If IBM could stand for one thing, what would it be?

Say IBM took a stand on a certain subject, got behind a cause, what would it be?

For a consumer brand like Dove’s campaign for real beauty for example, this is very easy (ok, easier) but for what is essentially a business to business enterprise not so. That’s not to say IBM doesn’t touch nearly everyone of us at some point each day – just think of banks cash machines and shop tills.

My personal view is that the Dove example is a poor one, it is a brand not a company (Unilever) which has many contradictions with sister (or brother) brands like Lynx.

IBM has been a great supporter of diversity, especially gay rights, where more and more businesses are starting to understand that good employees come from a every area of our communities.

But what next? What is inspirational, how can IBM distill it’s many values into something simple and memorable?

Internal communications and social media

This web 2.0 thingy might actually catch on.

Start of the week was asked to talk with clients about how we use social media tools in IBM and demo some of the many we have.  As any one in IBM knows, we have loads of tools but the one they had heard of was Beehive.  We also went through Fringe, Cattail and Connections.  The people were mostly from Internal Communications with a developer thrown in, which makes me think that they were looking for ideas to come up with something homegrown.

Then today, day 2 of our Communications training, I got to show our own team some of the things I “play” with and that actually, they are useful, and no, it’s not just my job to use them, it is my job to help YOU use them.  Again mention Fringe, Cattail, Media Library, Dogear and BlogCentral.  I hope they just start with one each.

The usual question came up, “What tool do I use and how do I use them?”

1. There is obviously a way to share a file in Cattail for example but many more advantages and scenarios that it can be beneficial – someone the day before asked if I knew what Roo Reynolds presentations contained, I said, have a look on his Cattail page.. bingo!
2. Select one tool at a time, play and give it time, if it isn’t easy or getting you results after a couple of months, try something else.
3. Make time to play and enjoy it – it shouldn’t be a chore.
4. If you like it, keep using it and try something else new on top of it.
5. Don’t be afraid to give feedback to the developers – don’t give it to me, I’m not going to change anything for you.. how can I?
6. For the love of god, get an rss reader and save your time surfing.

Then later today got an email from a colleague who would like me to talk to more clients… oh this is so odd.

My cv as a wordle (tag) cloud

Here is my cv as a wordle or tag cloud.

As seen on many many blogs, the popular wordle.net keeps on thundering along like an out of control tank.

So far this week I have shown wordle to a number of people and everyone has gone mad for it.

Why not do your own? It’s a great way to start a meeting instead of name badges have these! Instantly find people with similar taste. I think we may use this to get across the idea of tagging in an education session coming up on social media we are running for the communications team in the UK.

Remember dial-up?

I believe Twitter have a similar set-up