IBM is the 3rd largest brand in the world; but since it sold off its PC division it’s not sold any products to consumers. Our objective was to give IBM consumer presence within the world of social media, encouraging people to engage with our content and share it themselves. This meant reaching beyond our B2B target audience to present IBM in a way that connected with everyone. We knew earned media “critical mass” couldn't be achieved with a B2B audience alone. Our strategy was a constant presence of new content to keep IBM present in technology and cultural online conversations.

We set out to find the interesting stories lurking within IBM (especially in its R&D division) that we could collide with topics of broad public interest. These were not the topics that we would conventionally advertise, but while they were less directly commercial, they were no less interesting. Once we found them, we created highly engaging content and deployed it across a number of social channels including IBM’s own Youtube channel and a dedicated tumblr we created at ibmblr.com. It was through telling these compelling stories that had real human interest that we related to the general public more.

After identifying specific stories from within IBM’s R&D divisions, we interviewed subject matter experts to fully understand the each case study and it’s implications to the world. After conducting audience research we then identified influential groups that we would seed this content to. The video and infographic content was created to be highly shareable and to appeal to many audiences in specific ways e.g. filmmakers interested in the behind-the-scenes, animators interested in the methods used, doctors interested in the implications of the tech, scientists interested in the inventions showcased, science students and even geeks. We then seeded this content to these audiences via highly shareable owned media channels.

These have only just been launched, in the “IBMblr” Tumblr that was created to provide a platform for celebrating IBM’s 20 years of patent leadership, but they have been acclaimed by internal audiences.