IBM turns an informal Social media engagement into a formal one
No sooner had I finished writing the blog on blogging that I came across the news that IBM has released social media training kit and tools at Impact 2009. According to the news snippet dated 6th May, Sandy Carter, vice president for IBM SOA & WebSphere marketing, strategy and channels ,who is said to be the ambassador for all things social within IBM, announced that ‘IBM Impact’ had broken into the top 10 Twitter hash tags, with 782 Tweets on Monday alone, while 750 event pictures had been posted on the web by Tuesday. “We’re the first vendor to release social media training and tools to our partners to teach them how to leverage tools such as Flickr and blogging,” said Carter. “We’ll also cover search engine optimization, helping them to get better hits.”
To me such news is confirmation of my belief that blogging though already established as an informal marketing channel is likely to transform into a legitimate corporate tool. Not only blogging, but other social media tools will have high impact on the corporate marketing mix. Whoever thought that SEO would be taught by IBM and that too by using teaching tools and products?
The move by IBM is not surprising since they have been at it for a long time. I have been tracking them and their progress for as long back as 2005. If some of you guys remember those were the early days for blogging and social media. I read an announcement that it was encouraging its 320,000 employees worldwide to consider engaging actively in the practice of ‘blogging’ ( looks like some official statement which it was) In short they were encouraging their employees to blog. What followed was a huge list of do’s and don’ts which to me was a lot of rubbish and not in the spirit of blogging. What I thought then was that these guys with business suits will kill blogging. But fortunately that’s not happened. In fact their blogosphere has broadened to encompass former IBMers (Ironically ,even those IBMers who lost their jobs are proud of their former employers)
What is the conclusion? Many conclusions I must say. The first is that large corporate are moving towards formalizing the informal channel. Starting with educational kits, we will see more sophisticated software tools which would integrate formal marketing and social media in such a way that the distinction between the two will vanish. Google for all its size is still a maverick. Its online tools are still at the periphery of serious business. But with big IT firms like IBM, SEO and stuff will soon enter the gilded boardrooms of established traditional firms.
Those who are reading this blog would claim that this movement has already happened. I beg to demur. It is only the IT companies who seem to have latched on to social media. Not the traditional businesses. For them online is still not mainstream. Only when I see serious players creating serious software tools for the serious traditional businesses will I concede that online has arrived. It may happen soon or it may take time (because of the financial meltdown)
Another part of Impact 2009 which interested me was the development of collaboration tools ( also called Web 2.0) which have been incorporated in Lotus as well as WebSphere . “Through the Lotus and WebSphere software portfolios, IBM is committed to bringing new collaboration and business process management capabilities to the market to better enable customers to work smarter,” said Tom Rosamilia, general manager, IBM WebSphere. Both these software are the flag bearers of IBM and any announcement regarding them has to be taken seriously.
The breakdown of IBM-Sun deal was a sad affair. I felt that Sun with so many open source projects would be ideal for IBM. But that was not to be. Now that Oracle has taken over Sun, it is not clear what will happen to the open source projects. Anyway there is no news from those guys, Oracle nor Sun. Why I mention this is that social media engagement requires a more open mind than what we have seen Oracle demonstrate. As I have said earlier, only when the big guns like IBM, Sun Microsystems etc. start firing that we will see the real transformation in social media activities. Traditional businesses will follow what these guys say. Google does not belong to the business class. Only when the informal channel is adopted by IBM and such that social media will become formal. This is the signal which everyone is waiting for.
