BusinessWeek has put social media at the heart of its June 2nd issue, titled ‘Beyond Blogs – What Business Needs to Know‘. You can read most of the magazine online, along with videos and photo galleries of Top 100 IT Companies, Top 10 IT Companies in North America and Top 10 IT Companies in Asia.
Big Blue Embraces Social Media is one of the articles features in the magazine, and it provides an overview of how IBM got into social computing and how our customers can benefit from our experience.
Over the past two years, IBM has been busily launching in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits. “We’re trying to see how things that are hot elsewhere can be fit for business.” Irene Greif, IBM Fellow.
Why it’s important for IBM, and business at large, to adopt enterprise social computing solutions? Excellent question! There are many answers, but I’ll mentions the ones BW did:
First, in a global company people are too far away to communicate face-to-face.
These social tools, will provide a substitute for personal connections that flew away with globalization—and help to build and strengthen far-flung teams.
Second, it’s important for recruiting.
Hotshots coming out of universities are accustomed to working across these new networks—and are likely to look at a company that still relies on the standard ’90s fare of e-mail and the phone as slow and backward.
How do IBM employees communicate with one another? I use various methods, with email being one of the last. My first option is instant messaging (Lotus Sametime), followed by twitter (internal), post on beehive, e-mail with link to a file on my web space.
So far, IBM has Dogear, a community-tagging system based on Del.icio.us, Blue Twit, and a rendition of the microblogging sensation, Twitter. It also has a Web page called Many Eyes that permits anyone (including outsiders, at many-eyes.com) to upload any kind of data, visualize it, and then launch discussions about it on blogs and social networks. The biggest success is the nine-month-old social network, Beehive, which is based on the premise of Facebook. It has already attracted 30,000 users, including top executives.
Link: Big Blue Embraces Social Media – BusinessWeek
[pictured: my social network at IBM, as of 3 weeks ago]
