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Creating a strategy to support organizational culture and working practices
AN INTERVIEW WITH PHILIPPE BORREMANS
Social media - friend or foe? For IBM, ever keen to connect its 340,000 global employees more effectively, it's the former. But this has more to do with the organization's desire to change its culture than any obvious technological advantage, says Philippe Borremans. In an interview for Melcrum's new report on How to use social media to engage employees, he explains the cultural and strategic significance of IBM's approach to social media.
"The first step in building a social-media strategy is to recognize that it's not for every company or every employee," says Philippe Borremans, new media lead in Europe for IBM Communications. "I can't claim this is a natural fit for every company. It all stems from understanding what kind of company and culture you're working in. But for us, it's the right way to go."
A company at ease with technology
At IBM, it's certainly a natural fit. "Big Blue" has an illustrious history of being at the forefront of technology-based corporate communication. From the multimedia brainstorming "WorldJam" that made news headlines back in 2001 - in which 50,000 employees worldwide joined in a real-time, online idea-sharing session about the company's future direction, and which has been reprised in numerous similar "Jams" since - the company has set out its stall as one prepared to use breakthrough technologies to establish a two-way dialogue with its employees.
Little surprise, therefore, that in the last few years it has been recognized as being in the vanguard of social-media use: IBM was one of the first Fortune 500 companies to get behind collaborative wikis, published internal blogging guidelines as far back as 2003, and is now moving fast beyond RSS and podcasts into videocasting and "virtual world" technologies like Second Life.
It would be wrong, says Borremans, to assume that this is simply a by-product of IBM being a leading-edge technology company. "It helps, of course, but that's not what it's about," he insists.
It reflects the very way IBM does business, rather than the type of business it does: Increasingly less command-and-control, top-driven and hierarchical, it's spent the last decade developing towards a consultancy model of business - with...