Social Computing at IBM
Chris Luongo of IBM, along with his collaborative partner Jane Harris, have created a new YouTube video that helps to explain what ‘a smarter planet’ means to them. It is presented in an elegant and thoughtful manner, and breaks from all of the social media content my team has been producing on the subject to-date. I highly endorse this video and suggest you give it a look. And, thank-you Chris and Jane, for delivering such a great video.
Pop by the smarter planet blog for the latest in our series. This week, IT Infrastructure, or, making smarter systems smarter.
Nice short video from IBM.
So, what are you working on? I’m working on getting conversations started and building extended relationships online…
I can’t believe I forgot to mention a recent interview with me published by Shel Israel on his Global Neighborhoods blog. Check it out here and please, leave a comment if you are so inclined. I think it represents a nice update on the current IBM internal social computing state of affairs.
Spoke to a group of Marist College students today. PRSA members to be specific. Working with Adam Christensen, we presented some of the ‘why we do it’ and ‘lessons learned’ type information around IBM and social computing prior to opening up the discussion to everyone attending.
Adam had the great idea to have the group talk about how they find information online about companies, what resonates, what they like to find, what they do with it. We got on the topic of recruiting and job hunting and the students came up with some interesting points that support quite a bit of what our team here at IBM does.
Top response from the group in regard to key influencers was ‘word of mouth’ or looking for information from ‘people like me.’ We see this opinion quite a bit nowadays, and although some big business folks I speak with still don’t believe or understand this, the students rely on this form of information gathering quite heavily. They prefer friends and family over online strangers, but admitted that the strangers did have impact if there was perceived common interest and beliefs/culture.
Second most important influencer… Google search results. Many of us may overlook this, but it is worth paying attention to. Overlooking a major brand representation on Google, what comes back when folks ‘Google’ you?
In regard to recruiting specifically, the students expressed desire in being able to find respective recruiters online and finding out a little bit about them prior to connecting on the phone or in person. I find this fascinating. They look on Facebook for them, they Google them. They do this as well for potential bosses and etc. What do they want to do when they find you online? They don’t want to get an email address or phone number or to start IMing… they want to KNOW a little bit about you. Pictures, interests, connections, to get a feel for you, even if it is a limited view.
All in all a very interesting session. I’d like to thank the Marist PRSA for the invitation. I think we all learned a few things today.
Ragan have run an article on IBM’s podcasting initiative, and the platform that supports it. Check it out!
In the past week or two, through necessity and desire, I have begun to drop a few of the ways in which we have been speaking about social computing over the last few years. New Media? Totally gone. Social Networking? Done with it. Social Media? On its way out (OK, I have a soft spot for that one). You get the drift…
So what’s up? As my friend and colleague, Ethan McCarty, likes to point out when you talk about these efforts in practice, “it sounds like the internet.” How true.
We have woven most of these practices into our daily surfing. We consume video in spaces that are social in a variety of ways, we comment with our friends and with strangers in open spaces without pause or notice, we categorize and organize content for the greater good as habit, not by necessity anymore. The clock has passed midnight and we have entered a new day.
I hereby proclaim that I am no longer an IBM New Media professional by title. These concepts and practices are now fully integrated into our marketing and communications organization. I am now simply just an IBM employee in marketing and communications who posesses some very current skills – not to be confused with some sort of wild ‘future’ skill. I value the fantastic memories of what our organization has been through over the last 6 years and I look forward to now, officially, moving back to participating on ‘the internet’ we all know and love.
Seems there is quite a bit of focus these days on subscription-enabled media publishing as the norm. As my MySpace page continues to increase in traffic, I wondered about the pages of my friends and the kinds of visitor numbers they were receiving.
I should point out here that I went to High School with a number of very musical people. Many seem to be on MySpace such as Mike Milazzo, John Andriani, Lee Feldman, Michael Shelley, Philip Shelley, Josh Brown, Dan Garcia, and more. Their visitor numbers are strong for relatively unknown artists. I began pondering why I, a podcast enthusiast/educator and evangelist, am still on MySpace…
Well, I LIKE that many of my friends are on MySpace. I like the somewhat standardized way I can quickly sort through their pages to find out what’s new and where they will be playing, how they are feeling, who has found them etc. It is so much faster than clicking around on a custom web site, and adds so much more of a personal touch than my feed reader would if I were just subscribing to the audio or video content alone.
My point is this… subscription is often best employed when you are certain that the media you are sharing can do most of the work for your desired goal. If you want to add other, sometimes valuable elements, consider another approach. Something simple, something that has a quick and user-friendly design with a few really strong secondary elements.
Let’s face it, subscription is still not the holy grail many thought it would be. I’ve seen a few Twitter posts over the last two days from friends ‘cleaning out’ their feed readers and comparing it to sock drawer maintenance. Subscription is embraced by a select group, but many others surfers want more. They want to find out more about who you are, how you are doing, what you look like, who your friends are, what your interests are, they want to comment, hear back from you, network. This is social media and it is still something that is finding new fans. It ain’t always only about subscription.
Some days after IBM released our Social Computing Guidelines, Sun Micro has done the same. They too have moved from ‘policy’ to ‘guidelines.’ Do I sense a trend here in the world of social computing practices? Yes. Is this something your organization should be considering? Yes. This goes beyond affirming your culture and leadership to conveying best practices for effective communications. I suggest you give both a good read.
