Recently Ragan.com interviewed me about IBM’s http://www.asmarterplanet.com blog — their writer, Matt Wilson, put together a tight article that gets at what we’re trying to do with the blog.

What he couldn’t really have captured (because we didn’t discuss it!) is how grateful I am a) to work for a company that gives its employees the air cover, permission and mandate to participate in social business with such a cool vision (smarter planet), and b) to work with great people like Steve Hamm, Kevin Winterfield, Jack Mason and the many other contributors and editors of IBM’s smarter planet blog.

Read Ragan’s article on IBM’s smarter planet blog

Check out how popular the article is on twitter…wow 🙂

>I haven’t been writing much, but that’s because I’ve been busy as all get out! Along with getting married, going on a honeymoon in Turkey, and moving back to Brooklyn….I have a new job at IBM. I’m starting a new department within the Digital Strategy group called ‘Digital Expertise Enablement.’ The term ‘expertise’ is a bit of a double entendre here…on the one hand, I’m own a software development and business management project designed to identify and cultivate IBM expert and display them in digital contexts; on the other hand I own a program designed to increase my global team’s digital marketing acumen through a series of workshops, materials and support activities. Whew! That is some mega-buzzword-ology. But that’s how it goes in the hi-tech world.

The nice thing is that, by contrast to the intranet and Internal Communications work I’ve been doing at IBM for the past ten years, there’s more I can talk about publicly. Not that most of what I was working on was secret; it was just behind IBM’s firewall.

For example, you can see an early iteration of the IBM experts we’ve surfaced on this smarter planet page. We have more sophisticated designs and methods for doing this coming soon.

As for the other project — the digital strategy workshops — you can see some photos from my most recent trip to China last week. Overall, I was very happy with how it turned out. The China team seems enthusiastic about implementing the digital planning model — and they’re already doing very cool stuff with digital.

>A month or so ago I presented at two different conferences in Philadelphia — the J. Boye conference and the Council for Communications Management annual meeting. I met great people at both events and a had a good time presenting. It’s always fun to show off your work (or well, I find it fun anyway) to an engaged audience. and I got to ride Amtrak, which was fun too.

Anyway, the first presentation has the startling thesis that the way you manage your editorial team directly correlates with the kind of content you will have on your intranet. We have chosen, at IBM, to take a community approach to content management and have been able to scale the number of publishers to the thousands and have reached record levels of employee engagement (many of our articles will have, for example, lively discussions appended to the bottom of them and readers freely tag the content and rate it etc.)

The second presentation i an overview of financial reporting to employees. Again, a startling thesis: I believe companies should communicate and contextualize their financial results for their employees, which means doing more than posting the press release on the intranet (though that’s a good start.)

So there you have it. A couple presentations for ya. Enjoy.

>Just read a great article in the NYTimes about The Death of the Open Web by Virginaia Heffernan. As someone who runs a welled garden site (for former and current IBM employees, http://www.greateribm.com) I can speak to both the benefits and challenges. The high signal to noise ratio that I can provide for my users is worth its weight in gold — and that’s one of the things that an intranet provides an employer too (a way to crank down the volume of the ads, obscenity and other cyber detritus on the web for its employees.) Most intranets and marketing-run walled garden website don’t run ads, though I have seen a few. I suppose you could argue that they are just one big advertisement, but if the value offered to the user is high enough, it isn’t really an ad at all. What do you think?

>IBF’s Nancy Goebel has a good list for key performance indicators for intranet news in her blog post at the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. Depending on how your intranet is configured, you could certainly add things like ‘action taken’ to the KPIs…like, did the reader download something, click to the next action etc. This is, of course, assuming your have action-oriented content in your news….which you should, imho.

>Thanks to Rebecca Selvenis at Google for sending this link to Andy Shainldin quoting me about alumni programs my way…I am still flattered when someone quotes me on a blog. It’s because I am, at heart, an old man who still thinks quotes matter 🙂

>I’m doing two presentations in Philadelphia next month. The first will be at Janus Boye’s conference on May, 6th. My spiel there will be called “Editorial or social media? Both!” Let’s pretend for a moment you’re riveted by this catchy title…lemme explain: most intranet content is driven by the need of the publisher (typically organizational announcements, executive stuff etc), but it doesn’t have to be stiff and, in fact, integrating social media into the editorial can help employees find others with similar interest, get excited about their work and learn how to be better at what they do. I’ve been working on methods for doing this in a way that doesn’t cause the organizational culture to self-destruct for a while and have a team of people I work with at IBM who re doing really nice work integrating social into editorial — something that many external publications do too. It’s clear to me that just because employees are “stuck” inside the firewall for most of the day doesn’t mean yesterday’s broadcast-oriented publishing models will work. Anyway.

