Sunday 6 October 2013

Week8 Blog : Enterprise Use of Blogs, Twitter and Wikis



The International Business Machines Corporation (commonly referred as IBM) is an American multinational that manufactures and markets computer hardware and software along with providing hosting and consulting services. This multinational corporation was found in 1911 as a technology giant through a merger between the International Time Recording Company, the Tabulating Machine Company and the Computing Scale Company. The IBM has been making the most “clever” use of Blogs, Twitter and Wikis in its enterprise-level operations in order to spur employee innovation using social media tools and solutions. It is undoubtedly one of the most active social media participants in the corporate world.

The company undertakes a decentralized social media participation approach whereby the company does not have a corporate Blog or a corporate Twitter ID but IBMers are encouraged to use their personal blogs and discussions both in-house and externally outside the organization in order to participate and “comment” about key organizational happenings. The company boasts of having around 17,000 internal blogs with over 100,000 employees very actively participating on those blogs to discuss various topics and happenings pertaining to enterprise operations and prospects.


Communication researchers maintain that the importance of using social media for enterprise and official usage has still not yet been adequately regarded by the corporate world. Social media is a distinct area of technology that serves many purposes at the same time. It is considered as one of the most desirable platforms for User Generated Content. The company rightly uses this technological power to voice out its employees’ opinions by using “Social Blue” which is similar to as Face book for its employees. There is a great scope of enhancement of presence on the social media and the company feels it can go even far. Presently, there are a few thousand members on Twitter while almost 200,000 employees have their accounts at LinkedIn. The employees of the company realize their importance as company representatives on these social media websites whereby they can not only create an image of their companies but also enhance their customer and clientele base. Moreover, there are 50,000 members in alum networks on Face book and LinkedIn. In short, the company is successfully maintaining its social media presence, making it a platform to spur business and bring knowledge to many people at the same instance.

Being a knowledge-based company that IBM is, it is only the company agenda to prioritize social media participation as a vital factor for company’s workforce integration, empowerment and collaboration. They contend that it makes perfect “business sense” to the company management teat their employees share and exchange ideas while contributing to the collective information of the entire organization. The coming era is sure to see a more active and integrated presence of the company in more social media networks that emerge from time to time. 

3 comments:

  1. Hi Rowaina,

    Found this blog post very interesting and learnt a lot! Didn't know how much IBM prioritised social media participation. Can't wait to read more from you!

    -Grace

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    Replies
    1. Hey Grace,
      am more than happy that you have got benefit from my post ,
      you were asking about how much IBM prioritised social media participation?
      its a good point to be answered so i did some research and i found that the IBM has about 16,971 followers on Google+ up to now , Not everything worked ideally. Many of the participants logged on just to look around. But participants posted more than 46,000 ideas on Wikis .
      When IBM conducted its study of 1709 around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years.
      Wish that information be helpful..
      Cheers,

      Delete
  2. It is a smart way for IBM to use their employee in order to represent the company name and major topics through social media such as Facebook and Linkedln , This should be a great example for other companies to follow in order to make their employees share and exchange ideas through the social media ... Thank you for this valuble information Rowaina....

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