Branding in the age of YouTube

Ben Edwards (IBM)


An imposter! 14 years in print journalism, 9 of them at The Economist as a foreign correspondent. Left - bored with journalism, the rise of blogging had affected his understanding of the role of journalism in society. The way the oligopoly of opinion and influence was eroding. Nowhere for mass media to go but shrinking share and attention. A much smallr part of the universe of voice and opinions.

IBM, funnily enough, is an upstart in the publishing business.

New Media Communications

• Establish social media skills among IBMers.
• Develop enterprise apps for these social media capabilities across all communications disciplines, internal and external.
• Establish the business value of new media, demonstrating
• Lower costs and improved effectiveness of existing communications
• Innovations to connect with audiences in different ways

Establish IBM Copmmunications as a valued resource for the company as it adopts social media

Psychology: Bubble, bust, now we're on the knee of the s-curve of technology adoption.

IBM has an internal podcast, blog platform, wiki, social bookmarking.

Lots of people don't find internal blogging useful. A bit of an echo chamber, people blogging to each other about blogging to each other. Web 2.0 evangelism.

The Wiki tool is the most popular and successful of these tools. I have 4 wikis myself. Great semi-formal repositories of information for the team. A transparent way of collaborating - when you touch it, you leave your name and a date stamp.

Social media should not be thought of as new "channels" for distributing existing content and messages. They are fundamentally different - different economics, expectations, skills.

Active participation vs. passive. Even the people who never post to your blog or wiki, or comment on your blog, expect to be able to. Newspaper phenomenon: "reader rage" as readers are unable to make their opinions known, papers don't run their letters or edit them heavily.

Encourage your colleagues to publish, and publish to the best of their abilities.

Publishing model: attract readers based on the value of your content. Marketing needs to start thinking this way too.

BRANDING:

Thinking of branding in the most general terms.

Shows IBM mainframe commercial, making fun of sales.

VW "Beetle". Originally sold baed on its reliability, German engineering. Adopted by counterculture who began calling it the Beetle. The engineers HATED this, wanted to kill the model. Instead, VW adopted the customer perception of the product and marketed it accordingly. Ad: "Live below your means."

Brands become symbols of our social aspirations. BP, GE "ecomagination", IBM "innovation matters".

Prevailing orthodoxy is that companies have to let go of the brand, give up control.

I would argue that we lost control of our brands a long time ago. Look at that VW advert. In the 90s, VW began remarketing our ideas about the Beetle back to its customer base.

Brands are vbolatile, people fall in and out of love with them. They're about employees, consumers. When they no longer serve us, we punish them mercilessly.

The Gap.
Sony.
Kodak.
Ford.

We've fallen out of love with these brands. They don't serve us anymore. Where is Kodak on Flickr?

As brands engage with social issues, brand insecurity may be worsening. Merck, BP.

So if it's not control, what's changed? Three things:

• People can create and share the brand themselves.
• We can listen better to the people engaging with the brand.
• We can engage with them.

How brands live (and die, horribly) on YouTube.

User behavior:

• Celebrating the brand. People repost ads on YouTube. Sometimes they dub them into other languages.
• Mocking the brand.
• Mashing them up with other brands - peoplke take one movie and make it into another, or mash it up with another.
• Making your brand perform strange and unnatural acts. (Guy eating Mentos, then his buddy pours Diet Coke into his mouth and he explodes.)

If you want to know what's going on in IBM India, go to Orkut. IBMers there are all members, chatting constantly.

We shouldn't call ourselves the Communications department, but the Listening department. Help the company listen better to consumers, suppliers, business partners.

We can influence the way people perceive the brand. If we engage well with our constituents, we can have maximum influence.

Don't try to segment your audience. Nurture a brand that employees, custoemrs, and all constituencies can relate to. The key is honesty.

Provide employees with the means to tell their own stories about the brand, and in their own words.

Listen.

When there's potential for a positive outcome, engage to influence. (Questions whether Coke engaging with the Mentos thing has positive potential for them.)

IBM ads - many people like them because they're honest, they say something about the challenges of working in a large corporation. Expresses confidence in us as a company - we're not a cool company. Old line, old fashioned, hierarchical, bureaucratic company, and we're comfortable with that.

When selling new media internally, be humble. Present these as practical tools to solve help people solve indentifiable problems. Remember how hard it was to sell the enterprise on instant messaging, that toy for kids on AOL?