Warc, 12 August 2013
NEW YORK: General Electric, the US conglomerate, is adopting
the mindset of a publisher to leverage its strengths as a
"storyteller".
Alongside boasting an in-house content marketing and social
media team of four people, GE now holds weekly editorial meetings featuring all
the agencies involved in producing and managing its output in these areas.
This group includes BBDO, Group SJR, Mekanism, Starcom, The
Barbarian Group and Vayner Media, and meetings can include up to 40 people.
"When you look at everything that GE does - look at the
scale and technology - you see that we have this incredible latitude to be out
there as a storyteller," Paul Marcum, GE's director for global digital
marketing and programming, told Digiday.
"Our interests are incredibly well aligned with many
different folks out there online who are interested in science, mathematics and
engineering, data, aviation, health care, policy and all the other aspects of
being an organization to this scale."
Among its recent initiatives was "Pi Day" on March
14. When the date and time together read 3:14:59, the first five digits of Pi,
the firm sent out 314 messages to members of Twitter accompanied by the #PiDay
hashtag.
This activity was accompanied by a sponsored article on
BuzzFeed, the social content platform, entitled "25 Geeky Math Jokes to
Celebrate Pi Day", and GE flagged up both these efforts on its corporate
blog.
It also regularly champions different inventors. One example
of this was using Twitter on Inventor's Day in February, asking consumers to
come up with interesting ideas using the #IWantToInvent label.
Blueprints for some of the most interesting suggestions,
such as a solar-powered hoverboard and scuba-diving suit for horses, were drawn
up and posted on the site.
Elsewhere, two of the organisation's leading blogs -
Txchnologist on Tumblr and the official GE Reports - feature posts from
numerous internal and external specialists.
Alongside these platforms, GE has a presence on Facebook, Google+,
Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Vine, and was one of the first operators to
use the last of these platforms with its #6secondscience campaign.
"What we find when we do our polling is that the more
that people understand the company, the more they want to do business with us,
work for us and buy our stock," said Linda Boff, GE's executive director,
global digital marketing.
Data sourced from Digiday; additional content by Warc staff
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