Challenge
Traffic, transportation, energy, education, healthcare, water and public safety were major issues in cities and there was tremendous pressure on leaders to find solutions to these problems. IBM had more than 2000 successful city engagements, but tackling these issues required the coordination of a fragmented ecosystem including government officials, public and private sector executives, and potential partners, many of whom had no idea that IBM was in this space to begin with. The challenge for IBM was to make its target group aware of its experience while encouraging the ecosystem to engage with each other to find ecological solutions.
Insight
IBM recognised that business decisions were increasingly being made within social media communities, yet IBM had not entered this space in a structured way.
Solution
IBM had to find a way to trial building a community, within a known entity and a structured space such as LinkedIn. This community was the first of its kind for IBM and the first custom group for LinkedIn in Asia Pacific.
The strategy was to attract and nurture a community of its target audience to drive conversations and thought leadership around ‘Smarter Cities’ and create relationships and networks within the platform between IBMers and the ecosystem.
Ultimately, the brand wanted to establish a favourable selling environment for its offerings and position IBM’s thought-leadership and influence through dialogue around key business issues and challenges. It also wanted to increase the social media footprint and profile of its IBM Experts while creating an end-to-end marketing solution that took consumers from brand exposure to lead generation.
All social channels were interconnected using the IBM group as the centre of the social ecosystem. Twitter feeds and Smarter Planet blogs all filtered through the group while key events leveraged the group for registration, discussions and amplification. The group was also leveraged for key IBM announcements.
Member acquisition was highly targeted – via paid banner ads and eDMs on the LinkedIn platform. While IBM needed quantity to create a critical mass and conversations, it placed utmost importance in targeting and acquiring the right people – senior decision makers and thought leaders. It also limited the number of IBMers who join the group to between 5 – 10%.
IBM subject matter experts (SMEs) played a key role in driving conversations. Apart from discussions on the group, IBM also leveraged LinkedIn’s API technology to extend the conversations outside LinkedIn– a banner widget pulled in real-time discussions from the group. This son relevant third-party websites and visitors are able to join the conversations in a couple of clicks.
The group was also used to support all events by driving event registration, extending the ‘audience’ base (members who were not physically attending the event could get live updates) and amplifying and extending the shelf-life of the event content.
The group also provided members with useful, valuable content – videos, whitepapers, case studies, blog posts and tweets.
Results
Through a combination of paid media and organic referrals, IBM gathered 13,800 members of which 97% were non-IBMers.
Even with zero promotion of IBM’s offerings, IBM had 4 direct inquiries from members looking to collaborate with IBM. One of those progressed to partnership.
IBM’s targeted paid media results were rather outstanding, including interaction rate with video in stacked ad unit: 31.6% , average time spent with stacked ad unit: 34 seconds, display group banner ads CTR: 0.77%, partner message (eDM) open rate: 24% and partner message (eDM) click-to-join rate: 19%.
The group supported a Smarter Cities event in India in September 2012, and out of the 5,000 eDMs sent to a highly-targeted LinkedIn audience in India, over 400 people registered for the event. In all, the group generated over 1,400 discussions and comments, 75% of which were driven by non-IBMers. IBM experts grew their LinkedIn connections by 18% during the year.