A new value exchange between your brand and employees: authenticity for credibility

January 2, 2013January 4, 2013 ~ Ethan McCarty

Screenshot of IBM.com/Voices running on a mobile device

Organizations that allow and encourage individuals/employees to become comfortable integrating their personal and professional personae aren’t getting enough press. That is to say, we are all experiencing the convergence of organizational brand & culture with personal identity that is unprecedented — and the organizations that will win in this era of greater data transparency, permanence, velocity and discoverability will be those that can attract and retain people who improve company culture by embodying the company’s character. Essentially, social brand strategists need to create intentional systems of engagement that share benefit with employees and allow these individuals to contribute positively to how the brand is experienced. Naturally, this is especially true for business to business firms. It might even be a no-brainer when we look back one day.

One externally visible representation of this strategy in action is www.ibm.com/voices where we have begun to experiment with a data service (rendered there on a web page pretty simply) that combines our “official channels” with those of some of IBM’s subject matter experts. This juxtaposition of the individual IBMer’s expertise and the official channel content seems to have an overall improving effect — for the brand channels, you get additional legitimization because they’re right there with individual people. For the IBMers, they get the credibility of being in this special data service (which leads to more exposure etc for them.) We have been building out the criteria, guidelines, registration systems, training etc on the back end for this for a while — but more importantly, we can do this because at IBM we have been working a long time on creating a values-led culture, which somewhat mitigates risks and tends to improve the likelihood that the quality of the interactions will be good (thus ~~obviating~~ decreasing the need for micro-management).

I think this all indicates a new value exchange emerging between employees and firms — authenticity for credibility — and it can flow bidirectionally depending on the context.

*This blog post is an edit to an email exchange I had with Kare Anderson, who is hosting the panel discussion I’m on next week at New Media Expo in Las Vegas, “Driving Social Business Results at Scale” .

Digital War is Over! (If you want it)

December 19, 2012December 19, 2012 ~ Ethan McCarty ~ 1 Comment

How many times have you heard your social media or digital campaign described with vocabulary borrowed from a field commander? Even the term “campaign” has a distinctly military connotation.

Just the other day I participated in a webinar where the social media ‘expert’ describing his program used the following phrases in less than 15 mins:

“boots on the ground”
“battle for mindshare”
“the enemy”
“attack the competition”
“laser focus”
“Shotgun approach”
“social media bootcamp”
“Trojan horse”
“turning the battleship”
Referred to employees as “troops”

And it wasn’t just this one guy…I hear this language of war applied all the time to marketing and communications….”battle for hearts and minds” “on target” “crusade” “tip of the spear” etc etc.

I find it particularly disturbing because so many people in our field overtly declare themselves passionate advocates — and even evangelists — for doing things in new, social, highly collaborative, inclusive and innovative ways. The whole war-as-metaphor seems like a colossal miss.

I am all for spirited competition and passion in our work, but can we agree to try to give the war words a rest? Heck, I will take impenetrable marketing lingo over jingoistic jargon any day. Leverage THAT synergy, pal.

What if you were launching “Anonymous Business” instead of Social Business?

November 1, 2012November 1, 2012 ~ Ethan McCarty ~ 1 Comment

When it comes to making the enterprise workplace more digital and social, I don’t think we’ve made it clear enough what behaviors are expected around the roll-out of just about any kind of interactions in digital media…we’ve relied too heavily on institutional inertia which has a kind of gravity towards the lowest common denominator in many cases.

What if you were launching something called “Anonymous Business” instead of social business? What would you do…activate evangelists and coaches and create online tutorials about how to be anonymous and and antisocial while at work?
“Top tips for ignoring your colleagues’ contributions”
“Six easy steps to sending emails from system IDs with incomprehensible instructions”
My point with the silly example is that in absence of definitive behavioral signposts, you have essentially done the alternative.

Meanwhile, there are alternatives…though we haven’t really made it happen yet. I remember someone telling me about a sign that was up (may still be) in every single Intel meeting room, including the board room, that listed steps for productive meetings (a bit of googling and here’s a link) Talk about pervasive, contextual cultural signals! Can you do something like that in the context of your company’s digital toolset? Not just offer how-to instructions, but cultural signposts as well?

We’ve applied some light gameification to some of our how-to guides and enablement materials for the adoption of social business tools and platforms. It’s not much a cultural signpost yet, but I think there’s potential.

Does anyone have examples of behavioral signposts in the context of digital systems?

My favorite social video in recent memory

September 10, 2012September 10, 2012 ~ Ethan McCarty

Nope, it’s not the dancing twins. (Though that is a pretty awesome viral video too.)

Over the weekend one of my colleagues at IBM sent me a link to a video from “The Ugly Indian” and immediately I thought “Oh brother, here’s someone who wants to comment negatively about my company’s presence internationally.” But I was pleasantly surprised.