The second spiel I’m doing is the following day at the Council for Communication Management’s 2010 conference. I’m going to give a bit of an overview of how IBM’s intranet editorial team is structured (yes, I’ll be borrowing from my own pitch from the day prior)and then focus on the way we communicate financial performance to employees. Sounds boring, but I’ll try to liven it up with some music and dance. Kidding. Maybe.

>Not that you have the time to read a the transcript of an hour-long speech, but last night I read through Eben Moglen’s remarks from his February address to the Internet Society’s NY branch.

He walks through some fundamental decisions about how the web would be built that were made early on in the name of consolidating power rather than sharing it and goes on to demonstrate how the business models (such as Google’s and Facebooks) that resulted and prospered are fundamentally bad for human freedom. Here’s a sample:

The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.

Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works.

That’s the sad part, it works.

How could that have happened?

There was no architectural reason, really. There was no architectural reason really. Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.

And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.

I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.

He makes some points about how Microsoft’s vested interest in the client/server model as opposed to peer-network model laid the groundwork for all this — very interesting to me. It sort of makes me want to just unplug myself from the social web, but I think it’s far too late for that. Even if you don’t tell Google your social security number, he points out, they know it anyway because you are the only one who hasn’t. It’s the mosaic effect for everyone and everything in a panopticon world.

He suggests a technology-based fix at the end that I think is mostly wishful thinking. I don’t Pandora is going back into the box — even if the box runs open source software and has pretty good security. The potential for freedom in the cloud is not going to come down to a technical fix — it’s going to have to get a whole lot worse before people get wise about managing their identity and privacy on the web. The market desire is so strong for php baubles and free web hosting that there’s gotta be some real pain before anything changes…and it will change when there’s a product that meets the needs of the collective lizard brain recoiling from it.

>I was at a meeting with IBM’s digital agency along with Pauline Ores, who I work with at IBM and she came out with yet another one of her killer analogies. She described the way that many companies are approaching social media is as though they have just heard about the idea of public transportation and so decided to buy everyone a bus. Amazing — this is so true (and often true within organizations as well.) I am sure you are all getting competing invitations to join online “communities” that really aren’t communities at all — they’re more like magazines with passwords. Especially in that they are devoid of the essential ingredient: people interested in helping one another.

On that same point, I am wondering if people from an internal communications/field enablement function are the worst or the best people to lead a company’s charge into the social media space. On the one hand, they typically have a high familiarity with web-based tools. On the other hand, they often see the world as an audience to be reached through a set of channels. Who wants to invite a spammer into their community (or join a spammer’s community.) Afterall, this is why God invented tivo — so we can SKIP the commercials, right? But if these people can shift their perspective to one of service to the audience (as opposed to, say, the short term goals of their own management) then they are the perfect agents for this kind of work. Those publishing skills could come in handy — or as Pauline and I were discussing, what was once spam could turn into a gift, if it’s produced in service to the community as opposed to targeted at an audience.

I am banking on this being possible.

>No, I’m not talking about their personal compensation. Rather, your company’s financial results. Was it a good year? Was it a bad year? Is it enough to just point them to the press release? Does it even matter if your employees understand your company’s financial results?

I’d argue that it is critically important that people have a well-formed understanding of their employer’s business model and results against that model. For one thing, it helps contextualize the decisions that senior leaders make — from provisioning IT, to the size of expense accounts, to travel expenditures, to increasing/reducing the size of the workforce etc. And since so many people own shares of their employer’s stock, it just makes good sense to understand your investment (don’t you wish that sentence could be teleported back in time to Enron and Worldcom employees?)

I’m going to attend — and speak at — the Council of Communication Management’s annual meeting. This year one of the focus topics will be communicating financial results. The size of IBM and the demographic and geographic diversity of our employee population has made communicating financial results challenging, but we’ve come up with some approaches that I hope the CCM members in attendance will find worth hearing about.