Here is my basic speech (I didn’t stick to it very well) from PodCamp Boston this past Sunday the 28th (I also used it at the IABC on the 29th in Stamford CT). This is not an ‘official’ statement from IBM, but reflects fairly deeply how I feel about social media.
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IBM is an enormous organization with approximately 370,000 employees. A large percentage of these employees have been with the company for under 5 years and many of these employees are remote workers operating out of their homes, working on the road, or in the offices of business partners. We represent a wide mix of geographic cultures along with a broad mix of business cultures. This is a challenging variety of people to communicate with.
As well as a constantly evolving workforce and our broad geographic reach, this is a company whose business model has changed considerably over the past 100 years, leaving our employees, stakeholders and the general public a bit confused as to what businesses we are in. We find ourselves in a constant position to educate and inform over this.
We began as a commodity business, selling cheese slicers, meat scales and clocks. We kept part of our business in commodities for over 80 years, but in a nutshell, we have basically divested all of our commodity businesses – PC’s being the most visible recent example – which further confuses our brand image for many. Without these desktop touch points in workplaces and homes, and with our marketing messages being so focused on innovation and large-scale computing, we find ourselves in an era of brand re-definition with many inside and outside the company.
Today, I’m going to focus on our internal communications efforts – something I have been involved with at IBM for the last 12 years.
Although many corporations attempt to utilize new media for marketing purposes, the IBM Corporate Communications mission is different. In my opinion, IBM Communications is not in the business of that style of traditional external marketing.
At IBM, the Corporate Communications function participates heavily in helping to shape our business strategy. We work with the press, with financial analysts, with shareholders. We lead employee communications, and create publications such as the annual report. With the emergence and popularity of digital media came something that struck right at the heart of our mission to connect with these groups – the empowerment of these stakeholders.
This is a great example of what makes working for IBM so satisfying for me. The ultimate brand image today is one of authenticity, but the harder companies try to achieve this, the more readily it is exposed as disingenuous. As we watched so many large organizations make failed attempts to reach out into the social spaces through marketing veiled as podcasts or blogs, we took another route and saw it as a way to bring this large company together and get it talking, acquainted, informed, entertained.
About 4 years ago, it became clear to us that traditional forms of communication – internal news and intranet knowledge-sharing – needed a shot in the arm. Top-down text-based knowledge sharing in the form of intranet articles and blast emails had become less impactful. In observing the viral impact that social media was having around the world inspired us to re-think our communication methods.
What happened, as it turns out, is extremely rare in the world of the large enterprise and is something I find to be quite exciting. We have shifted from monologue to dialogue. We forged a new compact between the individual and the enterprise.
IBM set goals both internally and externally with social media, to help evolve our culture, policies and programs in an effort to attract and retain new generations of IBMers – people with different expectations, aspirations and ways of working and leading… geographically and generationally. Frankly, for any organization to remain a leader in the IT employment space, new internet savvy employees hope to find their intranet experiences to be much like their internet ones.
I know that most of you are very familiar with the world of social media, but at a business like IBM, operating in 170 countries worldwide, the thought of enabling our immense workforce with publishing tools to allow them to express themselves through more flexible and open platforms was uncharted territory 5 years ago and slightly puzzling, but there was good reason why we needed to do this.
In a paper about to be released by the Arthur Page Society – a paper that IBM participated in – the topic covered is the evolution of corporate communications in the 21st century. Many of the points I have made so far here are addressed in the paper. One finding, in particular, in the paper discusses the necessities of transparency and authenticity in modern enterprise communications. Transparency and authenticity are not corporate catchphrases, nor are they to be taken lightly by any large organization. I feel that they are the basis of successful modern communications and are at the center of all large enterprise social media efforts.
So, what was our anchor for entering the social space? IBMers sign a document of agreement yearly called the IBM Business Conduct Guidelines. These are extremely comprehensive guidelines that, in my opinion, simply state that we will behave as responsible business adults in all of our interactions. This type of agreement is common practice in large companies, especially those that trade publicly and have deep responsibilities to a vast number of shareholders.
As well, about 6 years ago, IBM employees around the world were invited to a mass online ‘Jam’ as we call it – kind of like a 3 day worldwide message board discussion – to determine what our company values were. One of the outcomes of this values exercise was the determination that IBMers value trust and personal responsibility in all relationships. These values are a firm basis for who we are and what we believe. This is not something we take lightly throughout the company.
Very basically, between the firm foundation of our Business Conduct Guidelines and our company Values, we decided to launch a blogging initiative. About 4 years ago, we introduced a blog platform inside of IBM. This was a milestone in company history as far as I’m concerned. The masses were given the ability to publish at will on a global platform for the first time in 100 years. This is very unusual in the world of large enterprises. Traditionally you needed to approach our intranet editors and writers to propose something for publishing. Now any employee could do it at will.
