There are two faces to social media. Inside the company, social media is a nice thing to encourage staff, and make the company a more humane environment. Outside, social media is a hard-nosed analytic tool to capture and manipulate customers.
That, more or less, is what I took away from a conversation with IBM’s top social media guru, and while she might dispute the latter point, I think it’s a fair summary of what she said – and both sides of social media roundly contradict the opinion of eWEEK Europe readers, who said in a recent poll that social media is a waste of time.
She’s written business books on social media, and also headed IBM’s WebSphere and SOA strategy. She also tweets a lot, and claims to have four million readers for her blog.
More to the point, after all that has been said about social media, she has a fair stab at making it sound fresh and interesting.
“We are looking at trends in the market and social media is everywhere,” she says, harking back to the original web explosion before the year 2000. “When the Internet [she means arrival of the web in the late 90s] came out, people said it was for fun, but then people started using it for business. We think the same thing is happening for social media.”
“Companies that use social business will be the ones that succeed in future,” she says but adds that, like the original web explosion, adoption has to be a strategic initiative, not a “drive by”.
The first thing companies have to do is use social media themselves: “We became a social business,” she says, describing the challenge: “Could we as a corporation be boundary-less, and let our employees use social media internally to optimise the business?”
Inside IBM, the company is a social utopia, and internal social media is apparently the driving force behind its Smarter Planet campaign, and events like last year’s Start Summit in London, sponsored by Prince Charles. There’s an innovations community called ThinkForward, and discussions of environmental issues, and staff use the internal social networks to find experts they need within the company.
“People join IBM, because they want to be part of something bigger,” she says. She’s not talking about disappearing into a 500,000 person company; she means having lofty goals outside of your work life. Giving people space to explore these keeps people happy at the company, and “if we retain one percent of our top talent, we save $50 million a year.”
The social bit also helps people trnsition to other stuff when they leave, she says. Former Lotus and Tivoli chief Al Zollar has retired from IBM, to go and work on improving water supplies in Africa.
* Her full title is: “Sandy Carter, IBM Vice President for Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, Sales and Evangelism”
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What an appalling article - such negative overtones. If you have such strong objections to IBM's take on social media, why not actually voice them in the interview and report Sandy's responses?
On a more basic note - your writing style is quite demeaning.
Thanks Jeff
I'm sorry you were appalled by the article.
I think I was raising more general issues than IBM's take on social media. The whole sector is simultaneously about transparency and manipulation, and there is a conflict there.
Sandy is the most eloquent spokesperson I have met on the subject, and IBM may have the most developed social media practice of any of the big players, both inward and outward facing, so our meeting brought the issue into focus for me.
We did in fact get onto that aspect of social media, but I was still processing my thoughts and wasn't able to put the question that well. I hope to take the issue further in future interviews.
Peter judge