The Impact of Corporate Culture on Social Media(An IBM Case Study)

Adam Christensen, IBM

January 22, 2009

Corporate culture

v. Social media

Corporate Culture + Social media

= Fail

= Success

Enterprise social media formula

Business Model+

Corporate Culture+

Desired value=

Social media success

Proper roles of management & employees

Top DownEmpowerment

TrustTools (availability)

GuidelinesValue

Bottoms upInterest

Tools (selection)Participation

IBM’s starting point

Business Model• B2B NOT consumer• Company of experts• 386,000 employees• 170 countries

Culture• Intensely diverse• Progressive• Highly collaborative• Risk averse

What did we do?

Empowered everyone to participate

Learn from mistakes (or near mistakes)

Social Computing Guidelines

Building a culture for participation started inside first

Experiment. A lot

1. Empower everyone

Trust employees. They are the brand

2. Learn from mistakes

(or almost ones)

Near shut-down of ValuesJam 2003

3. Community-developed guidelines

IBM Social Computing Guidelineshttp://www.ibm.com/blogs/guidelines.html

tag cloud by www.wordle.net

4. Startedinside.

Like to swim, but afraid of the ocean?

Photo courtesy of David Sifry: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dsifry/2173895296/

5. Experiment.

A Lot.

BlogCentral - 67,000 users, 16K blogs, 140K posts, 140K comments

Beehive – 53K members, 63K photos shared, 2.9K events

WikiCentral – 150,000 users, 1 million views each day

InnovationJam – 4 Jams, more than 500,000 participants

GreaterIBM Connection – 50K in alumni network on Facebook/LinkedIn

Media Library – 8M downloads

Final thoughts

Projects without regard to culture fail

If current culture doesn’t align, start to create it

Top-down mandates generally don’t work

(but neither do completely grassroots efforts)

Experiment and learn

Connect

This presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/adamclyde

Twitter: http://twitter.com/adamclyde

LinkedIn:www.linkedin.com/in/adamchristensen