Imagine It Forward

by Beth Comstock

  But how do you encourage that kind of communication? How do you make the invisible visible? We invited people in via programs like #GEInstaWalk, in which superfans got to share photos via Instagram of their visits to our aviation facilities. There is a big community of people who love manufacturing and seeing how stuff is made, and another community of people who love aviation. With #SpringBreakIt, we created a social media campaign in which science enthusiasts and lovers of the science of materials could see how pressure applied in industrial applications would break things—ranging from baseballs to some of the strongest materials on earth.

  Not only were these events engaging and fun, but the media they produced was almost impossible not to share. Making stuff became cool. Science became cool.

  There was also a lucky and surprising by-product that spun out of the “visibility” initiatives: they led to “horizontal”—cross division—communications, which directly inspired innovation. Appliance engineers discussed how to make appliances with, say, physicians, chemists, and anthropologists. Silos were broken down. People doing different things met and formed clusters, networks, and joint ventures. Spreading our stories outside each silo acted as a catalyst that allowed people in different divisions—or in India, China, wherever—to use the newly visible to figure out and generate actions and, ultimately, innovations. It spurred discovery.

  We jumped headfirst into our storytelling as a way to reinforce GE’s renewed strategy focusing on industrial might. And GE doubled down on investments in these businesses, new products, and technologies at a time when others were not. Even so, 50 percent of GE’s business was still made up of financial services. And that was a challenge for our company, and our story. We told ourselves, “GE Capital is a builder—they help build (small to medium-size) businesses.” But it nagged at me, and the team.

  Being Always in Beta

  Never being done is part of the inherent experience of sensemaking in digital life. In an analog world of books and paper memos and clocks that chimed at five to release us from the world of work, we had deeply satisfying periods of being “done.” But, of course, the flow of life and of events was never as organized as all that. Turning the last page of a newspaper didn’t mean that the news stopped happening. Now that we have the tools that have caught up to the endless flow of our thoughts and actions, we’re at our best when we let go of the expectation of being “done.” A digital innovator’s motto is that everything’s “always in beta.” You’re also never done improving. There’s always more time to get better.

  Investors grew increasingly tired of the financial-services category, with its lowered returns and market valuation. Regulators had entered the business with their SIFI due diligence, adding more complexity and questions: “Do we need to be here?” became a louder question as we made GE a more focused science and engineering company.

  In 2009, Jeff agreed to sell much of NBC to Comcast (and all of it by 2014), believing we’d be much better off funding GE’s industrial future than funding NBC’s uncertain digital future. Investors criticized the sale as a low price at the bottom of the market. Yet in the following decade, most of the big media companies sought mergers to survive digital disruption (21st Century Fox to Disney, Time Warner to AT&T, AOL/Yahoo to Verizon).

  Could GE have exited Capital sooner, accelerating progress faster? What would happen to the earnings it generated? Could we make up the lost revenues fast enough to suit investors? These questions would haunt GE for years, even after Jeff announced the divestiture of GE Capital in 2015 and exited all but industrial finance by the end of 2016. It’s easy to second-guess Jeff’s decision not to sell off assets sooner or at all, as investors would do, with little bandwidth to imagine forward new scenarios. CEOs travel lonely paths where they have to take input from many sources as well as in consideration of the now and the future, often in conflict, to satisfy differing constituencies. It’s little wonder that some CEOs opt for near-term wins for which returns are more certain and the numbers are the story.

  Story can’t be what you do afterward. We struggled with this over GE Capital. The ability to harness story is what differentiates a good leader from a great one. It takes courage to connect to the broader trajectory of a business, not just be reduced to what you can see. That’s why I am such an advocate of linking strategy and story early in the business cycle. Strategy is the story. The story has to bring to life the strategy. They are two sides of a coin. If you can’t do one, then maybe you don’t have the other.

  Write It as a Press Release

  The surest test of a sound strategy is that it can be written as a press announcement. I often test my new business ideas, company initiatives, and partnerships this way.

  Press releases in and of themselves are an artifact of the past. But the purpose (to alert the world to your news) and the structure (how it is composed) stand the test of time:

  HEADLINE: What is happening

  SUB-HEADLINE BULLETS: List the two or three most compelling points.

  BODY COPY: Restate what is happening in the first two paragraphs, list the anticipated outcomes and benefits, and then quote the leaders of the effort to summarize the strategy. End with supporting points.

  END: Summarize in one sentence the benefits, and in another the bridges to what’s next.

  Ask, Is the strategy and rationale clear? Do the quotes make sense? If they are filled with clichés and empty words, then the strategy isn’t clear yet. If you make the release about yourself or your business, nobody’s going to care. If you make it about what the reader might want to hear, then you’ve got a shot at capturing people’s attention.

  I use this approach after an ideation session with teams. Once we’ve summarized our best ideas and then agreed to a course of action, I’ll assign someone to write a press release. When we get back together again, we review the press release as a way to revisit and test our ideas. Do they make sense? Are we united in the vision? What’s missing?

