Some thoughts on how increasing your company's surface area through enabling your employees in social media and optimizing the quality of your branded presnece can lead to better client relationships -- and a view to how we've been doing this at IBM.
30. Voices is a program that unifies IBM’s key social efforts in order to bring
empowerment, insight and more meaningful engagement at the
enterprise, brand and individual level.
1. Nurture
To educate, empower and activate IBMers
Guidance
Activation
2. Optimize
To collect, structure and analyze
social data and content.
Governance
3. Engage
Make social content and data accessible and
meaningful to IBM and its clients
Collection
Content discovery
Metrics
Data insights
31. Voices is a program that unifies IBM’s key social efforts in order to bring
empowerment, insight and more meaningful engagement at the
enterprise, brand and individual level.
1. Nurture
To educate, empower and activate IBMers
Guidance
Activation
Business Conduct
Guidelines
Governance
Forward Thinker
Social Computing
Guidelines
Social Brand
Registration
Guideline Compliance
Effectiveness Measurement
Verification
Voices Data Set
Digital IBMer
Social Business Manager
(SBM)
Official Voices List
3. Engage
To collect, structure and analyze
social data and content.
Select
Our Values
2. Optimize
Make social content and data accessible and
meaningful to IBM and its clients
Collection
Content discovery
Metrics
Data insights
32. Voices is a program that unifies IBM’s key social efforts in order to bring
empowerment, insight and more meaningful engagement at the
enterprise, brand and individual level.
1. Nurture
To educate, empower and activate IBMers
Guidance
Activation
2. Optimize
To collect, structure and analyze
social data and content.
Governance
3. Engage
Make social content and data accessible and
meaningful to IBM and its clients
Collection
Content discovery
Metrics
Content
Meta-Data
Categorization
Scoring / Algorithm
Data insights
33. Voices is a program that unifies IBM’s key social efforts in order to bring
empowerment, insight and more meaningful engagement at the
enterprise, brand and individual level.
1. Nurture
To educate, empower and activate IBMers
Guidance
Activation
2. Optimize
To collect, structure and analyze
social data and content.
Governance
3. Engage
Make social content and data accessible and
meaningful to IBM and its clients
Collection
Content discovery
Metrics
Data insights
Enterprise View
Brand / BU View
SME View
Client View
Public View
Visualizations
The key to creating value for your organization is to empower individual integrity in order to create collective authenticity.
Let me illustrate this with a little math problem.
Imagine this apple’s smooth surface as a metaphor for an organization’s social media policy and presence.
‘The monolith’
Pros: Consistent, predictable
Cons: Rigid, tightly controlled, homogenous,
By contrast, imagine this bag of marbles as a company’s social media policy and presence…
‘The collective’
Pros: Eclectic, diverse, dynamic, exciting, individualized
Cons: Chaotic, uncontrolled, unpredictable,
Which of these two has more surface area? That is, if you dropped them in a bucket, they’d displace the same volume of water, but what about the surface area. Before you answer, let me remind you the equation.
Ok, in case you need a little help remembering the formula for computing the surface area of a sphere…
That’s 300% more interactions your brand could have – generating opportunities, sensing threats, deepening relationships with your customers and partners and employees. So…in an era of voluminous, mine-able data…the organizations with the most diverse and abundant surface area will win.
The term “brand ambassador” has been a round for ages, but do we really want to create brand ambassadors? The analogy isn’t quite right. Nor do we want to put pressure on IBMers to mindlessly share content on their personal networks. So we have a bit more of a nuanced approach. IBM has been working on a bunch of different enablement tiers that create an ecosystem of social enablement for IBMers. Starting with a foundation of guidelines and policy – we’ll go into more detail in a bit – and moving up to general education about social media, cybersecurity and reputation for all IBMers in the Digital IBMer hub. From that tier, IBMers can move into the Forward Thinker Program (formerly known as the Expertise Locator) which enables them to be surfaced on ibm.com and other external experiences – and also to be identified for the IBM Select program, which is a small group of high-tough, bespoke plan enablement for the top tier. All of this is managed by people from many different areas within IBM – the social business managers…we’re not suggesting that we create a whole department of social business managers, but this is definitely an emerging set of skills
IBM Select
High touch, high value/potential SMEs
Strategic, tactical external placement
Forward Thinker Program
Intermediate touch, high value SME’s
Scalable service to surface expertise externally (on and off .com domain) and internally (w3) based on needs of the business
Digital IBMer Hub
Low touch, high volume core enablement, education and across IBM
Digital Program channel enablement
Self-serve surfacing and engagement
Guidelines and Policy
Screenshot of our internal enablement website
Marc Teerlink, Global Strategist for IBM in the BENELUX. In April 2013 he enrolled in the IBM Select Program and worked to increase his engagement with IBM constituencies on social media driving a lot of conversation around Big Data & Analytics. He shares his expertise in TED Talks, radio and TV-shows and on a variety of blogs. His network increased in quality and size and his reach has increased 141%, engagement by 157% and amplification by 177%
Graham Kittle, Business Development Executive, BAO for IBM in A/NZ. Became one of the faces of IBM in a commercial for the Masters and enrolled in the IBM Select Program in March 2013. Eager to participate he learned quickly and his key performance indicators has been outstanding. His reach has grown 500%, his engagement has gone up 300% and his amplification has gone up 700%.
In a small study we did, we’ve found IBM subject matter experts are 7x more effective on average at driving registrations than traditional web tactics like email newsletters and banner ads. Just goes to show you that when you have the authentic voice of an expert backed by the credible voice of the brand you can engage more deeply in conversations that produce real results – for your company and your clients and prospects.
And these experts at IBM are not alone.
When we do a back of the envelope calculation we estimate that IBMers have about 61 million connections on social networks…that is far more than any one branded channel could achieve for us – not just the reach, which is huge – but the AUTHENTICITY.
Some screenshots of IBM Voices – this is currently real and on IBM.com.
https://www.ibm.com/social/aggregator/voices/voices
List view…all the content from our very best channels and experts
List View – scroll…here you can see how we’ve applied our algorithm to understand the relative reach, engagement and amplification of these social media content objects and can see their relative performance.
When we celebrate the most effective individual IBMers and managers of official channels through IBM Voices, a visualization of our best social media content from across the globe, we set the cultural precedent for the right kinds of behaviors through a positive incentive.
It’s a bit like hearing someone you admire compliment someone because they recycle or drive a low-emission vehicle – you’re more likely to adopt that behavior too when you see it recognized.
Grid view – in this view, we’ve created a mobile friendly engaging visualization – same data, but less emphasis on the ranking and more on the visual engagement – it’s like a browsing view.
Grid view – scrolling through you can see blurbs of the content and event play the video in-line without leaving the page.
Trending topic filter – Watson…in this example we’ve drilled into a specific topic. In this case, content related to the cognitive super computing system, Watson.
Keyword search – and in this view we are seeing the results of a search for the term “cloud” – we get to see all the different content IBMer experts are highlighting about the topic of cloud computing.
We are exploring other use cases for Voices – like creating a version for our category marketing and communications teams that lets them see our content along with that of partners and competitors.
Or even using the system to explore the relative effectiveness (according to our proprietary algorithm) of our experts and content compared with competitors.
We’ve also been experimenting with loading the feeds for a client or potential client into Voices in order to create a dashboard for our client teams so that they can have a finger on the pulse of what is happening for their client’s brand, what’s important to them, what news and ideas are breaking in their client’s industry.