June 2009

“The Virtual Forbidden City SOAcampaign was a pioneering piece owork and is being held up internallywithin IBM as an example o bestpractice in integrated social mediacampaigning.Text 100 and C&M broughtsocial media into the abric o acore marketing programme andshowed how to use new tools in aB2B sales environment.”

Delphine Remy-Boutang, Worldwide Social Media Marketing Manager,IBM Software Group (You can follow Delph on Twitter via@DelphRB….)

Case Study:

The IBM Virtual Forbidden City Social Media Campaign //

C&M

//June 2009

C&M and our PR Agency partnersText100 have been busy since the start o 2009as the Online brains behind IBM SotwareGroup’s Social Media action.In our rst project together we werecharged with helping IBM to showcaseall o the development smarts behind their Virtual Forbidden City, abreathtaking Second Lie-like representation o a Chinese world rom vehundred years ago.IBM has more than a decade’s experience in creating successul culturalheritage projects, including the Vatican Library, the Pietà, HermitageMuseum, Eternal Egypt, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum o Arican American History and Culture.The creation o the Forbidden City as a Virtual World is designedto show how IBM can fex its sotware, hardware and consultingexpertise to deliver large scale Service Oriented Architectures(SOA) that are capable o serving a variety o B2B and B2Capplication interests. In this example, IBM’s technology isbeing used to provide lasting cultural experiences that preservelearning and have a real social impact.

As IBM’s soCIAl MedIA AgenCy tAsk forCe ourChAllenge wAs two-fold:

Help IBM to reach out to new (Online) audiences andeducate them about IBM’s capabilities in the SOA arenaMake this message – and the work done on the VirtualForbidden City – relevant to a B2B audience

The Social Media space is relatively new orIBM. The over-riding project goal was to provethat Social Media could be a relevant channelin terms o lead generation and awarenesscampaigns. Under this brie, we devised asimple series o ‘Executive Briengs’ insidethe VFC – and our challenge was to persuadepeople who normally dress in suits (and sandals)to create an avatar and let themselves loose oran aternoon in the virtual company o IBM’sdevelopment team.Further inormation about the event and how itwas positioned or prospective attendees can be viewed HERE!From the outset the campaign planwas 100% Social and based on soundOnline PR tactics. We used Social Mediachannels to build relationships with coreIBM infuencers who would be capableo helping us to spread the campaignmessage to the arthest (but most relevant) parts o the Web.Tactically, we wanted Infuential bloggers,Twitterersand groups/ communities to learn about the event, get excited and communicate it toa wider audience on our behal.These tactics were straight out o the PR and ‘Acquisition’ handbook. Weneeded to raise awareness, drive trac and have people sign up. Sinceour targets were extremely niche (IT Architects with a proven interest inSOA and enterprise Virtual Worlds environments), our strategy was toidentiy our infuencers on a one-to-one basis.

soCIAl MedIACAMPAIgnBACkgroundsoCIAl MedIACAMPAIgnChAllengesoCIAl MedIACAMPAIgnPlAnnIng

Case Study:

The IBM Virtual Forbidden City Social Media Campaign //

C&M

//June 2009

Research and analysis wasessential to the success o thecampaign. Whilst we had anexcellent platorm or our work(an online, virtual version o oneo the world’s most populartourist sites) the boundaries or engagement were narrow.With this in mind, and in line with our standard campaignapproach, the rst part o the project involved a large amount o‘Infuencer Research’ and target planning. Using our ull Online PR kitbag, we establish which blogs, orums, Social Network groups, andTwitterers would be most ruitul in terms o our initial engagement.These broke down neatly into two camps: ‘IBM Evangelists’ and‘Technocrats.’ Our research provided a platorm and a series o targetlists or both, which ended up as extensive Excel spreadsheets thatranked each type o target by relative ‘Infuence’ value to our campaign. As with all our work, the emphasis was on the person’s ability to spreadour messages eectively. In PageRank-ashion, we produced a series o‘top 20’ lists o infuential IBM employees, partners, customers, pundits,groups and communities, and Online media.The next stage was to plug all o this inormation into our (bespoke)Online Infuencer Monitoring and Engagement Dashboard (see below ora screenshot).The Dashboard –which is an essential tool in

every one o our Online PR Campaigns – becamethe basis or our implementation work withIBMVFC. It gave us a real-time view o all o therelevant conversations in which we needed toparticipate, as well as an immediate view onwhat our key targets were talking about at anygiven moment in time.Once the campaign web pages (andregistration process) were launched,we were ready to go. (Incidentally, wecreated all o the creative content andOnline properties or the campaign.)We had ve weeks between launchand event.Twitter was chosen as the central tool or communicating the campaignto Infuencers and prospective attendees because it gave us the quickestway to establish relationships and build a ollowing around the eventactivity.You can check out the campaign Twitter prole here. Alongside the campaign registration pages and our Twitter prole, webuilt a variety o Social Media channels to enable people to take ourcontent and repurpose it or their own uses. These included aYouTubevideo channelwith event previews, and aFlickr proleto share images o the VFC environment.We also used a Twitter hashtag (#IBMVFC) to enable us to ‘stream’ anyconversations around the event. This was applied liberally throughout thecampaign by us, and all attendees and Infuencers were encouraged todo likewise whenever they were Tweeting about it.Once these properties had been established, we went into hardcore‘implementation’ mode.The campaign Dashboard was the primary tool or monitoring andlistening to our Infuencers and all o the Online conversations around the VFC and SOA-related themes. Whenever we ound something relevant,we got involved, providing helpul or interesting contributions to thediscussion rather than simply promoting our own ends or ‘spamming’.We responded to orum posts, blog comment threads, Tweets andre-Tweets. Our goal was to raise awareness o the event – particularlyamongst our target infuencer community – and to create conversationsabout the event which would drive trac to the sign up pages.