  This is also a good way to summarize an idea—to imagine it forward—for your boss, or for a customer, to sell your vision and strategy. When you make it announceable, it becomes more real.

  Becoming a Content Factory

  We were finding digital was a critical component in our marketing and publicity outreach—in targeting the right audience, in sharing the content, in creating new kinds of content. Sensemaking itself was an inherently digital process. Could we digitize GE’s marketing more substantially and use it as a proving ground to eventually digitalize more of GE’s operation? I focused first on our brand communications, as media was an easy place to test digital, and my experience at NBC had given me the confidence that we could innovate here.

  When I returned to GE, I asked Judy Hu, our head of advertising, to lead what we came to call the Content Factory. I had hired Judy years before from the auto industry; she was a solid professional, talented and smart.

  In retrospect, Judy was a good brand marketer who was especially good overseeing advertising from BBDO. She did the “digital” basics of the time—a YouTube channel with videos of executives giving speeches, online banner ads, search marketing, the same things others were doing. Essentially she applied traditional models to new media. But I was impatient, and I was eager to distinguish ourselves digitally.

  By early 2009, I decided that I would need to create an in-house digital challenger. I brought my old colleague Linda Boff back from NBC to launch a scrappy team of digital innovators to internally attack the digitizing effort with greater creativity and without preconceptions. I carved out 15 percent of the advertising budget for her and instructed her to hire a small team of people who could help her do that.

  My eyes were open this time, though. I knew that being ahead of the pack could be dangerous for the challenger. I told myself to live with the tension for now between Judy’s ad team, who didn’t want to relinqui
sh digital, and protect Linda’s team from the politics. In a meeting with me about marketing campaigns, both teams would show up with separate and conflicting ideas on how to use digital media, spending time and money we didn’t have. Judy would bring in the BBDO team to present work, and they would present dozens of ideas for digital. And while I love new ideas, BBDO hadn’t yet mastered digital. They didn’t have the skills of the small digital independents. BBDO thought that lobbying me about their scale, rather than the quality of their capability, would win the day. Or the challenger team would stay in stealth mode too long, not sharing ideas with the ad or PR teams, leaving them out and feeling frustrated. Or the PR team would take sides, depending on what the issue was. Someone was inevitably ganging up on the other. As a team leader, I had to allow a certain amount of tension to exist, yet keep it in check. I spent time coaching Judy and Linda separately and together. I joked, I ignored them, I even lost my temper, but mostly I persisted. Seeding challengers tests your resolve—it’s much easier when things aren’t changed, especially deliberately.

  Once Andrew Robertson, the CEO of BBDO, hosted an intervention, disguised as a lunch, with the purpose of asking me to resolve the tension between teams at GE. He said it was time I dealt with it. I acknowledged the difficulty and asked for patience, explaining, “We’re testing new methods. BBDO can’t do everything, neither can our brand marketing team. I’m seeding new capabilities. There is a purpose to the madness. It will get better, I promise.” And it did.

  With Linda pushing us, we signed up for digital, deploying campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Consumer brands had begun to use social media more often, but B2B companies like GE hadn’t taken the plunge yet. We launched the “GE Tweet Squad,” social media experts inside GE who could help others in the company get comfortable with Twitter and encourage more GE people to use social media. (We did this despite the fact that the IT departments at the time in many GE businesses forbade employees to go to social media, which was seen as spam-filled and a frivolous drain of productivity.) It was an uphill fight every day; as we were launching GE Reports, one of the first corporate news blogs, the head of GE.com—a digital “leader,” in theory—sent me an Ad Age story titled “Top 10 Reasons Companies should NEVER Blog.”

  My goal at GE was to “shout louder than we spend”—to employ new communications tools to steer our message, repeat it, and flood the zone in order to drive brand position with efficiency. Social and digital media was the big amplifier that would allow us to tell our story and get attention in ways that added value with much less budget.

  Linda’s team went well beyond the social media and blogging basics. We were one of the first businesses to use new platforms such as Instagram and Twitter’s Vine. Linda led our #6SecondScience video project of community-created mini-videos about science, and created moments like Pi Day (to celebrate pi by giving out pies on social media).

  I called our new virtual shouting place the Amp Room (or Amplification Room). The purpose of the Amp Room was to use every media tactic possible to amplify our messages (combined with the efforts of our PR teams). We hired former journalists to write and edit content—setting the standard for “branded content.” Some of the methods at first seemed silly: A video game to explain how a hospital manages patient flow? (It worked!) Some believed we’d embarrass ourselves. Or that we were wasting money. I always brought it back to our purpose and mission, to connect people to what we did: We are a company that makes things—through amazing feats of science—that make the world work better. We build, power, move, and cure. After all, I said, customers, employees, and investors are people first. This is how you win their mindshare and influence buying and hiring decisions. They aren’t just interested in GE in a transactional way; they want to connect with GE where they are. Our job is to get their attention in unexpected, even delightful ways. Digital was the way to do that, less expensively and with more engagement.

