How about the Beach Boys touring band, huh? The Journal News published yesterday that they get $185,000 per gig these days. Only two original members left touring under that banner – Mike Love and Bruce Johnston – and their abilities and brand are still strong enough to command some serious $. Bravo Mike and Bruce. What the heck does that add up to at approx 175 shows per year…
Wait, this blog is supposed to be about Podcasting and Social Media at IBM. Something tells me I’ll digress here and there. Forgive me.
I’ve been blogging here inside of IBM for a few years now. I’ve been leading IBM’s podcasting initiative for the past three years on behalf of Corporate Communications, and it’s been an amazing ride. We have a remarkable set of self-publishing platforms here inside of IBM- audio podcasting, video podcasting, wikis, blogs, social networking sites, etc. – and I would like to share some of the things I have learned along the way. With approx 400,000 employees, IBM’s Media Library – where we go to consume and publish content for the global employee population – has just reached it’s 4 millionth download. We have over 130,000 unique logins to-date, and over 10,000 media files hosted. I’d love to know if any other major corporations can boast the same kind of multimedia community activity. I’ll see if I can get my hands on some blogging and wiki stats as well.
Anyway, welcome to my new blog. Please, ask questions if you have them.
Wooohooo! Welcome to the Internet blogosphere, G! Glad to see you over here sharing with us some of the superb stuff you have been doing with the rest of the team pushing social media in the corporate agenda. Fantastic! And now we have got the opportunity to catch up with things through your blog on what is happening out there, like all of the impressive stats on the Media Library! Brilliant!
Keep up the wonderful piece of work and welcome on board! Let’s rock!
Hi George,
Quite interesting pieces you are writing there. IBM sure is one of those organizations which looks forward, in fact, if you ask me, much forward … Something I had experienced when I was there. Though, I think theres loads of scope for reaching out especially with tools like blogcentral, to folks across geos. For example, not many in India who were active in the blogosphere (its been almost 6 months since I left, though …)!
I have written a bit about this …
http://atulrai1.blogspot.com/2007/10/adoption-of-knowledge-management.html
Waiting to read more from you!
Cheers, Atul.
Actually Bruce Johnston is not exactly an original member of the band. He joined shortly after “Pet Sounds” came out. But he was a key member of the classic Beach Boys.
There are actually three splinters of the Beach Boys still touring. Brian Wilson and Al Jardine both have their own active offshoots of the original band, though only Mike & Bruce get to use the Beach Boys trademark. IT’s kind of like… IBM, Lexmark and Lenovo
Sympathy For The Devil! A Stones title, with a Beach Boys posting…
I was amazed to learn that IBM has been in employee podcasting and blogging for so long. Do you see this as communication, or informal learning…or is it both?
This is relationship building, knowledge-sharing, injecting some human elements into our communications. This is giving a voice to every IBMer that chooses to participate, but most importantly this is about starting and maintaining conversations around all of the things we may be passionate about as individuals. We talk, we grow.
Good to see you start his up outside the IBM walls. As I podcast on my blog and mainly on IdoNotes, I can see the benefit that many get learning about Social Networking through sites like this