Thomas Coustenoble

IBM award winning Cloud Computing campaign

Just learned that the French marketing and communication team received an award (Golden Brand Content award in the B to B category) for its online Cloud Computing campaign 'les clés du Cloud'. It translates very well the nature of investments that IBM is doing in the digital area. Some of the key success factors: local content creation (co-construction with visible influencers of the French market), partnerships with major online newspapers and radios (i.e. La minute Cloud on Europe1), tight integration between these platforms and the IBM local website, well balanced paid-owned-earned strategy and investment over time with tuning of the campaign...congrats team (IBM France (@ConstanceBordes), Ogilvy, Mindshare  and Lagardère publicité)! Check out the following video (in French) that highlights the key success factors and results of the campaign.

IBM Smarter Cities new advertising is on

Maybe one of my favourite ad from IBM, clearly positing the company on real world issues (see IBM Smarter Cities initiative). The ad will be on TV in France starting today, running on many major channels. The other good new is that if you're interested in engaging with IBM on this topic, you can directly jump from advertising to real life examples in IBM WW solutions center based in south of France (La Gaude Solutions Center).

Learning and mixing thinking styles to transform

As professionals, managers, it's important to step back from the day to day activities to really crystalize our experience while shaping the future. Learning is an important ingredient of that process. I'm spending 3 days in Berlin with other IBM managers from different countries to attend the 'Basic Blue for Business Leaders' session. IBM Launched this core training program in 1999 for managers worldwide. Since its inception, Basic Blue has won numerous industry awards and has had a profound impact on learning at IBM (read the following whitepaper on IBM's learning transformation story).

Back earlier in the 1990s, IBM transformed itself from hardware company to a service-driven organization. This change required rebuilding and re-skilling employee base. Looking at the upcoming years, and the IBM 2015 roadmap objectives, the company will continue to rely on skills development and learning in order to align employees around new business models (i.e. Cloud Computing, Business Analytics & Optimization, Smarter Planet) and to capture business opportunities in the marketplace.

This day 1 of the program was a good way to connect with different managers and cultures, sharing issues and best practices. Before the workshop we had to go through the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) test to better understand what's our thinking style (I won't give you mine but should be easy to find as most bloggers and marketers fall into the same categories) and how that may impact our behaviors and leadership development. The Whole Brain Model summarizes the 4 categories.  There's no 'right or wrong' category, all are important. Individuals may have different thinking preferences that they can leverage to succeed. More about the Whole Brain Model in the book preview here under.

 

 

Roland Garros 2011 on iPad, iPhone and more...

Fan of Tennis? Can't take your TV to the office? Just download the Roland Garros application for iPhone or iPad to get the best of the Tournament including live streaming video (in France), news, photos, scores, visitor's guide, map of stadium, access to Orange Sport mobile website and highlights (apps also available on other devices) More to come on how Roland Garros Tournament uses technologies to deliver superior experience to Tennis fans.

Credits and Thanks :
- FFT: organizer of the Roland-Garros 2010 French Open
- Orange: Official Mobile Broadcaster and publisher of the application
- IBM: Official Partner on Information Technologies, creation/routing of the data streams
- France Télévisions : Official Broadcaster of the tournament/live matches 
- DEGETEL : Design & development of the application

Marketers, 5 reasons for launching your own blog

There are many reasons for creating a blog, mine was simple: people. While working abroad I needed to keep in touch with family and friends, having a blog was the best way to share pictures, videos and interact (through a private/restricted blog). At that time, I've also worked with two bloggers and want to thank them for the inspiration: Ed Brill (@EdBrill) and Alan Lepofsky (@alanlepo). 

As a marketer, you certainly meet with many different people: clients, partners, research and development, analysts, journalists, students...working on various activities ranging from  market analysis, product development, business strategy to digital tactics...so why not giving back parts of this journey to your community?