The blogging community inside of IBM proved that it could use blogging to add great value to our business, our community, our enterprise-wide mission. We had begun talking to one another in a new, social way. It was in light of this blogging success that we decided to introduce podcasting inside of IBM a year later. This was a natural next move, and a massive opportunity to take our social media efforts into a whole new arena. Now we would enable the enterprise to hear the voices of one another. The power of the human voice can be an extremely effective communications tool and, for the first time, we would be able to have a platform for sharing our joy, our pain, our triumphs, our experiences. So what is the Podcasting at IBM world like and how did we launch it, educate our employees, and nurture the effort to make it successful?
We knew that recording may pose a challenge to our employees, as well as having to go through a learning curve in concepting and production approaches, so we began to pull together an online support plan. We also recognized that we needed a simple and comprehensive place for all of this activity to occur. So was born the IBM Media Library.
The Media Library is an amazing space IMO. Anyone inside the firewall has access to the files hosted there, and can publish as they see fit. The library offers file hosting of single-hit media, series-based media, media tagging and sorting, ratings, hit counts, date published, and accepts html in the description fields enabling dynamic presentation of episode pages and also accepts secondary files such as transcripts, pdf’s, word documents, images, etc. When launched, the Media Library became a very popular destination. Podcasting had grabbed the world’s imagination and IBMers were ready to jump in.
We launched the library understanding that it would require serious, dedicated educational support. I led this and learned so many things. A decision was made to base all of our recording and editing tutorials and hands-on training sessions on the least expensive, yet most appropriate tools possible. We wanted this to be a place to not only share knowledge and culture, to open discussion and form communities, but we wanted IBMers to feel free to experiment with creating media.
We published a help document that was split into many sections such as ‘how to record with no cost’, how to record at low cost’, and how to record a more advanced production’. At the heart of these advice documents was one, more important thing, in my opinion. We published a list of things to consider before jumping into ‘podcasting’ – how to think about what you were trying to do before you decide to commit to a series. In a nutshell, these stand today and include:
Who are you trying to reach? Do you know your intended audience? Are you clear on the best ways to reach them?
What will they react positively to? Media, text, social elements?
If multimedia is involved, is it a single-hit or a series commitment?
Have you established who will manage, nurture the effort / platform?
Who will be producing / creating the content?
What equipment do you have to work with and what is it capable of
How much of this can you accomplish in the time allotted?
Can you identify who, and arrange time with, the most fascinating and engaging person involved in this project?
Can you concept your ‘program’ in a compelling yet useful way?
Will your program be accessibility compliant?
Do you have a promotion strategy? w3? IBM.com? Notes? Blog? Viral?
Will you have time to nurture and continue to promote the content? Discussion nurturing, keeping the buzz going?
Do you have the skills / time necessary to edit well?
Are you familiar with publishing on the intended platform?
Have you gathered enough material to publish in an effective way? Title, short description, long description, images, links, tags, html?
We still spend quite a bit of time going through these points and educating interested IBMers about the specifics. So many cool things have happened watching IBMers work through this process. Many people, rightfully so, used this new platform to publish speeches, presentations, conference calls etc – these are valid and useful ways to share knowledge – but many soon learned to spend some extra time and energy to make more creative recordings and build episode pages that were really unique and fascinating to reach a wider audience. I have always attempted to lead by example and push to make the best content possible in attainable ways for everyone so that IBMers could be inspired to be daring and creative and unafraid, but we found that many folks were darn creative right out of the gate.
But for those publishers who really took advantage of the functionality of the Library tool, through watching and analyzing their download numbers, nurturing their comment field discussions, following their the ratings, etc, these participants began to learn to tweak their approaches to take their efforts to the next level. This is where the social aspect of Podcasting at IBM holds some very significant value. Think of it as being able to consume and react in a variety of ways with your publisher immediately.
The IBM Media Library – without ever being formally announced – has over 12,000 media files hosted, over 150,000 unique log-ins, and over 4.2 million downloads to date. Best practice tagging, rating, comment field nurturing and html publishing use are not exactly where I would like them all to be, but IBMers get better with it every day, and we continue to raise awareness. The platform, along with our blogging platform, remain a bit viral in nature but I think we are ready to make a bigger deal out of them soon and it will be fascinating to see what happens.
As of now, audio podcasts are the most commonly published item in the library. Video is catching up, especially audio-enabled slide-shows. Interviews seem to be the most common format outside of speeches and conference call recordings, but one interesting new development would be the sheer number of IBMers using the space to tell stories. There are not enough folks doing really fun programs, but there are a few and they are quite popular.
We find that the most active geographies are, in order, Japan, United States and India. We see Latin America catching up quickly and have some very enthusiastic producers and publishers in France.
We have learned quite a bit along the way, have a great deal of work ahead. I’m very excited and proud of this initiative by IBM. We have entered the world of self-publishing and dialogue in a very unique and comprehensive way for a large enterprise. I think, because of folks like you and the the way in which you have all helped to change the way the world at large communicates, many many large enterprises will soon be doing the same.
OK, I admit it… I’ve been recording all of my telephone interviews over the last few years by pointing a microphone at a speakerphone. With all of the options out there, it’s a bit disgraceful, but I have to say it has worked wonders. The big downside has been having to find a quiet room everytime, which can be a challenge in a crowded corporate headquarters building stocked with cubicles.