  The digital efforts were gaining traction, but not everyone embraced the change. Some people are eager to change and are just waiting to be given the permission; others are undecided and need proof, permission, and skills; and others still can never get there—either they don’t want to change, they don’t like it, or they don’t have the skills to change and ultimately they leave. Judy eventually did just that.

  Years later, Linda told me, this was one of the hardest periods in her career. She’s a natural collaborator, and being asked to challenge the status quo meant that she had to get used to tension, often of her making. But it made her better at what she did. She gives the most helpful “no” I’ve ever heard; she is firm but offers alternatives that people might consider, beyond just “No, we can’t do that.” She went on to distinguish herself as a digital marketing innovator and eventually was named GE’s chief marketing officer.

  Moreover, we created something new that worked, and that scaled and differentiated GE’s conversation with the world. Here’s what we learned about how to transform a company into a “content factory”:

  1. STAFF THE STUDIO

  For a content factory to work, you have to staff it with a mix of narrators and data nerds who are digital natives. You can’t outsource this work to an agency.

  While your in-house team has to steer the content factory, you need outside perspectives and sparks as well, especially in times of rapid change. In our case, we created what I called a “farm team” of outside creators that could be called upon when needed. One of the sparks was Benjamin Palmer, the head of the creative digital media lab The Barbarian Group. They were given access to go almost anywhere within GE to explore various parts of our business, from wind turbines to jet engines. Partnering with them, we created the GEAdventure.com site, explaining how science happens at GE.

  One of the earliest videos they produced was filmed at a wind farm on Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts. They videotaped themselves climbing to the top of the turbine, showing how they got there the way our technicians would. They went on to demonstrate how hugely tall these giants are by tying a small camera to a toy soldier and launching it from the top. Over the years, they created a range of edgy content that connected GE’s science to new audiences.

  2. BE FIRST

  No one remembers who won the silver medal at an Olympic event, and that’s as true in storytelling.

  At GE, for example, we were the first big company to partner with new outlets like BuzzFeed. This allowed us to spend less money because the platform was smaller and the model not yet fully developed. That gave birth to media interest about the partnership as well.

  3. MICRO-TARGET YOUR AUDIENCE

  A digital content factory allows you to micro-target new consumers. In other words, you can use digital tools to parse audiences by interests instead of blunt demographics. Sometimes you want to connect with five million people. But many times you really only want to be in contact with the five thousand you’ve specifically targeted.

  For example, in telling stories about the wonders of railroads, we targeted what the rail industry calls “foamers”—people who foam at the mouth over trains—with “The Juice Train,” a two-and-a-half-minute time-lapse video that follows the Tropicana/CSX Juice Train, powered by two 4,400-horsepower GE Evolution Series Tier 3 Locomotives, as it hauls Tropicana orange juice up the eastern seaboard. What’s the point if they’re not buying locomotives? you ask. We were going after the hearts of rail enthusiasts with the knowledge that many of them influence the purchase decision, some of them may one day work for us, and more than a few hopefully have GE stock in their portfolio. Micro-targeting takes pressure off feeling like you have to achieve Super Bowl or World Cup reach and spend all the time.

  4. CREATE A SMORGASBORD

  Building and running a content factory requires constant experimentation rather than giant, one-off campaigns. Essentially what you are doing is laying out a smorgasbord of content to see what is most desired. Shareability is the key: if something is get
ting shared, it has struck a chord.

  Take a bit we called GE Flyovers. We created a behind-the-scenes experience at GE factories, for which we captured aerial footage from the factory floor and let viewers vote on what they wanted to learn more about. People voted across all of the channels in our digital ecosystem: GE.com, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and BuzzFeed. By the end, the four videos earned over 500,000 total views. And those views, in turn, led to a flood of ideas from people outside the division—and the company—about how we could improve, change, and imagine forward what we did. This turned into GE Drone Week—think Shark Week for science and engineering geeks—a recurring series that features live-streaming videos from drones flying over test beds for aircraft engines, deep sea oil exploration, wind farms, and even the Rio Olympics. It has gotten millions of views now. And GE recently joined with Vice to spread Drone Week globally on its video channels.

  5. CONVENE CONVERSATIONS

  Marketing is a conversation. Invite others in, and give them opportunities to talk back, as we did with #GEInstaWalk and GE Flyovers.

  We did versions of “Ask Anything,” teeing up scientists on platforms ranging from Facebook to Reddit, to talk about environmental science or 3-D printing.

  GE had a prominent role in the 1969 moon landing. To retell that story on the occasion of the forty-fifth anniversary, we introduced on Snapchat our revision of the original moon boots—metallic sneakers designed with some of GE’s most advanced materials. One hundred boots, termed Missions, went on sale on the anniversary day for the price of $196.90. Buzz Aldrin helped with the launch by posting a photo of himself on Snapchat wearing a pair. The conversation continued as DJs and comedians showed up wearing Missions. The shoes ended up on eBay for thousands of dollars and have been worn by celebrities and featured in the Brooklyn Museum of Art.