Here are 5 reasons for jumping into the blogosphere (for the 'how', click here (French):

• Your market/product knowledge is worth sharing (see ideas worth spreading)
• You have great content (testimonials, demos..), make them more personalized
  
• Learn from the outside, blogging obliges you to look around/to benchmark
  
• You know the ecosystem, bring it inside, by connecting the dots with your experts
  
• CMO and CIO are now friends, leverage blogging to strenghten your Web culture
  

Some say 'People are the Brand', very true in a consumer world. But in a B2B world, expertise, relationship and ecosystems matter. Brands are People. No worry, as a blogger you have no obligation of loosing your personality! Write when you want (but still on a regular basis :-), about topics you know best, to people you want to connect with...respecting some basic guidelines (such as the one we have in IBM). Try to identify your core audience in order to meet with your objectives (channel enablement, press relationships...).

In a continuous effort of change management, our Digital team (represented by @henririmbaud) has produced a short video explaining why some of us blog (initially this video was targetting IBM employees). When Brands are People...

IBM France on Twitter

During the last few months, my colleague Henri Rimbaud and the digital team have been busy in federating IBM France employees who are active on the web. Most of them who were twitting or blogging didn't really have the chance to meet yet. The video here under is not just a good way to explain the benefits of Twitter to the corporate world but also acts as a change agent within our own organization. Such communication  initiative suddenly brings more concrete elements on what it is and why people use it .

Some of the key benefits highlighted in the video: engagement with peers/customers/partners, rapid  scan of market news, identification of new projects and contacts, learning about competition, etc.). Social Media/Networks adoption/success in the enterprise still much relies on change management investments such as the following one..

Making markets: IBM Smarter Computing example

As a marketer, it's always fascinating to see how companies are making markets by leveraging existing assets, assembling them in a non-traditional way to disrupt the marketplace while setting up a new vision. It's part of what authors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne detail in Blue Ocean Strategy when they urge companies to "value innovation" that focuses on "utility, price, and cost positions," to "create and capture new demand" and to "focus on the big picture, not the numbers." They challenge companies to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space that makes the competition irrelevant.

Last friday, I was attending a presentation done by Marc Dupaquier, our VP Marketing Communications from the Systems & Technology Group. He took us through a recent announcement of IBM (Smarter Computing) and I felt that it really was about 'making a market'. Multiple factors have led to this announcement: commoditization of hardware business, growth of IT needs while budgets are shrinking, emergence of Cloud Computing, explosion of data, etc. This announcement explains how IBM Smarter Computing changes how systems are designed, how data is managed and analyzed, and how IT is delivered and consumed. Thanks to my colleague Mauricio Godoy for the presentation posted here under:

Pulse Smarter Computing

View more presentations from Mauricio Godoy

To me, Smarter Computing sounds like a game changer where IBM brings different capabilities together (Hardware, Software, Services) in order to shift to high value market segments while delivering more innovation capabilities to the market. For business and IT organisations, this Smarter Computing vision should be an invitation to step back and establish a long term business/IT vision around their data while rethinking how they could achieve greater differentiation, saving money and gaining flexibility:

- If technology could help you to develop a competitive advantage, what would it be?
- What are the data and information that would be required?
- What type of insights would you be able to develop out of these unstructured data?
- From an IT perspective, how would that translate in term of workloads (applications)?

After establishing such vision, the intent is to work backwards on the required IT Infrastructure strategy, going through the following steps: consolidation/virtualization, automation/workload optimization (integration with hardware and software architected to address diverse workload demands), management capabilities across all systems (leveraging Cloud).

For more information about this announcement, do not hesitate to  register and attend to the following webcast on April 6th. Also follow the IBM Smarter Computing launch and announcements on dedicated Twitter and Facebook accounts. 

