IBM Shows The Two Faces Of Social Media

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Analytics – the dark side of social media

At this point, Carter starts to talk about what social media can do for IBM’s customers, and it all gets a bit more brutal. Outside of its own social networks, what IBM offers is the ability to understand social sentiments about a client company… and change them.

Now, for IBM, at this stage in its life, the answer to any question is analytics. Carter actually takes 23 minutes before she mentions the word – a record amongst all the IBM spokespeople I’ve met lately – but once the subject is out there, she’s off and running.

“We can track sentiments, and find how the community is feeling about any issue,” she says. “We use deep analytic capability to find what is being said. Then we look at affinities.” IBM’s analytics can track who is tweeting what, who is the most influential tweeter, and so on.

So it’s all about analytics?  “Analytics is the new black,” she grins.

If any company dares to tell Carter that social media is not for them, she uses her analytics to convince them otherwise. “If I talk to a CEO and they say it is too risky to get out online, so they aren’t going to do social media, I prepare a [slide] deck and say ‘This is what your customers are saying about you’. You may not do social media, but your brand is out there already. By not being there, you are raising your risk.”

Analytics is “like a focus group,” she says, but it’s obviously a lot more, because it’s about going back out there and influencing people. IBM has a reference archtiecture for social media, and does it by the numbers.

Analysing opinions for an energy drinks company, for instance, she could find the most susceptible consumers (females) and spot potential problems with sales – such as reports of health risks with the product.

Routing round those  problems and keeping people buying the stuff might seem a long way from the idealism of IBM’s internal social media, but that’s what she is offering, through a programme of intensive business-focused social media: “We are not talking about tweeting once in a while,” she says. “It’s about developing a relationship with customers online and using it ultimately to sell them a product.”

You can also pick words, to get yourself higher in Google searches – she reckons the phrase “cost optimisation” got one company to the top of a Google search page, where “cost cutting” had them languishing further down.

She likes the online life, claiming unbelievable (to me, literally unbelievable) success for “virtual gifting”. Seventy-two percent of online Americans gave a virtual gift on Valentine’s day, she claims, “and 57 percent of people receiving them said it was equal to a real gift.”

I don’t care what source she has for that, but I don’t believe it. I’m maybe more convinced by the success of virtual gifts at conferences: more people chose a “virtual hex” necklace at a recent IBM event, than a T-shirt, she says. “This year the virtual gift had equal satisfaction with the real gift,” she adds.

She also likes FarmVille [to declare ourselves, we think it’s an evil, money-sucking time-waster]: “More virtual gifts are given a day through FarmVille than the number of Hallmark cards given in a year,” she enthuses, and apparently an IBM customer called Farmer’s Insurance is actually doing business with real farmers, by placing an advert on a blimp inside the FarmVille game.

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