What is your role in the company and who do you interact with the most?
I studied at Classical High School and then graduated in Modern Literature. After University, and after some experience as a junior journalist, I attended a post-graduate course at CUOA, a business school based in Altavilla Vicentina. Here I specialized in Communication and New Media. This path allowed me to broaden my knowledge and create a more solid foundation that was transversal to various sectors. And above all to come into contact with the business world. I entered the internship here in Carraro in 1998 dealing with internal communications. A few months after I joined, an unexpected opportunity opened up in the field of corporate, product and financial communication. From here I significantly broadened my horizons, moving from trade fairs to financial press releases, up to the new (then) frontiers of the web. Over the years I have consolidated my experiences and have built step by step a new communications office which today coordinates all the Group's activities from Italy, also serving the foreign offices in China, India and South America. With my staff I take care of all communication, online and offline, with an eye on social media.
What do you think about the use of social media in the B2B market segment?
Lately I have noticed an increase in the use of social media at a national level in the B2B market. We are finally starting to include these channels actively within the company strategy. I have encountered this phenomenon especially on LinkedIn which has the great advantage of being able to involve both other companies and individual users in its communication. B2B is learning a lot from B2C, we see it in various "colleagues", competitors or companies similar to Carraro in the pure industrial world.
Which social network do you use with the most involvement and which one the least?
Operating mainly in the B2B market, we have a varied audience of interlocutors: from customers to suppliers, from bondholders to investors, from the press to institutions, without obviously forgetting students and potential new colleagues. The most relevant social network for us is certainly LinkedIn with our main page Carraro Group. As a corollary, we also manage the presence on Facebook and X. But they are less relevant as a reference audience. We use these platforms to update our audiences in real time; at the same time our website has become more of a sort of starting point on which more static contents live. From history to our Values. LinkedIn is certainly the social network closest to our business model because it allows us to address the most professional targets. At the moment we are not yet using either Instagram or TikTok but we do not rule out that they may be activated soon in relation to the planned employer branding activities.
The data shows that having a low number of followers damages the brand image, what do you think?
This is a fact that needs to be put into context. If you have been present on social media for a long time and your fan base is low there is probably a problem. I think it's quite normal to expect a high number of followers from an important brand. Carraro's following is completely organic, we have never invested in actions that would increase the number of followers because we preferred investing in content, from professional photos to videos. And so far it has proven to be a successful and quality approach.
How important are online reviews, are they important?
At Carraro I mainly take care of the reviews. I monitor them constantly even if at the moment there aren't many: I believe that ours is a somewhat particular niche where the habit of writing feedback is not yet so widespread. Personally, however, I like to leave them often, especially on TripAdvisor and in the food sector. Generally speaking I tend to share very positive or very negative experiences, I don't think anything in between can help.
Have you thought about enlisting the help of professionals from the social world given the importance achieved by digital platforms and their management complexity?
In Carraro, communication is almost totally internalized. The texts, the copy and the entire strategy are managed internally while we are supported on the visual side by a graphics company. We manage the PED personally, integrating it with material from all departments. Once we have decided what, where and when to post we need to make the content perform and this is where the support of an agency that accompanies us comes into play. We reconvert contents for internal and external communication, adapting them for the different audiences and for the different markets in which we operate.
What are the future corporate communication projects?
In the last three years we have worked a lot on VR, perhaps no longer a novelty in B2C but definitely very interesting in B2B and in the extensive use we are making of it in Carraro. We have created a world dedicated to the agricultural and construction sectors, and we have given it a dedicated space during a fair. Here one of our guides accompanied the guests of the stand in this experience within our reality which includes over fifty virtual products on the shelves. The idea now is to further expand the applications of this tool and create an even more extensive VR Experience that also involves our foreign offices. Among the various projects we certainly want to further improve social strategies and online communication.