The IBM Virtual Forbidden City Social Media Campaign Case Study
C&M IBM VFC Social Media Agency Campaign
“The Virtual Forbidden City SOA campaign was a pioneering piece of work and is being held up internally within IBM as an example of best practice in integrated social media campaigning. Text 100 and C&M brought social media into the fabric of a core marketing programme and showed how to use new tools in a B2B sales environment.”
Delphine Remy-Boutang, Worldwide Social Media Marketing Manager, IBM Software Group
(You can follow Delph on Twitter via @DelphRB….)
Social Media Campaign Background
C&M and our PR Agency partners Text100 have been busy since the start of 2009 as the Online brains behind IBM Software Group’s Social Media action.
In our first project together we were charged with helping IBM to showcase all of the development smarts behind their Virtual Forbidden City, a breathtaking Second Life-like representation of a Chinese world from five hundred years ago.
IBM has more than a decade’s experience in creating successful cultural heritage projects, including the Vatican Library, the Pietà, Hermitage Museum, Eternal Egypt, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The creation of the Forbidden City as a Virtual World is designed to show how IBM can flex its software, hardware and consulting expertise to deliver large scale Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) that are capable of serving a variety of B2B and B2C application interests. In this example, IBM’s technology is being used to provide lasting cultural experiences that preserve learning and have a real social impact.
Social Media Campaign Challenge
As IBM’s Social Media Agency task force our challenge was two-fold:
- Help IBM to reach out to new (Online) audiences and educate them about IBM’s capabilities in the SOA arena
- Make this message – and the work done on the Virtual Forbidden City – relevant to a B2B audience
The Social Media space is relatively new for IBM. The over-riding project goal was to prove that Social Media could be a relevant channel in terms of lead generation and awareness campaigns. Under this brief, we devised a simple series of ‘Executive Briefings’ inside the VFC – and our challenge was to persuade people who normally dress in suits (and sandals) to create an avatar and let themselves loose for an afternoon in the virtual company of IBM’s development team.
Further information about the event and how it was positioned for prospective attendees can be viewed HERE!
Social Media Campaign Planning
From the outset the campaign plan was 100% Social and based on sound Online PR tactics. We used Social Media channels to build relationships with core IBM influencers who would be capable of helping us to spread the campaign message to the farthest (but most relevant) parts of the Web.
Tactically, we wanted Influential bloggers, Twitterers and groups/communities to learn about the event, get excited and communicate it to a wider audience on our behalf.
These tactics were straight out of the PR and ‘Acquisition’ handbook. We needed to raise awareness, drive traffic and have people sign up. Since our targets were extremely niche (IT Architects with a proven interest in SOA and enterprise Virtual Worlds environments), our strategy was to identify our influencer targets on a one-to-one basis, talk to them up front, and prove the value of what we were trying to do in a way that was meaningful to them – so that they in turn felt compelled to spread the word to their own audiences.
Social Media Campaign Research
Research and analysis was essential to the success of the campaign. Whilst we had an excellent platform for our work (an online, virtual version of one of the world’s most popular tourist sites) the boundaries for engagement were narrow.
With this in mind, and in line with our standard campaign approach, the first part of the project involved a large amount of ‘Influencer Research’ and target planning. Using our full Online PR kit bag, we establish which blogs, forums, Social Network groups, and Twitterers would be most fruitful in terms of our initial engagement.
These broke down neatly into two camps: ‘IBM Evangelists’ and ‘Technocrats.’ Our research provided a platform and a series of target lists for both, which ended up as extensive Excel spreadsheets that ranked each type of target by relative ‘Influence’ value to our campaign. As with all our work, the emphasis was on the person’s ability to spread our messages effectively. In PageRank-fashion, we produced a series of ‘top 20’ lists of influential IBM employees, partners, customers, pundits, groups and communities, and Online media.
The next stage was to plug all of this information into our (bespoke) Online Influencer Monitoring and Engagement Dashboard (see below for a screenshot).
The Dashboard – which is an essential tool in every one of our Online PR Campaigns – became the basis for our implementation work with IBMVFC. It gave us a real-time view of all of the relevant conversations in which we needed to participate, as well as an immediate view on what our key targets were talking about at any given moment in time.
Social Media Campaign Execution: Twitter Central in Five Weeks
Once the campaign web pages (and registration process) were launched, we were ready to go. (Incidentally, we created all of the creative content and Online properties for the campaign.)
We had five weeks between launch and event.
Twitter was chosen as the central tool for communicating the campaign to Influencers and prospective attendees because it gave us the quickest way to establish relationships and build a following around the event activity. You can check out the campaign Twitter profile here.
Alongside the campaign registration pages and our Twitter profile, we built a variety of Social Media channels to enable people to take our content and repurpose it for their own uses. These included a YouTube video channel with event previews, and a Flickr profile to share images of the VFC environment.
We also used a Twitter hashtag (#IBMVFC) to enable us to ‘stream’ any conversations around the event. This was applied liberally throughout the campaign by us, and all attendees and Influencers were encouraged to do likewise whenever they were Tweeting about it.
Once these properties had been established, we went into hardcore ‘implementation’ mode.
The campaign Dashboard was the primary tool for monitoring and listening to our Influencers and all of the Online conversations around the VFC and SOA-related themes. Whenever we found something relevant, we got involved, providing helpful or interesting contributions to the discussion rather than simply promoting our own ends or ‘spamming’. We responded to forum posts, blog comment threads, Tweets and re-Tweets. Our goal was to raise awareness of the event – particularly amongst our target influencer community – and to create conversations about the event which would drive traffic to the sign up pages.
A key part of our execution work involved working with the IBM client team to help them use the same tool sets (especially the Dashboard) and join in with the engagement / conversation work. We also relied on a variety of traditional marketing channels such as IBM’s internal comms network for Intranet posts about the event, internal newsletters, sales team mailings, and good old fashioned media relations. All of this helped us to create buzz and excitement amongst the wider IBM network and our target influencers.
Social Media Campaign Results
As part of the project, we presented full campaign metrics back to the global IBM Social Media Marketing team and also to our Social Media Agency community via a Measurement Camp meetup in May. You can check out the slides we produced for Measurement Camp below (they contain full campaign results data)…
IBM VFC Social Media Campaign Measurement
View more OpenOffice presentations from Roger Warner.
In short, our bottom line goal was to create 80 event signups and have 30 (targeted) IT Architects attend.
We aced our registration target by a factor of two, and we narrowly missed our attendee numbers. A host of blue chip prospects attended the event.
Along the way, we also…
- Drove 4,000+ visitors to our campaign pages (we doubled our target)
- Generated 20+ blog posts about the event
- Established a Twitter following of over 350 (very) niche followers
- Drove 700+ views of our campaign YouTube videos
- Drove 200+ views of our campaign Flickr images
Did we deliver on our objectives? Yes, but there were lessons learned. See the Slideshare PPT for more on this score.
Our campaign categorically proved that Social Media is ripe for niche, B2B, special interest communications activity. We delivered a bunch of relevant, warm leads with whom IBM is now in discussion in high ticket solution areas. What’s more, at the end of the process, we handed over a whole kit bag of assets that can be reused for future Social Media work: a living Influencer Dashboard, a stack of Influencer target lists and a live Twitter following packed with people that really care for IBM solutions.
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