Company: IBM, Austin, TX
Company Division/Group: Dynamic Signal
Company Description: IBM is the largest technology and consulting employer in the world, with more than 400k employees serving clients in 170 countries. IBM offers a broad portfolio of middleware, as well as the world's most advanced servers and supercomputers. Utilizing its business consulting, technology and R&D expertise, IBM helps clients become "smarter" as the planet becomes more digitally interconnected.
Nomination Category: Marketing Campaign Categories - Specialty
Nomination Sub Category: Viral Marketing Campaign of the Year

Nomination Title: IBM's Viral Marketing Campaign: #NewWayToWork

Tell the story of this nominated marketing campaign for the judges (up to 650 words). Describe the genesis, planning, execution, and results to date of your campaign. TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

IBM created a new email solution called IBM Verse. As one of the first companies to launch corporate social media guidelines, IBM has always been on the cutting edge of social. IBM wanted social to be a key part of the IBM Verse launch. The social strategy centered around changing how companies worked, so the team centered social activities around #NewWayToWork

The IBM Verse viral campaign launched in November 2014 with #newwaytowork. The inspiration was to promote brand awareness and generate sign-ups for Verse, the company’s new business email solution. For some time, IBM has engaged employees with social media through their “Always-On” strategy, so it was natural to leverage employees to execute the campaign via their social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) IBM wanted to engage their employees as social ambassadors for greater social media amplification and brand awareness of Verse.

The goals of the campaign were to: 1) drive awareness of the IBM Verse email solution externally; 2) create a seamless way for employees to share content with social channels via mobile and desktop; 3) remove the fear and empower employees to share company-approved content.

Leveraging employees as brand ambassadors was an innovative and new social media strategy for IBM. The program worked because of the authentic voice of the employees sharing content in their own social networks. Connections in social networks are more likely to view and engage with content from someone they know vs the corporate marketing social handle. This is what makes employee advocacy a revolutionary social media strategy. The IBM Verse campaign was the most successful social launch ever executed at IBM.

To plan the campaign, IBM digital marketing experts created a variety of content for sharing across employee social channels. They also designed the gamification element, which allowed employees to compete for points and awards based on social activity results. They could check leaderboards daily to assess performance relative to other employees. On the day of the launch, influencers drove 44% of impressions, with employees driving 27% of impressions. In the first two weeks of the campaign, 50,000 people registered to use IBM Verse. To allow employees to share content on their social channels, IBM used VoiceStorm, Dynamic Signal’s technology platform, which allows top brands to extend their social media strategies by letting employees receive and share company-approved content with their personal social networks.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief features and results of the nominated campaign (up to 150 words).

- Mobilization of thousands of IBM employees to identify, organize, and enable them to amplify messaging at the launch of the campaign
- Measurement of individual performances
- Measurement of relative performance against peers in similar workgroups
- Rewards for top performances
- Participation and promotion from third parties, including attendees at IBM events and various partners
- Content included video, infographics, blog posts and more
- Participants included IBM employees around the world including those from the U.S, Canada, Korea, Germany and more
- The result for Verse: 50,000 new product sign ups in the first two weeks
- 27% of the earned media for the IBM Verse launch was generated via employees
- #Newwaytowork trended as one of the top # of twitter during the campaign