Did the blogging Survey Short Change IBM?

Ian Kennedy, Six Apart's Director of Sales and Partner Development made a post about the blogging survey.

He also mentioned that the report might have short changed IBM, probably by omission. To tell you the truth I don't know the answer to that question. I do know that the blogger I interviewed was not aware of any examples of product feedback from customers within developerWorks, while in my efforts to reach out to IBM I have not seen any examples of bloggers asking for product feedback yet.

I actually struggled with this very issue in the preparation of my paper, as I was surprised not to find any examples of IBM using blogging for product feedback. It is my understanding that IBM is at the forefront of internal blogging in the US with over 3,600 blogs in the company. But as far as I know, I have not seen any examples of IBM’s employees using blogging in the same way Microsoft and Macromedia have been using blogs with the same level of openness and transparency to the external world, with regards to product feedback.

Ian mentioned IBM’s recent announcement to develop a major blogging effort amongst its 320,000 employees externally. The announcement is something that occurred during my research on the blogging survey, so we are definitely in an evolving state at the moment. If the strategy plays out I am sure we will start to see some examples in the future (unless there are already examples available?).

As I mention in the case study, IBM’s current position with its external position is not a bad position to be in. In the blogging divide chart companies on the left side of the cultural divide gain many benefits from their efforts and are to be commended. It is just my hypothesis that for many companies more benefits are possible by developing a blogging content strategy that focuses on their customer’s ideas than on just their own thought leadership. Why, well ideas that match customer needs and wants have a better chance of turning into usable and saleable products.

Posted by johncass at July 9, 2005 10:52 PM

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Comments

Hi John,

I meant to catch up with you at the Blog Business Summit but you know how conferences can be - always too many people to meet!

I catch your drift on IBM in that they do not have product-specific blogs and do hope that changes. They seem to be more interested in promoting the individual expertise of their employees which is exciting as a promotion of IBM as a generically smart company but a little frustrating if you're looking for specific information or want to give feedback on a particular IBM product.

The closest I could come to a Lotus Notes blog was EdBrill.com who works for IBM Lotus and blogs on Domnino but his blog is not hosted on ibm.com.

For Websphere, there is websphere.org/blog which is running on Movable Type (yay!) but is also managed and hosted outside of ibm.com.

Maybe this is a different way of spreading the word? Having independent domains pointing back to ibm.com about their products - kind of like the way usergroup sites and bulliten boards were in the days of old.

Posted by: Ian Kennedy at August 23, 2005 6:37 PM

Hi Ian,

Yep, sorry we missed one another at the conference. I like your idea about the independent domains. Though I think a sub-domain might also help with search rankings initially, in the long term creating more content rich sites would be the best strategy. We've been recommending sub-domains to clients. The IBM.com domain name would be a powerful support to the new websites in terms of search rankings. Look at the microsoft blogs, all sub-domains, each blog gets a boost from microsoft.com and boosts Microsoft.com.

John

Posted by: John Cass at August 24, 2005 2:46 PM

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