Ever Onward: Social media enablement from the early days

A few years ago when my team and I were getting super excited about podcasting (gosh, this must have been like 6 or 7 years ago now that I think about it) we realized that we and our other podcasting pals at IBM needed good intro, outtro and music-bed tracks for our IBM podcasts.  So we did a remix of IBM’s rally song from the 1930’s, Ever Onward (original lyrics and music; playable file from 1930s).

We did four mixes…a “corporate” mix which we wanted to sounded newsy, a “warm” mix which we wanted to sound folksy, a “rock” mix we wanted to sound energetic and an embarrassingly named “techno” mix that we wanted to sound, uh, techy.

Say what you will about the titles of the remixes, they were popular! The files were downloaded more than 15,000 from IBM’s intranet and used many, many thousands of times again in podcasts, live employee events, video podcasts and a zillion other contexts. We had negotiated a novel contract with the producer that would allow us to use them as we saw fit with the exception of advertising…this was pretty cutting edge, I think, for the time and allowed IBMers from all around the world to have professional-sounding audio branding for their podcasts without having to negotiate individual licenses.

Anyway, that’s an example of early-days social media enablement for the enterprise that I am pretty happy to have been a part of here at IBM 🙂