How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation. “Be yourself.” It’s one of the rules of social media. If you’re blogging, tweeting or Facebooking for business, be real—or you won’t be followed. Yet, how do you pull off “authentic” while maintaining the company brand message? It’s tough enough for a small business. What if you’re #2 on Business Week‘s best global brands list, with nearly 400,000 employees across 170 countries? At IBM, it’s about losing control. “We don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation. “We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first.
Thousands of IBMers are the voice of the company. Organization: IBM Social Media Stats: Results: Crowd-sourcing identified 10 best incubator businesses, which IBM funded with $100 million$100 billion in total revenue with a 44.1% gross profit margin in 2008 Edgy at 114 No Policing. How to Fail When Using Internal Social Media. This article is an edited excerpt from 15 Ways to Fail at Social Business—How companies have failed implementing Enterprise 2.0 and how to avoid their fate, Kevin D.
Jones' new ebook, which is available at vinJones.com Do a quick search online and you can find many ways to use social media for learning the right way. There isn't a shortage of tips, strategies, helpful hints—even conferences and training—that will help you to create thriving internal communities, put together a team of advocates, deal with cultural issues, choose the right tool for your organization, and even develop a job description for community managers. While all these are valuable, there is one glaringly obvious hole: Not all internal social media initiatives are successful. In fact, many fail. In the end, these experiences are swept under the rug with the hope that they will be forgotten from the minds of companies and resumes. No. 1: If you want to fail, underestimate the power of culture "Wow, this is powerful. Realizing social business: Enterprise 2.0 success stories. While large enterprises are often viewed as hard-to-change behemoths that can't keep up with the digital age and will therefore inevitably fail to avoid "creative destruction" via lack of adaptability, it's also now clear that some of these firms are in fact having very real and measurable success instead.
Over the last year, I've been noticing a steady stream of new case studies and reports emerging from large companies that have implemented social media within their walls to improve workforce collaboration. This itself is not new of course: Social media has blossomed in the enterprise since its inception. However, the size, scope, and sophistication of many of these efforts are particularly worthy of a closer look. Moreover, the details contained within these stories -- more than any abstract discussion or statistical survey -- clearly conveys how social business (the systematic application of social computing to improve the way we work) has now arrived at global organizations. Communications: Internal networks let employees make better use of their skills. Build a private social network that employees will actually use. By Todd R.
Weiss July 30, 2012 06:00 AM ET Computerworld - NASA could land humans on the moon and put exploratory rovers on Mars, but in the last three years, the agency just couldn't find a way to build an internal social network that would encourage its employees to collaborate. Initially launched in early 2009, "SpaceBook" was supposed to be a place where NASA workers could go online anytime to get feedback, learn from others' experiences, collaborate on projects and get to know each other better. But NASA ultimately squashed the effort this June, taking it offline for good. The problem, says Kevin Jones, a consulting social and organizational strategist with NASA's Marshall and Goddard Spaceflight Centers, was that no one sufficiently explained to users what they could do with SpaceBook to move their collaboration forward. That kind of crash-and-burn experience happens in enterprise IT when plans are established without understanding what users want or need.
Giving employees a voice.