Follow me on Twitter“Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more”
Jonathan Schwartz - Best Leader no more
These are the parting words of Jonathan Schwartz on Twitter. No multi-page letter like Scott McNealy did when he resined this post.
I am constantly amazed at just how much the social media phenomenon has changed the corporate attitude in just a couple of years. I see it reflected greatly in our own efforts to get everyone to partake in the goodness that is DB2. We have embraced social media out of necessity. As more and more of the IBM marketing budget and efforts focus on the big marketing programs and corporate messages, we find that generating awareness for a particular product, no matter how big and important this product is, becomes very difficult. How do you get a PHP developer to give DB2 a try in the next Cloud Computing project when IBM marketing machine is focused on the Smarter Planet message? And frankly, I am not a big fan of corporate marketing when applied to individual products. I cringed my teeth every time I saw a highly produced video posted on the IBM TV that nobody would watch because it smelled like traditional marketing drivel. IBM TV is gone; good riddance is what I say. I like our ChannelDB2.com with its 250+ movies shot with a shaky camera and lots of ambient noise. It is no Hollywood material but people watch it (just look at the view counters).
Bottom line, social media works. Last year we have seen the downloads of DB2 Express-C grow by about 50% from what already a very healthy number. In the last 5 months we saw Data Studio downloads increase 9x, yes 9 times! All of that generated through social media. No amount of advertising even if we had a budget would bring us results like that.
My advice, fire your PR firm and get a Twitter account, get your geek on. You will sell a lot more product. And if that does not work you can resign in less than 140 characters.
Dont blame IBM TV. Its targeted at different people. Company leaders needs to make strategic decisions and these are usually not made just for technical reasons. They needs long term vision where to go.
I am company owner and i like IBM TV a lot. Its valuable information and i am trying to understand why should i want to do something.
Marketing should not be synonym for lies and i dont make deals with companies which says lies about their products or competitors. I also know some people (not ibm) who speaks in ibm tv and they are not telling lies because they told me same experience when we met on IOD.
Vihka, thanks for the comment. I am actually in 100% agreement with you that the message and the media have to fit the audience. On ChannelDB2.com we know our audience well well. We try to reach technical professionals who are passionate about technology. The same goes for our Twitter and blogging. In general C-level execs are not much interested in downloading or having some hands on time with our products. IBM TV was meant for an entirely different audience i.e. decision makers, strategists etc. What I do have a problem with is when some of the marketing professionals take corporate directives a little too literally and try to get technical audience deliverables channelled through outlets like IBM TV.
The point of my post is a simple one. This is the age of Twitter. Adjust and adopt your strategies to leverage social media. With it you have to learn to use social media, you have to learn to use it effectively. You are now getting to a much broader audience and people who are used to “less produced” content. Drop the big words … as a matter of fact, don’t even worry about correcting spelling mistakes. Engage with people on the content not the form. Think Youtube not NBC, blog post not a WallStreet Journal article. I am not disconnecting my TV or cancelling my newspaper subscription. But when I need to sell some surplus stuff I go on Craiglist or Kijiji not the classifieds in my local newspaper. I do get most of my current technical information from blogs not industry rags the way I used to only a couple years ago. When it came time for Schwartz to quit, he tweeted <140 characters where his predecessor sent an pretty lengthy email. TO me, that is a startling example of just how much things have changed.
I assisted an IBM event a couple years ago in Buenos Aires, in the Sheraton Hotel (regarded as luxurious here).
It was incredible. Incredibly boring.
Look, I´m no pony-tailed PHP hacker writing L337 but a sixty-something developer with COBOL, DB2, and also lots of knowledge on the web acronyms cloud.
But anyway, the idea is that the marketing pitch reached only a few gray-haired attendants who already had bought it many years ago.
I addressed the PR girl who was in charge willing to communicate her lots of ideas about developer events like those sponsored by http://www.globant.com the software factory I work for.
Among the myriad of half-baked young developers working in my city, and also everywhere else, there must be at least a few capable of and interested in, delving into real men IT (women too, like Perna).
But the local IBM only reaches those, like me, who are already listening IBM´s music.
Anyway, I forwarded the invitation but nobody went. The offering appeared as the less “cool” possible event. And it was: professional speakers enumerating once more an endless roster of features of programs one should know in advance what what they were for (but if you already knew then the pitch was useless despite the features delta).
Something has changed and IBM seems to be completely oblivious of it.
Compare for example with Google, regarded as “cool”.
I believe that it´s not only about being cool, but IBM´s “coolness factor” must increase ASAP else most mainframe systems will have to run unmanned.
On the other hand Sun was “cool” (created Java!) but turned increasingly irrelevant as DEC did years ago …