IBM Shows The Two Faces Of Social Media
Social media makes your company all nice and warm inside, and brutally analytic and competitive outside, according to IBM’s Sandy Carter
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Three little buzzwords…
Isn’t there a conflict between these two aspects of social media? Between IBM’s warm fuzzy internal environment and the tough-edged, results-oriented external analytical approach? IBM can mix the two, she says, through being “nimble”.
Companies can keep their internal social media on “walled garden” services like Tibco Tibbr or IBM’s own Lotus Connections, or link out to the Internet, she says: “We believe that something social is open and boundaryless and transparent. We should pull in data from everywhere, but we can still do a private community on Connections.”
Microblogs and Wikis can be internal – and for some companies like healthcare providers, maybe they should be. “But you can go external and pull your Facebook friends and fans into Connections, or if you have an Exchange client you can bring your contacts into Connections. We are very open.”
Her own WordPress blog, of course, is available out there, and also on the IBM intranet, and she’s well aware of the limits to what one might put on a site like that. “I can’t tweet about our financial results in a quiet period, but other than that I can put on my page what I deem is appropriate.”
At this point she says, “It’s about being nimble. It is really about using the data that comes from social analytics and using it to make better decisions.”
With that, she sums up what she’s been saying in three words:
- Transparency [the warm fuzzy bit],
- Engagement [the analytics part], and
- Nimble.
It’s only when she lets the last one drop that I realise these are the tiredest three buzzwords in the whole of social media. They are promised in a thousand dull keynotes, by people with a half-awareness of what they might be.
What Carter has done is to flesh them out with real examples from IBM. For the space of our conversation, she makes me believe IBM is right there, delivering them.
I’m not sure if I’m excited, or terrified.
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