• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 20, 2013

Kicking off Day 2 of the Mobile Insider Summit, keynoter Paul Marcum, global digital director marketing & programming, GE, explains that his role at GE “is to claim the credibility the company has earned.” It also involves getting people to stop thinking of GE as a conglomerate and evoke its roots as an inventor and innovator, going back to founder Thomas Edison 120 years ago.

To help accomplish that task, the company has turned to mobile, in part because it’s an intimate channel. With a need for brands now to compete with more personal types of media, GE early on embraced platforms like Instagram and Vine, which have become popular for “people who find beauty in our machines.” GE’s Vine account, launched in January, now has more than 62,000 followers, and recent marketing efforts on the program included hosting "#6 second science fair" inviting people to post their own experiments.

The idea stemmed from a prior science experiment that GE tweeted out that became its most popular Vine ever. "We put mobile at the center of everything we do,' said Marcum.