IBM Creating an Army of Evangelists

Silicon Valley Watcher: Early next week IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging initiative in a bid to encourage any of its 130,000 staff to become online evangelists for the company. Tom Foremski's Q1/05 financial results, which missed financial analysts' expectations and led to ZDNet report with additional commentary. Tom's report says that IBM hopes blogging could help stem further losses if it can galvanize employees into becoming an army of online evangelists for IBM's products and technologies. Employees will be taught what blogging is, and they will be guided on what is appropriate blogging content. The goal is to help improve IBM's competitive position in key IT markets by having more of its tech gurus participating in online communities and discussions. This huge-scale blogging plan is visionary, to say the least, but the goal must be regarded as extraordinarily ambitious. Mind you, imagine if only one percent of IBM's 130,000 employees become outward-facing bloggers - that's 1,300 new bloggers suddenly on the scene, about as many as 2,800 internal employee blogs. I bet that number has increased substantially and geographically in the ensuing two months. There are also the efforts IBM is making to Reader Comments... Neville Hobson is the author of the popular Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog: