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 Customer Service @ Honda Motors Customer Service on Twitter @HondaCustSvc

Social Media is not only for marketing, customer engagement and corporate communication but also is very effective in customer service. Social Media platform like Facebook and Twitter are being widely used by companies to provide customer services. Customer service or after sales service is an essential component of overall customer satisfaction and it often plays a key role in retaining the customers and increase customer loyalty. Automobile companies have embraced the social media aggressively in the past few years and have been effectively using the various social networking sites for brand promotion, customer engagement, product launches, product innovation and last but not the least customer service. Twitter provides the customers a platform wherein they can directly reach the company for solving their complaints and problems. They can express their satisfaction and dissatisfaction of the product and service immediately and companies can respond to the issues fast and avoid further dissatisfaction. For Automobile companies it is even more important as there is severe competition within the industry and dissatisfied customer may even influence other customers including the prospective customers through negative word of mouth. Automobile industry had been going through its fair set of problems mostly related to vehicle recalls due to safety concerns for the drivers by faulty parts and components, product quality and performance issues, dealership issues and non-response of dealers, etc.

Honda Motor America is using twitter for customer service effectively for the past few years and is helping the customers to solve their problems and issues. @HondaCustSVc is an exclusive account for Honda Motors customers to complain about the company products and services. This account is maintained by three exclusive personnel of the company whose photographs are visible on the Twitter account page and they are available Monday to Friday 07.30 hrs to 16.00 hrs PST for resolving the customer complaints. The twitter page also provides the details of the toll free phone number, contact postal address, fax number and customer website address of Honda. There are close to 9,000 followers and close to 7,000 tweets on this specific page and the customer service team are very prompt in responding to the customer complaints. The response time is very fast and they are either resolving the issues or guiding the customers to the relevant place for resolving the issues. Some of the types of complaints on this site are they are dissatisfied with products and services, lack of proper response from dealers, vehicle recalls, schedules and letters and also queries relating to the financing of the vehicles. Some of the tweets highlight severe dissatisfaction of the product and services of Honda Motors and the customer service team is efficiently handling the tweets and avoiding serious repercussions. Twitter interactions of Honda customers are a proof that the customer service through twitter is one of the most efficient ways in which the customers can directly contact company customer service using their mobile devices instantly without any problems and tweet directly with guarantee that they will get the response as soon as possible. A dedicated customer service team is responding to the customer tweets in matter of minutes and guiding customers so that they can resolve their issues immediately. This is good case study for customer service through twitter. 

Why CEO’s are apprehensive about Social Media usage for Customer interaction

Business leaders across the world believe that advances in alternative energy, biotechnology, nanotechnology and other fields far beyond Information Technology are transforming products, operations and business models and has created new industries, fundamentally disrupted some of the existing industries. 71% of 1,700 CEOs surveyed by IBM expect technology will be the number one factor to impact their organization's future in the next three years. Social networking sites have drastically changed the way people communicate and collaborate with friends, family, businesses and businesses are realizing its role in reaching their existing & new customers. According to IBM Global CEO 2012 Study in which 1700 CEOs from 64 countries and 18 different industries were interviewed, currently only 16% of the CEOs are actively using social media channels in engaging business and customers but 57% of CEOs will actively engage with their customers through social networking websites and social media will rank number two in most utilized channels to engage audience in the next five years as it is presently the least utilized of all customer interaction methods.

Traditional methods of customer interaction that are most preferred by CEOs are face-to-face interactions, followed by websites, channel partners, call centers, traditional media, advisory groups, and social media. Presently CEOs believe that Social Media is a platform to obtain information about customers, collaborating with customers and a two way communication platform. Most of the CEOs particularly in the traditional industries like industrial goods are very apprehensive about the Social media hype and are not comfortable with the fact that their brands are in the hands of customers and employees. Control is shifting from institutions to individuals according to IBM Global CEO Study. Another critical factor highlighted by some CEOs is that Social media has seen tremendous growth in the past few years but industry knowledge on how to use it in the various industries has not evolved and most of the industries are struggling to find success stories and case studies within their industries that have profited from social media adoption and engagement. Very few CEOs are actively engaged on the social media platforms as they still believe that social media as marketing platform and most of the other CEOs are judging social media and its relevance without having firsthand knowledge of using it in their businesses.

Most of the CEOs are more than 50 years old and look at technology as a way of collaborating and communicating with employees and other stake holders, connecting with friends and socializing but the young generation people in their 20s work and think about social media in a totally different way as they look at it as a way of life. Young people use social media in all aspects of their personal lives and also looking for ways to use it in their professional live in terms of using it in performing their jobs within the organizations they work and are demanding for social media like platforms. They are well versed at using social media but not the CEOs and other senior managers who are still not totally comfortable with social media and need more evidence that it is one of the highly successful medium for engaging with the customers. As highlighted in the IBM Global CEO study, CEOs will shift their focus to using social networks as a way for direct engagement with customers from the existing modes of using e-mail and the phone as primary communication modes. Social media will help CEOs build closer connections with customers, partners and a new generation of employees in the future.