GE Connects Its Marketers Across The Globe

Author:

Karl Greenberg

Source:

General Electric has launched a private online community for its global network of 5,000 marketers. An intramural social networking platform called MarkNet, the program is designed to connect marketers from different GE divisions who normally wouldn't speak to each other because they belong to different marketing silos.
 
The company says it now has about 3,000 marketers around the world signed in to the program to share best practices via communities differentiated not by GE products but by marketing practices. The effort is via Passenger, which has done similar programs for Fox, Microsoft, Mercedes and Coca-Cola.
 
Steve Liguori, executive director of global marketing at GE, tells Marketing Daily that community members can participate in webinars, blog posts, message boards and marketing issues like innovation, pricing and packaging. He says it's a big change from how GE has done idea-sharing in the past.
 
"The simple analogy for how we used to do this would be an updated game of telephone, where one person tells another something, and that person tells someone else, and on and on," he says. "We were basically doing an updated version of that with PowerPoint and email, one person to another. Who knew that best practice had anything to do with what you need when you need it?"
 
He says the MarkNet program is sort of an intramural social community....