Jul 07, 2009Article

Combine Social Media with Traditional Tactics: 3 Campaign Examples fromIBM

SUMMARY:

As the number of social media channels continues to grow, it can be daunting toﬁgure out which tools suit which purposes for marketing.See how an IBM VP combines social media with traditional tactics for product development,event promotion, and demand generation. Includes lessons learned and highlights from threecampaigns.Sandy Carter, VP Service Oriented Architecture and WebSphere, IBM, has been incorporatingsocial media into IBM’s marketing since 2006. She and her team started slowly with corporateblogs, and lately have pushed into hosting forums and using third-party social networks.A key lesson learned is that is that using social media channels is not a strategy unto itself."All of our campaigns involve a combination of traditional marketing, plus social media," Cartersays. "We actually don’t believe in a solid social media campaign. We always combine it."We spoke with Carter to discuss three IBM marketing campaigns that featured prominent roles forsocial media and online communities. Read on to learn how social media ﬁt into the context of these larger strategies, and how the team combined social media with traditional tactics.

Campaign #1. Harnessing group knowledge for product development

In 2007, Carter and her team were building an IBM platform for Web-based applications calledWebSphere sMash. At the time, IBM’s website had a robust set of online forums where developersdiscussed technical topics. That community represented a large skill and knowledge base.To make sMash as strong as possible, the team listened to developers’ needs through traditionalmethods, including focus groups and analyst reports. Then, Carter’s team supplemented thatinformation by going to the Web to ask developers for their opinions.Channels included:o IBM-hosted forumo IBM-hosted blogo Twitter feedThe team explained their vision for the product, and asked developers:o "Is this something you want?"o "What sort of features do you need?"

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Information came pouring in, with about 4,500 postings to the IBM forum alone, Carter says. Theteam gathered this information, mined it for insights, and incorporated some of the advice intosubsequent beta releases.- On-going updatesTraditionally, the team’s development process followed this basic schedule:o Issue a beta releaseo Accept feedback for about six weekso Make updates to the producto Release the ﬁnal version to the publicThe process for sMash’s release was more on-going, Carter says."We actually did beta releases on the blog, websites and forums we had. And almost every nightwe would take some of that feedback, post a new build, and people would download it and provideus feedback. And we did this continuous loop on the information that came in."The community helped design everything from the user interface to the product’s name.- Successful launchSince its 2008 launch, WebSphere sMash has been regularly growing in usage, Carter says."We’ve already had 81 subscribers on Amazon EC2, which is more than any other product placedthere." Amazon EC2 is a service used by developers to access resizable computing capacity.The number of people downloading the platform from IBM’s website has increased 20% over thelast four months.

Campaign #2. Building a community, promoting an event, generating leads

The team ran a 100-city road show on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) during the ﬁrst twoweeks of October, 2008. The goals were to bring together the SOA community in-person, furtherthe community’s knowledge, and help IBM generate leads for its tools and solutions.Furthermore, Carter’s team wanted the SOA community to stay connected online before and afterthe event. The team used social media and interactive elements to not only promote the event, butto hold the community together afterward.

-> Step #1. Promotion

In addition to traditional marketing -- including direct mail, display advertising, and one-to-oneinvitations -- the team used the following social and interactive elements to promote the event:- BotOn arrival to IBM’s SOA website, visitors saw an animated, 3-D person walk around the pagewith an offer for the event in her hand. When clicked, the person brought visitors to the event

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registration page. The "bot," as Carter calls it, increased clickthrough rates to the registration pagea whopping six-fold.- TwitterThe team sent messages on the micro-blogging service that included a promotion code. Whencustomers signed up for the event with the code, they were allotted 30-minutes to talk with one of IBM’s Chief Technical ofﬁcers at the conference.Within three days, 40 people registered to speak with the CTO in Amsterdam alone, Carter says.- BlogsThe team also blogged about the conference on several of their developer-oriented blogs. Theseposts, combined with the efforts on Twitter, encouraged some developers to mention the event intheir personal blogs, feeds, and social networking pages. Some customers created groups onFacebook, and at least one created a LinkedIn group, Carter says."With all these social media add-ons, we got an incremental 10% lift in our registrations forvirtually no cost."

-> Step #2. Connect customers

The team worked with a third-party provider to build an online community website calledSOAsocial. Having a third-party host the community was important to avoid the appearance of anIBM-dominated and -based community. The team wanted the community to grow on its own.

-> Step #3. Encourage engagement and user-generated content

The team encouraged customers to take pictures at the events and post them to the photo-sharingwebsite Flickr. This helped spur the community into action, and also helped Carter’s team savemoney."We usually have a photographer take pictures of the events. We had 100 events, and it wouldhave cost us about $100,000 to have a photographer at each and every one of those cities, takingpictures and recording that for us," Carter says.

-> Step #4. Follow-up widget

After the event, the attendees stayed connected through the SOAsocial network. Carter’s teamwanted to stay connected with them too, since the attendees were potential customers for IBM’sSOA tools.The team built a widget that supplied the often-requested event presentations. The widget could beplaced on a blog or website, or downloaded onto a computer."The cool thing about that for us is that the widget is driven by RSS feeds. So now that they havethat widget, when we have news, we push that information out to those customers," Carter says."If there is a new product, we can push a demo out to them."