IBM decentralized its Social Media and Content strategy.

1. Analysis & Outlook
Social Media Marketing Strategy @ IBM – Active Listening & Employee driven
IBM had restructured its Marketing Teams with a focus of increased presence and engagement
with customers on various social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google
hangouts, etc. Social Media will supplement traditional marketing channels in improving further
its product, brand and channel marketing strategy in future, according to Ed Abrams, IBM
Midmarket Business Vice President.Marketing Teams were retrained to use social media
channels, understand the company guidelines that need to follow while on various social media
platforms and drive demand for IBM’s products and services along with actively listening and
engaging with customers and prospective customers. The success of the IBM social media
marketing strategy can be attributed to the training that was given to the marketing teams as it is
very essential for the marketing managers to have right skills to actively engage with customers
on various social media platforms and any mistakes or wrong moves will out rightly affect the
brand image of IBM. IBM employees are trained and validated before allowing them to engage
with customers on social media platforms.
IBM social media training for employees includes how to get started on various social media
platforms and improve their skills blogging, tweeting and using other social media to share their
expertise and connect with IBM customers.IBM’s social media marketing strategy is based on
fundamental of “active listening” on social media channels, understand the customer concerns,
gather details, in case of prospective customers initiate the fist contact and providing content that
is relevant. “In that context, we’ll deliver proof points, access to experts and expertise to solve IT
problems of our audience,” Abrams said. “IBM wants to be responsive to our customers,”
Abrams said. “We’re out there with our own tools listening to conversations going on in social
stratosphere. We’re building a library of influencers who in real time can get involved in those
conversations to provide content.” With social media, IBM’s positioning and market direction
can be altered quickly: “You have options for the 8-minute, 8-hour or 8-day reaction,” Abrams
said in an interview with The VAR Guy.
IBMhas decentralized its social media and content marketing by relying on the employees
particularly the specialists and subject matter experts related to various technologies and
products from across the company and including their personal blogs, tweets and posts into the
company’s marketing mix, crucial success factor. Employee engagement is at the heart of how
IBM creates great experiences for its customers, explained Ethan McCarty, IBM’s director of
enterprise social programs. “We want to create the most innovative, leading-edge experiences”
for customers with employees actively engaged in the process. IBM’s social team that includes
the HR and legal teams too have been working develop a program to encourage employees to
actively participate and proactively manage their digital footprint. It all started in 2005 when the
company internally crowd sourced “blogging guidelines” which were necessitated by the fact
that employees then were actively engaged on both internal and external blogs and over period of
time these guidelines ultimately became the social media policy of IBM that included various
other platforms along with blogs and wikis.IBM is having positive returns by allowing the
employees discuss and link to IBM products on their blogs and social media posts.
Rajesh Prabhakar
Analyst Bio @ http://socialmediacases.blogspot.com/