In recent posts I have been talking about how companies are effectively using a company blog to reach out to their constituents and receiving comments and feedback as a result. They are building relationships, which is great for a company. In many of the articles I have read on corporate blogs IBM has been mentioned. So I decided to research more about IBM. What was found was somewhat interesting because their blog has a different feel. In the article Corporate Blogging Best Practices the author talks about how IBM encourages their employees to openly blog internally and externally. IBM has a community blog, which is called DeveloperWorks Community. IBM’s community blog consists of thousands of employees, developers, program managers. If you check out the link you can see how it work, its like a aggregation which holds all the new posts from each author listed. However, anyone can search posts by most popular, title, or author. What it seems like is that the employees that blog either do on their personal blogs or have a personal blog but, IBM has a guidelines to follow. In Corporate Blogging Best Practices and in the book Radically Transparent IBM mention for their guidelines. Their terms and conditions for their bloggers, is one big reason IBM has been mentioned in articles. Mostly based on how they created them, by asking employees who were currently bloggers to use a wiki to give what they thought was appropriate guidelines to have. The outcome was over a hundred responses, that build a constructive terms and conditions; and instead of just setting them for the employees, and going directly too them builds respect and communication within the company. This video goes more into it:
One point that has been mentioned in two separate case studies 1 and 2 on IBM was that their blogs were not getting much feedback and little customer support. Bill Higgins, a system engineer and blogger for IBM, was interviewed in both case studies. He brought up a intriguing point about how IBM is not too concerned with not getting feedback, he still feels there is a community, and at least they are getting their information out in a timely fashion to anyone who has an interest.
Strategy:
-Community Blog
-Recent Posts
-Effective guidelines
