Some 7,500 blogs last year have increased to about 15,000 corporate blogs this year, according to an IBM company survey of employee bloggers highlighted in a Journal News article Big Blue bit by the blogging bug.
IBM doesn’t just encourage certain people to blog, they’re encouraging all employees to blog – to the outside world and on the corporate intranet. As long as they adhere to the corporate blogging policies developed last year (developed by open contributors to a corporate wiki that formed the final blogging policy), employees can blog what they want.
To quote Julie Moran Alterio in her Journal News article:
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's vice president of technical strategy and innovation and the company's highest-ranking blogger, said Big Blue is encouraging employees to bone up on blogging for the same reason it asked them to get savvy about Web commerce in the 1990s.
"We absolutely recognize that blogging, just like the Internet, World Wide Web, Linux and open source, is a major initiative in the marketplace that we should be part of. This best way to be part of it is not to observe it passively but to do it actively," Wladawsky-Berger said.
IBM had the same idea when it rolled out tools last May that allow every employee to create a blog on the company intranet.
So far, 16,416 people have registered and 2,291 have
created active blogs.
Among the most popular bloggers is an IBMer from Japan who likes to discuss idiomatic phrases in English and a researcher in
I predict that within the next year we’ll see corporate blogging used by the sales force that demonstrates a positive ROI and a direct correlation to increased revenue. IBM is a leader in corporate intranets, blogging and ROI measurement – I can think of no better candidate to deliver that kind of ROI announcement.
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