IBM Tries Branding Expertise As A Product

If you are a company whose image is associated with the word THINK and you have a lot of smart people working for you, it seems logical that you would try to promote the concept - while defrosting that impressive but sometimes chilly image with some real, live humanoids who just happen to work for you.

The company is attempting to create networks that link thought and opinion leaders with its own staff so that IBM, the brand and the entity is deeply associated with the concept of expertise. It implies knowledge, intelligence and success, all good things for a 100 year old company that still manages to play with a pretty fast crowd. Whether this particular gambit will work remains to be seen (there are, after all, no shortages of smart folks in the tech universe), but if part of what you are selling is the quality of your staff, this is a clever way to promote it without looking too pushy.
Matt Wilson reports in Ragan.com:

"This year, IBM is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The company is choosing to mark its centennial, says Ethan McCarty, IBM's manager of digital and social strategy, in a way that is "very forward-looking as opposed to historical."

That's part of IBM's identity, he says.

"Every brand has to pick who it's going to appeal to," McCarty says. "We want to appeal to the forward thinker."

Within the last year or so, IBM has come to the conclusion that the way it can best put forth that appeal is by connecting forward thinkers—clients, prospective clients, investors, employees and communities—with the experts in its orbit. So, the company has created the Expertise Locator, "an ever-expanding system that leads people to knowledge by juxtaposing relevant business and technology experts in a potentially infinite number of digital experiences."

Expertise as product

IBM got out of the business of making laptops and many other consumer products a few years ago. Unlike Apple and other computer hardware companies, IBM doesn't really have products that people can ogle in a store. So the company had to decide how people would experience IBM.

The company decided that "IBM is experienced through the IBMer," says McCarty. People get to know IBM through its consultants, speakers, salespeople and researchers. Within its walls, the company has huge stores of accrued expertise embodied in several Nobel laureates and thousands of doctors.

"You start to think about, 'How are we going to operationalize that?'" McCarty says. "We have all this expertise, and yet there is a history of locking up this expertise behind a firewall."

Through communities such as Infoboom, IBM had already begun connecting its people with knowledge seekers, but the architects of the Expertise Locator began to "look at where we can find the most value for the groups that want to interact with us," McCarty says.

More than a tool

As opposed to something such as Profnet, which is essentially a database of experts on various topics, IBM's Expertise Locator aims to make experts available across the Web.

"We're not just talking about deploying a tool," McCarty says. "We're trying to come up with a digital system."

Finding an expert would be done through a Google search. McCarty says. For example, if someone was looking for expertise in smarter, he or she would type, "IBM smartercomputing" into the search bar, and find a page that would have widgets showing how people can connect to an expert.

Right now, the IBM100 site has a section where each page includes expert information. "You're going to start seeing IBM experts on sites as we experiment," McCarty says. For example, a LinkedIn group may want experts to come in and talk about a specific topic. IBM can find matches that would fit. Experts can communicate with clients and others through whatever venues they pick, McCarty says. They can opt for people to contact them by phone, LinkedIn, Twitter, their blogs, live chats or another channel.

"We have dozens of potential interaction patterns that we're going to build out," he says. So, how does someone become an expert? There are a few ways, David Stark, digital strategy and expertise evangelist at IBM, told an audience at Ragan Communications' conference at NASDAQ last month. A person can nominate him- or herself, and peers or managers can offer someone up as an expert, he says.

McCarty notes that not all experts have to be IBMers, though. "Ultimately, IBM experts will include our alumni, our business partners … even a client," he says. When "knowledgeable, thoughtful people show up in all kinds of digital experiences," he says, "the IBM brand experience will be one of interacting with experts who help me to make good decisions about how to make the planet smarter."

A work in progress

The Expertise Locator is going through what McCarty calls "agile development." The original version was up and running in just a few weeks.

"What we're trying to do here is not design the perfect system and launch it," he says. "We're adding functionality as we go."

For instance, IBM added an enrollment process to its intranet that ties into its social business website. Once someone completes a training program on that site, he or she can offer to be an expert. There's still some stuff to work out, McCarty says. For one thing, he's still not sure about the word "expert." Humble people are hesitant to put that label on themselves, he says. Plus, the word "expert" means different things in different cultures.

"All those things are things we're figuring out," he says.