It turns out that the Ugly Indian is an organization that encourages Indian citizens to take responsibility for how their country looks (locally) and their environmental impact (globally.) They organize “spot fixes” by partnering with various corporations to mob a particularly dirty area in the streets of India and clean it up, repaint it, plant new plants etc.

I am traveling a few weeks to speak at AdTech in Bangalore…and I plan to visit the site of this clean up as part of my trip!

So here’s the video and, below it, a bit of background information sent to me by my colleague, Deepa Kedoor, in India when I asked for more detail.

“This started off with a ” Say No to Plastic” oath and to to determine if there is something we could do, that would really impact from a grass root level. i.e reduce the use of plastic just by doing an activity. instead of going on a sermon mode.

This is where we thought of partnering with “The Ugly Indian.” This group works with Corporates to clean office spaces and educate vendors around the area, on reduced use of plastic, and promote a plastic free environment. The group has done some incredible work with Dell, ING Vysya and many other such corporates and have a great following on social Media. The thought behind this was that if we were to create a really clean space outside our main offices in Bangalore, then employees would …keep it clean and not litter it with plastic and cigarette butts etc..

We approached them to do the activity with us at Subramanya Arcade, This has stemmed from employees who have posted comments on our ‘ Say No to plastic’ article on W3 <IBM’s intranet> stating that they would like to clean up their campuses, and get rid of the plastic in the office spaces. This is being run with the support of On Demand Community volunteers by the Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs Team.

On this day about 60 volunteers came out to help run this effort.

This event was kicked off by our COO Amit Sharma…. and we plan to have this drive at other locations as well”..

Do the Biggest Brands Dominate Social Impressions?

September 6, 2012September 6, 2012 ~ Ethan McCarty ~ 2 Comments

A new report from PQ Media and uberVu on social media impressions claims Coke, Apple and Google dominate social media media “conversations.” However, something about it just doesn’t sit right with me.

The report “found that Coke was the No. 1 brand in social media impressions by a margin of two-to-one over the next-most-mentioned brand, Apple, during the month of July, the first for which data is being reported.” However, there’s no sense for whether or not the impressions are positive or negative or neutral…or even if they are actually about the brand. Are they excluding people talking about apples…the fruit that grows on trees? Coke, the “the solid carbonaceous material derived from destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulfur bituminous coal”? Googol, the number followed by 100 zeros?

Ok, that last one is a stretch…and maybe the Coke one too…but when we have done broad digital listening at IBM we find that something like half of the references to IBM are noise. The noise includes everything from people using the term “IBM” to sell old laptop parts to organizations that just happen to have IBM as the acronym for their name. (I’m looking at you, International Brotherhood of Magicians.)

More importantly, what doesn’t square for me from a B2B point of view, is that I don’t understand if the report accounts for interactions with the people at these companies who are engaged in conversations about their areas of expertise. For B2B brands (which includes just about all service providers) I would argue that interactions with people within the organization are much more valuable than brute number of impressions. Interactions with people lead to new opportunities, conversions to sales, deeper understanding of clients, better ability to attract and retain talent and…perhaps most important…more data thrown off around individual customers, prospects etc that can be used in a variety of contexts.

IBM Design Lab — day three

June 5, 2012June 5, 2012 ~ Ethan McCarty

On Friday we had some important visitors at the Design Lab — IBM’s SVP of Marketing and Communications, Jon Iwata, IBM’s VP of Marketing, John Kennedy and the founder of SY Partners, Keith Yamashita. The three of them had a walk around the Lab with Ben Edwards and met some of the teams doing work here. I caught the teams on video along with some reactions from Jon, John and Keith…the video’s about 6 minutes long and gives you an idea of some of the projects we’re working on here.

IBM Design Lab…nearly open (sneak peek video tour)

May 30, 2012 ~ Ethan McCarty ~ 8 Comments

I showed up a couple days before the IBM Design Lab opened to help get things set up and brought my video camera with me…Ben Edwards (VP of Digital Design and Development…my boss) took me for a 10 minute tour of the location, which is starting to look great….will be even better with some more furniture and people to work there (both are arriving as I type this!)

As Ben describes in the video, we’re going to have a bunch of teams working in the Design Lab on a variety of digital marketing and communications strategic projects — everything from our ibm.com presence for cloud computing to the web services that allow us to surface experts in social media to digital listening and marketing optimization projects and more. Biznology galore!

I worked at 590 Madison years ago in the early days of IBM’s intranet and long long ago IBM debuted some of its most powerful computers here — it’s a great locaiton for me to return to and an historic location for IBM, which makes it a cool place to design the future 🙂

Here’s the vid: