AROUND FOUR YEARS ago, a quiet conversation began in a small group of IBM programmers and software developers scattered among several countries. They wanted to share information, product development and feedback from customers. This joint interest sparked the weblog movement inside IBM. Today, more than 4000 weblogs exist inside Big Blue and one of them—“The Future Of” series—spawned a podcast that rose to within the top 50 of the most popular podcasts tracked by the iTunes download service.
Philippe Borremans, public relations manager for IBM Belgium, has nurtured the IBM Europe’s movement into weblogs and podcasting. Borremans brings a long track record of public relations to the task. He runs “The Conversation Blog” at Conversation.be where he shares interesting tidbits that appeal to knowledge workers.
Like other professionals who are responsible for monitoring brands and products, Borremans begins his daily routine by reading short summaries delivered by Really Simple Syndication (RSS). “My RSS alerts pop up first when I open my mail. It’s the first thing I do when I push the power button on my Thinkpad. It’s e-mail and RSS feeds.”
The smart way of absorbing a fast-flowing information channel is through routine use of RSS. Borremans monitors IBM products and the online discussion of related brands by skimming through the information aggregated by his RSS feeds.
“Our business learns from the market,” Borremans explains. Much of that business intelligence comes through reading the information that pours through weblogs. Freely available RSS delivers the business intelligence.
Some readers may think that taking charge of business intelligence means subscribing to the right newspapers, reading the right trade publicaitons, and engaging in constant informal verbal exchanges with peers and subordinates. In today’s knowledge economy, the world has changed.
Management guru Henry Mintzberg defined the skills of exceptional managers to include the ability to deal with complex and changing information. Leading from the top no longer stops with a one-way text-clipping service. Borremans sees today’s executive suite as shifting “from pure media relations to real public relations. This is a big shift,” he says, because “they talk back” when blogging.
These “talkers” are “influencers” (who) could be members of the press, our clients, the government, NGOs.” IBM wants the attention of these influencers and the corporation has set down very clear and open standards for blogging around work. “We have seen a rise in blogging and a rise in podcasting since issuing these standards. It’s very natural for IBMers to use the technology. It’s a liberating effect when the company does it.”
“It is about common sense and it is about trust,” explains Borremans. “You have to trust your employees. They are using common sense every day to do business so they will use their common sense when blogging.” In IBM’s case, the move to blogging amounts to a big change in communications policies.
IBM has a wide range of blogs, including personal blogs, hobby blogs, and project blogs. “Every kind of blog you can imagine,” Borremans says. “We also use wikis (online editable pages) where we put everyone on the same page. We are an international company. We have a lot of virtual teams using wikis to gather knowledge, to communicate, to collaborate.”
Blogging has positively affected the IBM business culture. IBM’s main blogs run on a Linux I-series platform. Of the company’s 4671 weblogs (104 in Ireland), half are updated at least once a week. Besides helping clients learn more about products, these company weblogs often lace into worldwide PR campaigns. They focus on a certain topic or a specific product. They help get messages across to the public.
And they originate on the desks of line employees, not through a well-stoked PR process. “It’s a big change in the culture,” Borremans points out. “There is a big change in the communications policies.”
IBM has extended blogging into the audible dimension. “We thought it would be natural,” Borremans says. “We have all the tools to do podcasting, so it’s logical to make the podcasting policies—openness, straightforward, taking care of confidential information.”
IBM podcasts attract a new audience. In fact, IBM’s “Future of” series has climbed to #55 on iTunes. The first external IBM podcast, “The Future of Driving”, got 10,000 download requests within several weeks of its iTunes release.
The success of blogging and podcasting doesn’t surprise Borremans. “We use technology to syndicate information. It’s part of IBM.”
Published in Money&Jobs with the Irish Examiner by Bernie Goldbach, December 9, 2005, following Les Blogs 2.0
