IBM:Branding in the Age of YouTube
I’m listening to Ben Edwards from IBM giving the Blog Business Summit keynote on the new world of communications. He’s the head of New Media Communications for IBM, overseeing New Media strategy and corporate policy. He wrote for The Economist for nine years before joining IBM in 2005.
In August of 2005 he launched IBM’s podcasting program. Their first podcast has been downloaded more than 200,000 times. He’s going to talk branding in the terms of this kind of new media.
Skills are of utmost importance - marketers need to be good practitioners by using social media tools - transferring their information to wikis, for example, and learn about them by using them…
Ben talked about social media technology being disruptive to IT folks. But also says it’s easy because the social media tools require authentication to the tools, so there’s intrinsic value and trust in their use.
He’s positioning IBM Communications as the core place to go for ideas as to how to use these tools. Communications departments in large organizations need to migrate to this strategic position in order to serve the needs of their companies… I couldn’t agree more.
IBM uses podcasts a ton - there have been almost a million downloads of IBM podcasts in the past year.
Wiki use at IBM has attracted 70,000 registered users. Ben uses his wikis (he maintains four) to facilitate projects from geographically distributed teams, they’re transparent, and they invite participation.
“The rise of social media heralds the advent of a new communications paradigm.” This is what Ben says when he talks to other IBMers. He says:
- Social media are not about the technology
- Social media should not be thought of as new “channels” for distributing existing content and messages - they’re fundamentally different.
- Social media have different economics, and require different skills.
Communications is changing because social media allows anyone in the company to publish. He holds communications pros responsible to help their peers to more effectively publish using these new tools.
Now focus on the brand:
Ben’s talking about branding in general terms - he’s showing the most hilarious video of IBMers making fun of their mainframe business that made me laugh as some of the (very funny) recent Office episodes.
I’d never, ever suspect something like that coming out of IBM.
More coming…
