IBM Shows The Two Faces Of Social Media

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.

A real social media guru

Of course, we can’t dismiss social media in those terms; we use Facebook and Twitter, and believe our readers do too.  So we were keen to meet Sandy Carter, IBM’s vice president for social business*.

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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