ARM Community: ARM Partnership, Ecosystem and Social Media - ARM Community

ARM’s partnerships, ecosystem and social media all go hand in hand into continually drive and strengthen ARM’s ecosystem, technology innovations and brand awareness. We were recently named the 8^th best company in the FTSE 100 using social media in the Social Media in the City study, so I thought I’d delve a little further into how and why we use it.

Partnership is an overused word in industry, but inside of ARM, we try to and live up to its true meaning. Our business model is such that we need our partners to be successful and sell products before we can really be successful. To that end, we need to work not just with the System on Chip (SoC) Partners but a much greater ecosystem of partners from OEM’s through to software providers. This is across diverse industries, from deeply embedded medical and street lighting to high-end server and cloud computing suppliers and everything and everyone in between (some say Internet of Things to Cloud). We also have to do this across the globe with partners in the smallest developing countries quite often needing the same information and support as the leading developed nations.

Because our sales cycles are long and complicated, involving a lot of different people and partners, we utilize social media to nurture and inform partners, media audiences, and technology enthusiasts. Social media is a key piece of our marketing strategy as it provides real time interactive channels to inform our audience about ARM related news, not just within our company but also within the whole ARM ecosystem. I’m especially pleased with the way partners now use their own and ARM’s social media channels to get their messages out. As you know for us, with our business model, that is especially important.

Some social media content is curated, some is from our partners. Two key pieces of content for ARM are the ARM blogs, written both by ARM engineers as well as by Partners, and videos published on the ARMflix YouTube Channel. We capture videos at tradeshows showcasing the latest and greatest ARM products and technology as well as do interesting ecosystem interviews. We also typically have videos for new product launches. Videos of cool new partner products also do especially well. I love the way we can get messages out to a much bigger audience quicker and easier at shows and launches with these channel.

We experiment with new social media platforms. We currently have a Pinterest page and are working on a holiday gadget board. We ran a Google+ Hangout On Air (web chat video interview, broadcast live to YouTube) earlier this month, you can view it here. We continually keep an eye out for how we might fit into and benefit from new channels. China is a very important market for us, so we are active in Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter equivalent) and YouKu (Chinese YouTube equivalent) and apply the same rules of monitoring growth and engagement that we do for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube.

We closely monitor our social media with the most stable indicator on follower/fan growth and performance indicator on engagement. How many times were we are retweeted, twitter links clicked on, how many views or comments did a blog get, did they comment on or like a Facebook or LinkedIn post? We also benchmark ourselves against competitors to understand where we stack up. We also track key data on metrics such as who came to our web page, what product or key word was used to get there and how long they read a certain blog.


Above is a slide that shows how our social media channels work together. Blogs are written, then tweeted out and posted on Facebook and LinkedIn. Videos are taken and are then typically embedded into blogs that are tweeted out and put on Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

Find a full list of ARM’s social media channels, here.

Ian Drew, Executive VP of Marketing and Business Development, ARM, joined ARM as vice president of Segment Marketing in July 2005 and was responsible for ARM’s worldwide segment marketing programs. In 2008, Ian was appointed as vice president of Marketing responsible for ARM’s corporate marketing strategy across the major markets such as mobile computing, mobile solutions and embedded. In 2009, he became EVP Marketing.

Before joining ARM, Ian worked at Intel Corp. for 14 years in various senior management roles around the world including Asia, Russia, Europe and the U.S. His last position was as GM of the Russia/CIS office in Moscow, responsible for all the sales and marketing activities in the region. Before his GM position in Moscow, he was running Intel’s telecom group in Asia.