Microsoft

context

Microsoft’s social media presence was initially fragmented and lacked a cohesive strategy, with disparate accounts managed independently by various teams and agencies. This decentralized approach led to inconsistent messaging, misaligned goals, and a diluted brand voice across platforms. Without a unified vision or content strategy, efforts were often reactive, missing opportunities to engage audiences meaningfully or deliver measurable business impact. Recognizing the need for transformation, Microsoft sought to streamline its operations, establish clear organizational structures, and implement a centralized content calendar to align social activities across its vast ecosystem. The goal was to create a unified, efficient social media strategy that drove consistency, engagement, and tangible results.

CHallenge

Microsoft’s social media approach was rooted in a product-first mentality, where individual products and teams operated independently, driving audience engagement and content creation organically. While this decentralized model allowed for some autonomy, it led to significant challenges:

• Fragmented Brand Identity: The involvement of multiple agencies managing separate aspects of the social presence resulted in a disjointed brand narrative. Without centralized oversight, messaging was inconsistent, and the brand voice lacked cohesion, weakening Microsoft’s ability to present a unified identity to its global audience.

• Unclear Business Value: The absence of a centralized strategy made it difficult to measure the impact of social media efforts on broader business objectives. There was no clear framework to evaluate return on investment (ROI), leaving social media perceived as a cost center rather than a value driver.

• Stakeholder Frustration: The siloed structure created barriers for key internal stakeholders, who often felt excluded from the social media strategy and unable to influence or leverage these channels effectively. This lack of access compounded inefficiencies and strained relationships between teams.

• Eroding Customer Sentiment: The absence of a dedicated social support strategy led to slow response times and inconsistent engagement with customer inquiries or issues. This lack of responsiveness fueled growing negative sentiment, diminishing customer trust and loyalty while exposing the brand to potential reputational risks.

These challenges underscored the urgent need for a centralized, strategic approach to unify Microsoft’s social media presence, streamline operations, and establish its platforms as a meaningful driver of business value and customer satisfaction.

Solution

To address these challenges, we established a Social Center of Excellence (CoE) for Microsoft—a transformative approach designed to centralize strategy, streamline operations, and empower distributed teams for meaningful engagement and activation. This initiative brought structure and clarity to Microsoft’s fragmented social media ecosystem, ensuring consistent messaging, measurable impact, and agile responsiveness across platforms.

At its core, the Social CoE centralized all aspects of social strategy and management. This included defining a unified brand voice, developing a comprehensive content calendar, and aligning social media goals with broader business objectives. By doing so, we ensured every social interaction reinforced Microsoft's brand identity while driving measurable outcomes like increased engagement, improved sentiment, and lead generation.

While strategy and oversight were centralized, execution was distributed to ensure each product, service, or region retained the ability to engage authentically with its specific audience. This model empowered product and regional teams to operate with clear guardrails, leveraging centrally developed best practices, templates, and tools to maintain consistency across channels.

A key element of the CoE was its focus on operational efficiency and scalability. A centralized content calendar unified campaigns across platforms, enabling synchronized launches and cohesive storytelling. Shared resources, like a global asset library, ensured that teams had access to high-quality, brand-compliant content.

In addition, we introduced robust analytics and reporting systems to measure performance and ROI. These insights allowed Microsoft to make data-driven decisions, optimize campaigns in real time, and demonstrate the tangible value of social media to stakeholders.

The CoE also emphasized audience engagement through the creation of a dedicated 24/7 support channel for Azure customers. This support framework allowed the social team to detect early signals, triage issues, and manage crises effectively, setting a new standard for customer care in the cloud computing industry.

By balancing centralized oversight with distributed activation, the Social Center of Excellence enabled Microsoft to deliver a cohesive brand experience, build stronger relationships with its audience, and position social media as a critical driver of business success.

Results/impact

During the MVP trial, the Strala service and platform has enabled 1m+ transactions, provided an average of £150 customer savings per household and prevented 55 tonnes of carbon emissions in a year. The UK trial has helped improve the service and deliver convincing evidence to secure the approval of BP’s board of Gas and Low Carbon Energy to scale the platform.

Client Reference

“Sterling was great at helping us work through the design process in a quick, disciplined manner and getting a new digital product out in record time, in a key new market for BP.

Even while operating in an unfamiliar domain, the he and his team at Designit were able to orient themselves fast and to start adding value from the start of our journey growing this new product for BP, with the ultimate aim of accelerating the world’s energy transition to lower carbon.”

Yannis Perrakis, Digital Innovation, BP

Approach, Execution, & Design

Working over 18 months alongside the BP and Wipro team, we:

Generated hypotheses and made early prototypes to test concepts as a foundation for defining the scope of the minimum viable product (MVP).

Built a digital customer experience and its supporting technology platform using emerging blockchain technology, to enable the peer-to-peer trading, from scratch.

Created a new consumer brand and assets to support it (name, logotype, imagery, iconography).

Analog and Digital Style Guide

Mobile Application Design

Comprehensive, Documented Wireframes

User Experience (UX) Flow

Website Design

Key insights

The research foundation included qualitative interviews to understand the future customer point of view on home energy plus analysis across trends, the market, the business, technology and regulations.

-We heard that consumers thought Strala was more about energy than a specific application like mobility.

-We also identified that it was important for people to be part of an inspiring community.

Insights like these helped inform the strategic direction and detailed design.

Outcome

The team delivered:

A new direct-to-customer proposition for BP including the brand.

The design of the trading service, the platform and customer experience.

Monthly communications to participants on the trial.