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.

IBM has 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 adoption @ Fortune 500 companies – Exxon Mobil Perspective Blog, etc.

Exxon Mobil is the largest refiner and marketer of petroleum products in the world and was formed by the merger of Exxon and Mobil in 1999. The company is also the world's largest company by revenue and largest publicly traded international Oil and Gas Company according to Fortune 500 2012. Exxon Mobil adopted various social media channels to be in touch with its customers and various other stakeholders. Since April 2006, Exxon Mobil has been active on YouTube and the channel has more than 1200 subscribers and close to 700,000 views. The official channel of the company has videos highlighting the real time updates of the company, employee videos, advertisement campaigns, and videos from the top management and leadership discussing various issues regarding the company and its products, environment issues, challenges and the company efforts.

Another major effort of Exxon Mobil is its Perspectives blog which is run by Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil's vice president of public and government affairs. The blog talks about company's views on the issues, policies, technologies and trends that are shaping the energy industry and Ken Cohen talks about ideas and actions from industry, governments, researchers and many others that affect the world of energy. The blog was started in November 2011 and it is widely followed and read by many people online. Exxon Mobil also has an official twitter account with close to 26,000 followers and more than 1000 tweets and the company only provides news about the company and various activities of the company in different locations. For further discussions, people are directed to Perspectives blog.

Exxon Mobil does not have an official Facebook page but there are many pages on Facebook that is filled with lot of negative criticism. The company does not seem to be interested in a Facebook page but is very active with a blog, Twitter account and YouTube channel. Exxon Mobil uses Facebook to aggressively market its flagship brand Mobil 1 — the world's leading synthetic motor oil. Mobil 1 Facebook page was launched in March 2008 and has close to 60,000 likes. With a focus on making new friends and market its brand along with a Facebook page, a dedicated channel on YouTube and an online game was launched enabling players to take part in a virtual race against Lewis Hamilton, awareness of the brand is going from strength to strength – the game alone has been played over five million times worldwide.

Exxon Mobil has also launched Apple iPad, iPhone and Android applications for their customers. The ExxonMobil application for iPad provides immediate access to ExxonMobil’s Perspectives Blog, a vital source of energy news and analysis, continually refreshed and relevant, and includes access to ExxonMobil’s library of publications, stock information, news, videos and more. Exxon and Esso Mobile Fuel Finder apps provide real-time maps, driving directions and station information for nearly 10,000 Exxon and Mobil retail locations across the continental United States and Europe. Overall Exxon Mobil is active on those social media platforms which it feels relevant for its engagement strategy with customers and other stakeholders. 

Social Media @ Wipro – My Wipro World for employee collaboration & networking

Wipro is a global IT services and consulting company and the company has 136,734 employees with 72 plus global delivery centers across 5 continents and generates revenues of around US$ 7 billion. Wipro has more than 150 global Fortune 500 clients across financial services, retail, transportation, manufacturing, healthcare services, energy and utilities, technology, telecom and media. Wipro believes that employee’s particularly younger generation want to interact with management regularly and social networking tools within the organizations provide a platform for communication and feedback between the employees and managements. Employees need to communicate with one another for project related activities and also for understanding each other personally and culturally. These interactions are essential for the global organizations to run smoothly, knowledge management, innovation and operational efficiencies. Wipro blog can be found on the website home page and blog posts are posted by the senior managers in the company and the topics are mostly technology and vertical related. Wipro had published blogging policy for all their Employees in 2010 which ensure that any content (Blog post, article or comments) published by Wipro Employees on internet are governed by the strict guidelines.

Wipro has a Social Media section on its company website home page called Wipro Social which has live feeds of Facebook, Twitter accounts of Wipro technologies & Experience Wipro and also Slide Share and YouTube Channels. Any discussion/posts/updates that quote Wipro are immediately updated on the Wipro Social that allows the company to keep track of various discussions and mentions about the company. Company also has Wipro TV that is part of branding initiative and also airs white papers and content developed by others like TV channels about the company and its leadership. Wipro also has social networking tool for employees called ‘MyWiproWorld’ launched in 2009, which has 116,981 registered users and 3,264 communities and has become an online forum for collaboration, networking, ideation and innovation. Employees can comment on blog posts, chat with colleagues on various chat forums and discuss various issues with HR and their bosses anonymously if they wish to do so. Wipro has integrated both Twitter and Facebook with MyWiproWorld so that employees can bring together their personal and official worlds.

The classifieds’ section of My Wipro World has 56,000 listings and employees use the portal’s classified section to sell bikes and rent homes as and when they relocate to other places. Wipro launched its employee portal ChannelW ten years ago and it has become one of the most effective employee communication platforms in the company. Today, it receives close to 3.5 crore hits a month. Employees can discuss what is happening inside the company, share ideas/thoughts and post advertisements (such as, selling old furniture, etc) in their discussion boards. The intranet provides a platform to share knowledge among Wipro employees and collaborate with one another across various locations. The company also has a knowledge repository called K Net based on Microsoft SharePoint. Both ChannelW and MyWipro World have a significant impact on the employee engagement and motivation of the employees and it has bonded together the employees working from various locations and has provided them the necessary platforms to communicate and collaborate.