Voices is an application that allows IBM to leverage social data to power insight and discovery to their enterprise social programs. Initially conceived as a program to unify IBM’s social efforts with common measurement, Voices changed the culture of behavior by rewarding true engagement over volume of reach. At one time, Voices had become the ‘go-to’ service that IBM marketers use to create data-driven social displays and find ‘at-a-glance’ insights into conversations and marketing efforts.
Project
IBM Voices & Voices Discovery
Role
DESIGN LEAD | product owner (2015)
Year
2013-2016
“At its core, IBM is a company of experts. Both the activation of corporate character and building of advocacy at scale at IBM relies first and foremost on the IBMers themselves who must engage and share their expertise with others to drive our business. IBM’s social web service – Voices – uses data analytics to serve up our best and brightest thinking in a way that is informative and compels interaction with IBM.”
Ben Edwards,
Vice President, Marketing Innovation & Platforms, IBM
Voices data comes from a hand-picked list of Twitter accounts selected based on their authority on a specific topic. The idea is that you want to listen to a target audience or demographic, instead of the whole Twitter-verse. Often the most important information in a tweet was a link that was shared. Voices retrieved the associated image, title and description from the metadata of the shared article, video or website. It also extracted the key topics from the content of the page. We worked together to refine the scoring logic and and weights. It was essential to have those scores reflect the values of IBM’s social engagement standpoint to escape the echo chamber and champion leadership KPIs.
WEEK AT A GLANCE VIEW
The ‘Week at a Glance’ feature made it possible to view historical top trending keywords by day from the previous 7 days.
Initial wireframe sketch
Prototype design
Coded test prototype
API Integrations
Voices as-a-service provides social content and data for over 60 IBM marketing sites and tools via an API.
comparison & influencer view
Based on user interviews, we began exploring a way to utilize our historical data to be the most beneficial to our users. We began validating the data; testing with users on rudimentary data prototypes while creating designs that would best visualize the data for consumption and analysis.
Wireframe sketch
Data prototype
Comparative Analysis
Digital marketing professionals can carefully choose the messaging, hashtags and strategy for their campaigns by comparing their brand’s content to that of their peers, competitors and influencers. They can now have a 360-degree view of the industry–in its own words.
Browse popular articles shared by influencers
Learn when a brand is a topic of conversation
Monitor trending topics among your audience
Identify potential partnerships
Recognize hidden gems and red flags
