In Q4 2020 a team was pulled together to prepare IBM Services and GBS for the eventual Kyndryl spin-off in 2021. That project became a 10-month workstream to build a new strategic positioning, narrative, and name which would launch in Q4 2021- IBM Consulting.
We set out to meet the needs of the market, and clearly establish IBM's relevancy as a leading business transformation consulting partner globally.
The team engaged hundreds of stakeholders (both internal and external) in research, a competitive review, internal reflection, strategic prioritization and goal setting around “who we are”, “who we serve”, “what’s unique” about our offerings, methods, and culture–and ”how we will fuel growth” to IBM in the coming decade.
Our social media team then set out to raise awareness of the launch through a global campaign.
Our team brought the IBM Consulting rebrand campaign to life through both owned and earned social media. We leveraged the IBM branded channels as well as influencer and employee channels to help spread the word about the IBM Consulting launch.
While there were a handful of media articles, the core of rebrand conversation came in the form of engagements with and shares of IBM Consulting on social media. We had the ability to lead and focus conversation among our audience and they relied on us to communicate the IBM Consulting story.
We did so through a series of formats, including but not limited to…
An investor day presentation
Global internal launch event & communications
Employee launch of IBM Consulting Way
Employee enablement through a social media toolkit for employees on how to talk about the launch externally and how to prepare their social media channels, templates for social posts, and an internal publisher site with resources and information on the launch.
Market and analyst briefings
Strategic partner briefings
Acquired company briefings
New digital footprint
Anthem video
Social rollout (including IBM Consulting eminence program leaders)
At launch we published 13 public posts between IBM Consulting’s Twitter and LinkedIn pages which received 14,700 in engagements, 682,600 in owned impressions, 41,400 views, and 499,600 in clicks. The announcement tweet is the highest engaged IBM Consulting tweet of all-time and all six LinkedIn rebrand posts (and a seventh Oct. 29 post) are the most engaged channel LinkedIn posts of all-time.
On launch week, conversation drove nearly 1K in mentions and net positivity of 18.5%, made up primarily of news sharing and general excitement. Conversation spiked the first two days post-rebrand, led by sharing of the news and social content, in addition to employee-led enthusiasm, and spiked once more on October 19th following the acquisition of Rego Consulting’s Adobe Workfront unit, set to integrate into IBM Consulting and IBM iX. 83% of conversations occurred on Twitter, and 68% of that was made up of replies and retweets, with heavy engagement of IBM Consulting’s launch post and Mark Foster spotlight, supported by posts from IBM News and Adweek.
Overall, the IBM Consulting rebrand campaign was a massive social success and our audiences have shown genuine support for the new creative design and tone. They’re eager for more ‘new’ and are excited to join the ride.
The IBM Consulting rebrand was a major success on owned media with post performance surpassing 2021 per-post median benchmarks by +100% - +1000% on both Twitter and LinkedIn.
The rebrand campaign led to a boost in account following, with Twitter rising from 0 to 15 median daily new followers and LinkedIn rising from 30 to 152. Earned conversation, under 1K mentions, was 18.5% net positive in sentiment and was driven by enthusiastic employees (38% of all Twitter conversation) and 550 posts were replies or retweets.
Internally we had global engagement of our ~140,000 employees including:
124,700 views on our pre-recorded video
71,000 views on our launch event blog
31,000 views on our employee launch event
8,600 reactions on our employee Slack channel announcement
Validation from CIO of TSB bank, industry analyst Ted Schadler, and Arvind Krishna at launch.
On Twitter, we had our highest performing Consulting/Services tweets of all-time:
100% to 1000% increase in engagement
Daily follower accumulation increased by 5X across channels, total increase of 810% MtM
62% conversation driven by clients, followers, and general audience (not IBMers)
Followership 4.5x larger than Kyndryl
On LinkedIn we had more than 145k appreciations sent to employees during the IBM Consulting Way Challenge. Our Anthem launch video asset received nearly 250,000 views, and IBM Consulting’s six posts amassed 13,500 engagements, earning 601,6000 impressions.
