Effective Digital Strategies for B2B marketing

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Effective Digital Strategies for B2B marketing

IBM Marketing

• Pauline Ores
• Social Media Engagement, IBM
• May 2008
• ores_at_us.ibm.com

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Strategy a careful plan or method

• Animal, mineral or vegetable what is this,
  exactly?
• Its a shift in..
• POWER -- changing relationships
• ACTIVITY I blog, I post not I banner ad
• CONTEXT for INTERACTION which applications
  merely enable

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Why Power Shift

• Clients can now locate and engage other clients,
  prospects and partners -- me content is more
  valuable than it content
• Clients have come to expect a larger role and no
  longer want to be dictated to as Peter Drucker
  suggested some time ago, vendors are becoming
  procurement agents
• Companies need to acknowledge and adapt to this
  new more level playing field and enjoy cost
  savings, an extended development team, and JIT
  market intelligence

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What New Activity vs. New Thing

• Its no different than skiing, swimming, or any
  other activity, it requires practice, training
  and expertise. You become a swimmer, you dont
  execute swimming
• In a B2B space its imperative to be in it to
  win it to learn as well as to manage the
  increased number of interactions, cross-silo
  questions, and opportunity to learn
• When building communities seek out experts
  specifically people who have actually gotten
  people to participate and join in

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How Building A Context for Interaction

• Implementing and executing things this
  approach, even if the applications are social,
  will guarantee youll be successful at just that,
  implementation if you build it they will come
  hardly ever works in this space
• Set the bar higher -- integrate participation by
  building a context for interaction addressing the
  question whats in it for me
• Dont arrive empty-handed seek out new
  opportunities to free your data and contribute
• First thoughts think about who you want to
  engage, what topics are of interest to them
  working outside in vs. using the normal
  marketing inside out approach

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Two Halves of B2B Enterprise External

• An external community will ask questions that are
  not likely to be
• something you and/or your firms social
  moderators can answer
• neatly organized according to your internal
  structure
• Responding in a timely manner requires a thriving
  internal community, where external community
  managers/liaisons can
• quickly ask and get answers
• locate subject matter experts
• deliver input to the right group (i.e.
  development suggestions)
• What is required? Who is using IBMs internal
  community and why? What has IBM implemented
  internally?

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Key Internal Community Elements
People Places Things
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IBM has over 370,000 employees almost 50 are
mobile

• 168 countries
• 2,000 locations
• 140,000 remote

ltltlt 64 acquisitions since 2002 gtgtgt
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Inside Lotus Connections _at_ IBM
Profiles
IBMs internal BluePages application provided the
basis for Profiles. BluePages holds over 579,988
profiles and serves 1.1 million searches per
week. Its the hub of user requests and all
applications authentication for IBM.
Communities
IBM hosts over 1800 online communities. IBM
forums have 147,000 members and over 1 million
messages.
Blogs
IBMs BlogCentral has 47,772 blog users (owners
and commenters) with 107,188 entries and 108,844
comments, as well as 24,156 distinct tags. There
are 1,544 active (10 entries or more) individual
blogs and 1,088 group blogs.
Dogear
IBMs internal Dogear system has 364,351
bookmarks with 917,500 tags, and a user
population of 11,600 users.
Activities
IBMs internal Activities service contains
41,200 activities, 313,000 entries and 67,400
registered users.
Status 2Q2008
Data as of April 2008
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