Blogging at Big Blue: An Interview (Part I)
[This is the first of what I hope to be an ongoing effort to profile the social media efforts of corporate America and abroad. These profiles are intended to show how companies are making the transition from old media to new, including the requisite who, what, when, why as well as lessons learned along the way.]
Imagine you have a pretty good job in corporation communications at a multi-billion dollar, well-established technology company and yes, you blog on the side. Then one day you are called in by your boss and another senior level manager to discuss your blog that as far you were aware was unbeknownst to anyone else in the company. First thought: You’re fired. Then, how would you feel when they say they were so impressed by your blog that they wanted you to build a blogging initiative? You would feel like falling out of your chair, right?
That is exactly the way Christopher Barger felt when his boss called him into his office. And from this single meeting, Chris, 38, now heads up IBM’s blogging initiatives.
I recently had an opportunity to talk with Chris about blogging at IBM. Employees at the Armonk, NY based company have been experimenting with blogging a few years now, but it wasn’t until 2005 that the company instituted official guidelines for blogging on or off the IBM website. Today IBM has more than 24,000 registered users on its internal blog platform, with IBM encouraging its more than 320,000 global workforce to experiment with the medium.
Dan Greenfield: Tell me what it was like to be called into your boss’s office to discuss your blog?
Barger: I have spent most of my career in corporate communications. Three years ago, I started doing a personal blog. They said “we know that you are doing a blog. We don’t get blogging, but you do. We want you to lead our blog initiative.” We then assembled a 22 person task force using a wiki to come up with best practices.
Greenfield: What is blogging’s impact on what you do and corporate communications?
Barger: There is a huge shift in the communications model. We are no longer informers; we are influencers. It’s a scary step, but we need to ride this. Inside the company, it’s democratizing the process of innovating and collaborating. Both the executive and the intern can now be thought leaders – in this marketplace, it’s the best idea and not the biggest title that wins out. In a company the size of IBM, it is easy to get lost, so blogging provides an opportunity to establish yourself as a strong or innovative thinker. By not just by repeating the company line, bloggers have emerged as leaders by sometimes expressing independent thoughts.
Greenfield: How did a company with as long a history as IBM come to embrace blogging in such a big way?
Barger: One of the reasons we were so comfortable with the idea of blogging was our history of “jamming” – jams are three day directed brainstorming sessions that can involve all 320,000 of our employees, facilitated by corporate communications. We’ve been doing jams since 2001 on a variety of subjects – and what we’ve learned from these directed conversations is that people are engaged and that the company can handle open, constructive conversation. Because we had that comfort level, the idea of blogging and the atmosphere of the blogosphere were less daunting than they might have been.
We had a number of IBMers who were blogging on their own, and who were evangelizing blogs to management of their own initiative. By early 2005, we hit critical mass – management agreed that we needed to have a policy and embrace blogging.
And because we based the guidelines on IBM’s already existing “Business Conduct Guidelines” and stayed faithful to what was already standard for us, the HR and legal departments had only minor changes or suggestions for the proposed blogging policy. On May 16, 2005, we launched the blogging initiative internally, and that story on our intranet experienced six times the normal readership.
We encouraged employees to blog externally. They did, and we got tons of press without ever issuing a press release or calling a reporter.
Greenfield: What benefits does IBM see in blogging?
Barger: IBM encourages its employees to blog, but only if they want to; we’re not saying that everyone has to blog. We do see blogging as a good thing for the company – recognizing that our employees are our best assets. They are the experts and getting them out and engaged benefits IBM. It’s not just that, though. We need to adopt new communications tactics to adjust to a new reality: we are seeing a shift in audience dynamics. The audience now controls your brand and how you’re perceived – not the messenger. Every single person can respond. Perception is controlled by how the audience is receiving, not how we are telling.
And there is an increased cynicism on the part of the public. Our old ways of communicating are not as effective. People are more dismissive of what they see as “corporate spin.” They trust the individual voice now more than they do the institutional voice. People don’t necessarily want an IBM press release, they want to hear what “real” people think – and by encouraging blogging, we are empowering the individual story.
Greenfield: Weren’t you worried that employees may say the wrong thing about IBM?
Barger: If people bring up legitimate issues, engage constructively, this is good, and we can collaborate. The community will police naysayers. It is part of the experience. The world won’t end. This won’t harm us. Ultimately, blogging is about credibility. You have to been seen as a credible source – and if you’re only saying good things all the time, you get seen as kind of a Pollyanna, which no one finds credible. We are open to observation or criticism. We give our employees parameters, not what they can or can’t say. Unlike other companies, we don’t house our blogs in one place. There is no single template they have to use. We don’t necessarily know about all our employee blogs. We have even let employees expense the cost of hosting their personal blogs.
Greenfield: What has been the reaction by management?
Barger: Surprisingly management has been the most receptive. It is communications folks who were initially the most skeptical, I think in part because it’s our paradigm that’s shifting the most, and our jobs that are changing most dramatically.
Greenfield: What’s been the public’s reaction?
Barger: Overwhelmingly positive. I’ve never seen a negative article in the press about IBM blogging. I think people are sometimes surprised that a company like IBM, that’s perceived sometimes as “old school,” is embracing this new medium so enthusiastically. And largely, I think the public likes being able to engage with the individual people who make up our company. I saw a headline the week we announced the initiative that said, “Chances are, today you feel a lot closer to Big Blue.” I thought that summed it up perfectly.
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End of Part I. I will post Part II this Thursday.
Let me get back you.
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