IMB's success story using Enterprise 2.0

Following closing with last weeks blog, this week I will attempt to investigate some organisations that have integrated Enterprise 2.0 and used some of the social technology levers to innovate and benefit their company.

I found one specific organisation that has a very interesting history with technology and the use of Enterprise 2.0. This company is IBM. Specifically, I will be examining how they used Enterprise 2.00 and social technology levers to leverage their position in marketing and sales and most importantly how they improved across their entire enterprise. 

To begin lets talk about who IBM is. IBM (International Business Machine) is a multinational technology and consulting corporation. They manufactures and markets computer hardware and software, and offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. With over 420,000 employees in over 10 countries, IBM is one of the largest and most recognized companies in the world today. A company of that size needs to able to coordinate and collaborate, not only with other employees but with customers as well. They must be able to share business processes and respond to market demands. This is where Enterprise 2.0 was implemented and also using a few of the social technology levers this company became successful, however they were not always this successful. In the 90's IBM almost went bankrupt because back then they were one of a few in the industry, luckily though they had time to re-evaluate their processes and how they got things done.

So how exactly did they use Enterprise 2.0? they gave the power to their employees otherwise referred to as the IMBers. IMB does not have a corporate blog or twitter account or any kind of major social media account, corporately. However, their employees have over 80,000 blogs internally and externally, around 50,000 have Facebook and Twitter accounts. This was the companies strategy to let the employee's be the corporate blog or corporate twitter account, because the employee's would post publicly what was going on with the company, sales, answering questions asked by customers.

However IBM did not stop there. They had developed their own social media network within the organisation called SocialBlue which allows employee's to stay connected with one another.They also have a fully crowd sourced wiki which has all the information about the companies products. To top it off IBM holds about every 6 months an event called company"Jams" and in this event a few employees from different branches would come together to have a meeting and discuss how to innovate. Any ideas they had would be shared and talked about, these days IBM has thousands of employees attending, either over technology or in person.

So to wrap up, there are two main social technology value levers that are used here, published by McKinsey. The first is is the use of social technology to improve inter organisational collaboration and communication, the second is using social technologies for marketing communication/interaction.

Finally, the question, What do you think is the best way to improve marketing or sales using social media?