Points Mean Prizes – IBM Uses Incentives to Encourage Social Media

IBM has been embracing social media at its Impact 2009 conference in Las Vegas this week.
As well as holding training sessions for delegates on the corporate benefits of social media, incentives have also been offered to encourage attendees to make use of specific tools.
Points (see left) were awarded for posting photos and videos of the conference online, attending a Tweetup and tweeting with an #ibmimpact hashtag (the incentive clearly worked). Leaderboards around the venue have kept the score, with the winner claiming a ticket to the 2010 event.

Sandy Carter, IBM’s web strategy chief, said: “We’re the first vendor to release social media training and tools to our partners to teach them how to leverage tools such as Flickr and blogging. We’ll also cover search engine optimisation, helping them to get better hits.”

Interesting idea. More on IBM Impact social media here.