Shaping a Company and a Century: IBM CEO Sam J. Palmisano at HEC

Beginning of March, we had the pleasure to welcome our CEO Sam J. Palmisano in Paris where he met with President Sarkozy and gave a conference at HEC.  Great moment as he launched IBM Centennial in France and shared how a business and its ideas can shape a company and a century. The video underlines how IBM became a Global Integrated Enterprise, transforming itself in a fast changing world where everything is interconnected. Sam also touched base on the importance of developing a long term thinking management approach as it shapes your R&D investment, says where to invest and allocate your resources or influences how to develop your talents. He has also highlighted that in this changing world, it's critical that companies connect with local communities (giving the example of IBM Corporate Service Corps where diverse team of IBMrs work with local communities in emerging countries). Last but not least, he underlined that organisations meeting the challenges of a changing world have to be prepared to change everything about themselves, except their believes as they move through their corporate life.

Another part of the conference (also well reflected in the following article (La Tribune newspaper) was focusing on the fact that leaders have to rely on their intuition and judgment. Maybe this is why Sam  encouraged students to travel the world and do social networking not online but in the bars...;-)

IBM Centennial video (French)

IBM Watson: pure innovation for real world challenges

During the last few days, discussions were all about IBM's Watson supercomputer participation to Jeopardy TV game. Even today, I had a meeting with our worldwide industry marketing team in Paris and we've spent great amount of time discussing  IBM value proposal for companies who need to re-invent themselves, developing new services and products. How can IBM helps these companies in different industries to make best use of existing and massive amount of information to differentiate themselves. Part of the answer resides in hardware and software technologies...which is why we were so enthusiasts about Watson, I'll let you discover this incredible machine invented by IBM that has just won the Jeopardy game and that will help business, government and society to improve the way they work. To me, this is really not about 'Man vs. Machine' but more about 'Man with Machine' to solve world's greatest challenges...

First video is a summary in French from Euronews

If you want to know more about IBM Watson, its participation to Jeopardy and all the possible applications for business, government and society, here is another great video to watch. Also have a look at what Watson could achieve in the healthcare industry (from diagnostics to informatics, Watson could quickly search through medical records, clinical documents, and research information for precise answers that would benefit both doctors and patients)

IBM France on Facebook

2010 was a year of social media discovery and test for many marketers (with some deception in some cases as expectations were probably too high), 2011 will be the year of Social Media reality for Chief Marketing Officers. Yesterday, I was reading an HBR article highlighting fact that many french companies have been focusing on building relationships with fewer clients rather than broadcasting their message to the world. I thought that it was really going the opposite way of social media philosophy but at the end of the day, the most important is that companies build deeper relationships with their customers. Social Media should support that, and marketers should continue to better align their Digital strategy with specific business needs (sounds obvious but not always the case...yet)

In the last few months, companies showed more maturity, they've learned a lot and know pros and cons of Social Media. Marketers have experienced it and are now in a position to build a shared roadmap on Digital (cross functions). Most have shifted from 'nice to have' to 'must have' while building specific guidelines, consolidating brand presence on fewer platforms with some degree of integration to enterprise marketing systems (marketing automation, web content publishing...).

This week, our IBM Brand System* team has just announced the creation of an official IBM France page on Facebook. This is good new and I hope it will federate our communications, other Facebook  communities and bring our fans up to date with local news. More than this, it should be an extension of offline discussions we have with our ecosystem (clients, partners, government, students, citizens, employees...) on topics such as Smarter Planet. It also opens up new opportunities for our brand to continue to build interactions with students: our Human Resources team has also participated to this project by creating a 'Join us' section. This is also a great way to get different teams working together on building your brand. It has to be coordinated with specific objectives so it can be monitored, improved and deliver concrete benefits to your organization.

*IBM Brand System?

“Picture a framework with five columns. From left to right the columns are labeled what it means to look like IBM, to sound like IBM, to think like IBM, to perform like IBM and ultimately to be IBM…To really activate the System, you go from managing outward expressions and manifestations of the company — visual identity, naming conventions, messaging, design and the like — to the behavior and performance of people. This Brand System is necessarily inclusive of corporate culture.” Jon Iwata (IBM SVP Marketing and Communications) from John Bell's post (Ogilvy)