IBM has not always been known as an effective content marketing organization. Way back in 1993, Steve Jobs declared, with great accuracy:
“People get confused; companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content. And that’s ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content.”
IBM is now remembering the content.
For the past year, my team has been helping IBM transform into a content marketing powerhouse. We have built a new inbound marketing model elevating the importance of content. We have coupled that with our business processes, enabling us to capitalize on scale and process efficiencies while effectively telling our story via content marketing. As part of this transformation, we’ve developed brand newsrooms, content hubs, user generated content platforms and content-based trigger nurturing strategies. (Sounds like some topics for a future post!) The transformation process has been exciting and we’ve learned some things along the way.
