IBM’s Dutch Arm (Nearly) Takes Corporate Blogging To Next Level

The world of large Multinational Corporations is hardly thought of as a place for entrepreneurship and risk. And as a matter of fact, there aren’t so many best practices in the world of Corporate Blogging. To a certain extent, it isn’t either very new or very surprising. Right from day one, the Internet has attracted a lot of alternative thinkers and groups. Such Internet users – not all of them geeks – have used the Internet to voice claims and express alternative ideas. But corporations often find it hard to open up, and visibility from the outside world can often be perceived as a threat to the stock price and its evolution. However, from time to time best practice is shown by one of the big guys. I could not resist the pleasure of sharing the good news with you, even though we are not quite there yet.

The status of Corporate Communication
When information is put together in large enterprises, it is often surrounded with secrecy. Humongous Intranets are therefore built for internal only purposes. Most of the time, they end up being the epitome for a hell paved with good intentions. They are designed as repositories for precious and rare information but their very size and also the fact that they are purely internal is not really doing anything for their usefulness. Their content is often looked at as secret although it is often badly updated and mostly irrelevant. Not that I am saying that intranets are useless though. They are also the place where Corporate presentations are stored and shared but strangely enough, most customer facing personnel will continue to send each other files through the Corporate messaging system as long as it’s able to cope with the growing size of powerpoint files.

Taking it to the next level
But now there was IBM in Holland launching their ‘Next level‘ Blog in 2006 and here I see information, not data. Instead of building yet another internal repository dealing with innovation, our colleagues from Big Blue sponsor other authors whom they have selected – yours truly being one of them – and let them write openly and add content online as they wish. Now I say that this is really bold and worthy of note.

Alas, after a few months of hard work in the field at the end of 2006, and just before I delve deeper into more pre-sales activity, I decided to get back to my daily blogging exercise and I had a quick look at Next level. I therefore realised that the initiative had unfortunately died away and that the last post was one I had written for them last December (recently, on Feb 1, another post was added by the Webmaster but as it’s an IBM post this one won’t count). Nothing had been added to it in the meantime. Yet another sign that good ideas are also struggling. Close but no cigar, but let us hope that they are back in the saddle soon, and also that other large companies can learn from that (almost) best practice.