IBM is planning to introduce what could be the largest corporate blogging initiative so far, in a bid to encourage its 320,000 staff to become more active in online tech communities. While other companies are frantically trying to prevent their employees from maintaining blogs, IBM seems to have realized the potential benefit that thousands of in-house bloggers could bring to promoting its products and services.
IBM encouraging all employees to switch to Firefox!
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5704750.html
This is cool, I guess. But SUN has been doing for quite some time now.
” While other companies are frantically trying to prevent their employees from maintaining blogs, IBM seems to have realized the potential benefit that thousands of in-house bloggers could brin”
Isn’t the two reasons, legal and Image?
‘320,000 channels and nothing to watch’
Corporations have comendeered public broadcasts on radio and tv, to shape the conversations, are they trying to do the same for blogs?
This is not meant to be alarmist, it’s just an angle to consider.
Oh, that’ll just create a market for some sort of blog-rating site, which probably already exists, if the idea just occured to me…
Great, more crap for us to waste time reading.
Ditto. What exactly is the point of blogging anyway except to take up space on the internet? I mean if you’re an expert speaking on a particular field, it might be worth something. But to have every shmuck from California to Botswana saying “Oh hi, this is my blog. Let me get out my soapbox…” is utterly pointless.
What if the employee writes negative blog entries? Like writing down his anger about management or the way things go?
I don’t think that IBM would like to see that. Even I could write down things that are in my opinion not right at work, but I don’t. It’s not that I care whether I get fired or not (I’m looking for another job anyway), but the fact that they can attack you in court. Or maybe your future employer knowing you were fired for blogging negative stuff :p
Of course, this doesn’t mean all 320,000 of them will blog regularly (or at all) but it’s a nice move to appear more open to customers.
A lot of the concerns mentioned above are covered in the article. IBMers must disclose that they work for IBM, which eliminates the possibility of astroturfing. IBM happens to have a lot of experts in various fields; maybe this new initiative will give them more confidence in sharing their knowledge with the community outside IBM.
Negative blogging really has nothing to do with blogging. Disrespecting your employer in public can get you fired no matter who you work for or what forum you use.
Of course, I’m not speaking for IBM — read the blogging guidlelines for yourself.
Now they have a great way to pick which employees to lay-off in the next round.
MS has been doing this for a while as well, though not anywhere near this scale…regardless it’s had a pretty positive impact on their PR, and the community has actually been vocal enough to MS via blogs that they’ve changed stuff due to pressure from the community, most noticeably their huge MSDN pricing blunder w/ Team System. And as far as whoever said blogging just takes up space on the internet…nobody’s holding a gun to your head man…take it or leave it. This can only be a good thing as IMB has been pretty guarded in the past.
3. Identify yourself — name and, when relevant, role at IBM — when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
Outstanding. I wish more companies and marketing people were this honest. Too many marketing people think disclosure is optional. I hope a similar policy applies to their marketing people also. Kudo’s to IBM.
I can understand how individuals may not want to have a web diary, and how they might also not wish to read others’ web diaries, but for the life of me I don’t really understand the arrogant dismissal of them due to some perceived “pointlessness.” There’s clearly some form of self-gratification driving public writing, if nothing else.
When you comment on the pointlessness of others’ endeavors, do you ever find yourself wondering if your own have any merit? The best I can tell, few if any of the regular commentors here are experts on anything, and rarely is it that they post any comments that contain actual content. Frequently they’ll consist of nothing but vacuous criticisms, propaganda, flamewars over subjective nonsense, fights over which party is trolling, and uninformed rambling.
You can just assume that others’ endeavors hold some sort of value to them.
320,000 Clueless employees ranting about how IT used to work 5 years ago. Anhyone who has worked for IBM will understand what i am talking about.
Sun seems to have done a good job providing independence to their employees. Occasionally, an employee posts political or religious opinions, and they don’t get removed. Most blogs allow comments, and occasionally someone posts criticism and those don’t get removed. Sun are pretty clear that the blog posting are not endorsed or backed by Sun, other than Sun provides hosting for them.
For me, the most interesting aspect of blogs is seeing things that would never have gotten through public relations. Engineers often do independent projects that are pretty neat, like seeing how many Containers can be shoehorned on to a Sun workstation, or seeing filesystem performance data, or RAID performance data. There are things that have geek appeal but won’t ever make it into an official press release.
Oh no, corporate Bloggers are taking over. I knew one day
the only thing that matter was the path of education all the way through college and to get a corpoate job.
This is the progression of power in human society. We are at the cusp of the second transition, and corporate blogging is a representation of that transition. The power of the individual, whether in a corporation or as a startup, is unprecedented today, in part because of technologies such as blogging. The innovations of the future will come from independent thinkers who have the technology to get their ideas out to the public without the dollars/cents or nuts/bolts of the corporation (or the armies and tax collectors of the nation).
Corporations are feeling the pain. The struggle to remain relevant is expessed in many ways. One is the consumption/investment of/in startups with promising technologies. Another is a canopy of intellectual property protection. This allows the corporation to take the form of a group of independent thinkers that can share ideas amongst themselves but not necessarily with outsiders.
This is the corporation of today. The board of directors is more or less detached from the ideas produced, which necessitates a method of marketing more are less detached from the directors. Let the thinkers market their own ideas, and have the directors worry about how to protect them from the other corporations.
Of course, the whole mechanism works better if you get rid of the protections and release all ideas to the public domain. Then the time and cost from discovery to delivery is decreased. The corporation is subverted, and the mass of individuals is exposed to the public. This is a double-edged sword, as the followers of free software evolution realize. How do you make enough money to develop and maintain your idea if you release the idea to the public domain?
The idea, it turns out, isn’t very useful to the public on its own. Even if the idea is properly and thoroughly documented, it is often inaccessible to large portions of its possible audience. The public needs support, assurance, and consultation. There is no better corporation to survive as a free software oasis than IBM. As the largest consulting firm in the history of human society, they are best suited to give their ideas away in exchange for profits from support, assurance, and consultation. Steps like giving away thousands of patents to the public domain, supporting the proliferation of open standards, and this latest blogging initiative are a prelude to a large corporation’s transformation a modern corporated/individual hybrid.
Look for more of this from IBM in the near future, and look for me to be a small part of it. I’m joining IBM in a few weeks, and if I have something important to say (as long-time OSNews readers realize I often do), you might even find it on my blog, address yet to be determined.