Analysis & Outlook

Rajesh Prabhakar Analyst Bio @ http://socialmediacases.blogspot.com/

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.

Social Media Marketing Strategy @ IBM – Active Listening & Employee driven