Mark Willson

Continuing on from last week’s blog and my conversation with Kelly about our social intelligence monitoring, one of the biggest challenges has been getting everyone up to speed. It’s been quite an operation, according to Kelly, who expects it will continue to be a learning curve for some time yet.

“Companies absolutely understand and appreciate the importance of social media, what a lot of organisations aren’t doing a great job of is using it to its fullest,” she says. “As much as internally we can say we can bring everyone on the same page and we will up-skill marketing folk, we’ll up-skill our sellers, we’ll ensure everyone has a LinkedIn profile, that is a very arduous process, because everyone has their day job and to be able to get that agreement and buy-in, you really do have to convince the individual that it’s absolutely critical that they get onboard. When the penny drops you see it happen and the individual says, ‘yes, I am onboard, I can’t wait to get started’.”

The IBM Social Computing Guidelines governs the use of blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds and social media for all staff and a lot of work has gone into making sure we have that balance between encouraging them to have their own voice, while remaining considerate of our values as an organization.

The marketing team has also been getting calls from various departments asking for advice and help around their use of social media, says Kelly, who adds that the prevalent view is not only is marketing the discipline that can help, it’s the one that can give them the permission to go ahead and help them get started.

I think it’s great that marketers have an opportunity to set the tone and the direction and have a strong influence over the way IBM represents itself through social. Going back to one of the key findings of our Global CMO Study in that marketers mostly see their influence in the promotions area, this provides an opportunity to extend our influence. In stepping up to that leadership we are fulfilling the broader issue of marketing and comms around corporate character versus just focusing on being the people who run events and do direct mail.

One of the other interesting things Kelly has done is create a community of social and digital leads within the marketing communications team, which extends out into the agencies we work with. This allows us to leverage everyone’s skills to make sure we understand the opportunities and helps guide us in terms of our actions.

What’s next? As you can see, there are plenty of opportunities there, but you have to be quick, you have to be nimble, and we absolutely want to be at that forefront of this huge social change. Now that we have a good sense of what people are saying, we’re shifting the focus to customer engagement, so we are not just listening but engaging in conversations and linking what’s happening to the appropriate areas within IBM.

For me, that’s when things get really interesting.