work environments. Assumedly a plethora of internal blogs and wikis - intriguing - but I was unable to find access to this.


Working within EY - how can I collaborate with my colleagues, and can I be heard by the senior partners?

The external use of social media by EY is impressive, but what of the internal? Given EY provide extensive outward facing advice, including useful business templates, I assume they also use a collaborative system in-house. However, finding inside information has proved a challenge.

To understand the need for internal communication within EY,  it is worth considering for a moment where EY colleagues may be located. EY is a global organisation with seven geographical areas. To facilitate global communication  they have introduced an online toolkit called "intercomm". This looks promising, but again I couldn't access detail.

A McKinsey report, "Turning buzz into gold", identifies the benefits of using social media platforms for recruiting, which EY are doing, posting jobs on LinkedIn.

A blog posted in 2009 by a social media consultant was fairly scathing in it's review of EY's internal understanding and use of social media, concluding that none of the EY participants attending his social media event had seen their own company's social media sites. Not so good when they were EY marketing and development representatives. However, that was 5 years ago though. Have things improved?

Well, EY launched Yammer in 2013, with a major publicity campaign. Better late than never?

A webinar "How EY measures Yammer use" is being held on Sept 2nd , 2014, could provide insight into the success of this development.

My conclusion on the use of blogs and wikis by EY is that they are using blogs extensively to assist their marketing and sales, to provide customer service, and in operations and distribution. I assume the same level of information sharing occurs within, but was unable to find the evidence required.

If anyone else has any tips on how to source this data please let me know!