Social Media Policy – A Different Perspective

February 3rd, 2010Keep Good Staff, Manage Staff, Staff Management 2 Comments

In today’s HRwisdom blog post, we’re taking at slightly different look at the issue of social media policy used in the workplace.

The term ‘social media’ refers to the internet-driven communication tools such as blogging, Facebook, Linked In, and so on.

Whilst many businesses face difficult decisions when managing the use of social media in the workplace, today we bring you an interesting story from a more positive perspective. This perspective comes from Casey Hibbard in her blog post which examines a bold use of social media at IBM.

In her report, Casey presents the following IBM social media statistics:

  • There is no IBM corporate blog or Twitter account
  • There are 17,000 internal blogs
  • 100,000 employees use internal blogs
  • 53,000 members of SocialBlue (like Facebook for employees)
  • A few thousand “IBMers” on Twitter
  • Thousands of external bloggers
  • Almost 200,000 on LinkedIn
  • As many as 500,000 participants in company crowd-sourcing “jams”
  • 50,000 in alumni networks on Facebook and LinkedIn

Casey notes that rather than being a cost to the business in employee time, this mass employee social interaction apparently helped identify the 10 Best Incubator Businesses, which IBM then funded with $100 million.

Casey Hibbard interviewed an IBM representative who described the ‘crowd-sourcing jams’ which are three-day online employee forums:

“It was a big, online collaborative experiment. The first 8 to 10 hours, it was very negative. Over the next 12 hours, the conversation completely changed to being very constructive.

By the way, there was no intervention by corporate to say, ‘Hey guys, let’s be more constructive.’ It was completely employee-led.

We realized we could trust employees to engage. Employees realized, ‘if we’re within reason, we’re going to be trusted’.”

It will be interested to track IBM’s progress in the world of employee-led social media policy innovation.

Kind regards,

HRwisdom Support

2 Responses to “Social Media Policy – A Different Perspective”

  1. Michael Specht Says:
    March 21st, 2010 at 4:59 am

    Hi There,

    I have been following IBM and their movement into social media for almost 5 years now. The first step was management handing over the writing of their blogging policy to employees. These guidelines have been enhanced over time and now take the form of IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines, again written by employees:
    http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

    A few interesting additions for your post.

    Jeff Schick IBM’s Vice President Social Software was quoted at CeBIT this year that IBM has seen a 28% reduction in email traffic with the introduction of collaboration tools.

    Further IBM’s approach to collaboration has significantly impacted their learning programs. Here is a presentation done last year by a Melbourne based IBM’er http://www.slideshare.net/wonderwebby/hr-futures-conference-jasmin-tragas-ibm

    Finally their approach to openness has significantly changed the attraction and onboarding processes. The best example I have seen of this is Sacha Chua’s story, http://specht.com.au/michael/2009/06/17/social-recruiting-summit-2/

    Regards

    Michael

  2. HRwisdom Says:
    July 27th, 2010 at 5:59 pm

    Thanks Michael.

    Great to hear more about what is still a developing area for many businesses. The IBM social media experiement (or way of doing things) has many lessons to share with businesses of all shapes and sizes – the decrease in email traffic you quoted is a case in point.

    Do keep us posted on developments as members of the HRwisdom community do tend to be very proactive and keen to embrace new ways of positively attracting, managing and retaining good staff.

    Thanks again.

    Kind regards,

    HRwisdom Support

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