How IBM Promotes Employee Engagement with Social Media

January 9, 2010

I am constantly impressed with IBM and its open attitude towards its employees’ use of social media.  The company has on its website, for all to see, its “IBM Social Computing Guidelines” .  

I wrote about this on the Blogger’s Bulletin , a LinkedIn subgroup.  With the start of 2010, other companies, who are floundering with their social media policies, would do well to check out IBM’s guidelines.  One of many lines in the guidelines that intrigued me: “IBM is increasingly exploring how online discourse through social computing can empower IBMers as global professionals, innovators and citizens. These individual interactions represent a new model:  not mass communications, but masses of communicators.” What a profound statement.  Gone are the days when a company can tightly control its message through advertising and printed materials.  IBM has recognized that thousands of its employees, within certain guidelines, are the touch points for communications with customers, prospects and the general public. Read more

Why is Coke, the #1 Brand in Economic Value, Only #12 in Mentions Online?

November 2, 2009

You’d think that Coca-Cola, long #1 on Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands List,” would achieve the same prominence on the Internet.  But, no, Coke only ranks 12^th based on number of mentions online in 2009, according to an analysis by Sysmos , a company that provides business intelligence on social media. Read more

• Try Different — Seth Godin

  The usual mantra is to 'try harder'. Trying harder is impossible when you're already trying as hard as you can.

  But you can always try different.

  Years ago, I was creating trivia questions for a product we built for Prodigy. We had a 99% accuracy rate in doing the questions. Which was great, except there were 1800 questions in a batch, which meant 18 wrong each time, which was totally and completely unacceptable. These were honest mistakes, made by smart people working as hard as they could.

  No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't do better than 99%. So we switched our system completely and did it in a totally different way. Same number of people, same number of hours, 100% accuracy.

  If it's not working, harder might not be the answer.

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