I won something

Not the lottery, stopped doing that years ago. This is an IBM award for spreading the love about social media in IBM.

flying papers by Aldor

Some people think I should talk about these sort of things mroe often, ok, here goes.

The full name is “BlueIQ Most Valuable Ambassador” which along with 9 others I won in the first half of 2009. It is actually the 4th consecutive time I have been given this award, which I think shows how much I enjoy and believe in what we are doing.

The idea of the award and the BlueIQ community (it’s global not just the UK)  is simply to help other IBMers get as much value out of using social media as possible. This can be as simple as a one to one education session but go all the way up to looking at ways of changing culture and processes to be more social in outlook.

Although just about everyone in IBM has contributed to one (usually several wikis) or commented on a blog or w3 article, there are many less obvious things they can be doing that improves their working life, expands their network, makes finding stuff quicker and improves their employability.

Anyway, so a global community of nearly 900 (and growing) ambassadors are there to help, to sort the wheat from the chaff of new applications and websites, to enable employees. As you know I work in internal comms, which we call Workforce Enablement so it fits right in with what I do.

In a nutshell, my philosophy is that I can’t possibly know everything that is going on in the business, and sometimes the best people to tell the story are those that lived it, so I can sure as hell help those people get out there to talk and work.

You know, many of us get caught up in what we are doing and although there will always be the geeks, early adopters and simple masochists that want to endure the latest release of everything, not everyone will. So as the human filter for the innovators in IBM we help shape in some way the things that devs come up with and try to get to the people that can find new ways of employing it at work.

Part of the award is that we get to pitch an idea to several of our VPs later in the year… I need to think about that one.

London hosts “International Employee Communications Summit” in June

This year Ragan Communications are holding their Employee Communications Summit in London this year (June 4-6).

This is a great conference for communications professionals which covers hot topics, like social media, by IBM’s very own, Ethan McCarty. In fact there is quite a lot about on-line communications, from intranet redesign to social media and engagement and video podcasting.

I would love to go to this but not sure I will at the moment as we expecting a baby round that time, however, if you are interested I can pass on your name to the conference Director, who may be able to help you on the price – I can’t guarantee anything.

We are used to the likes of Meclrum so it would be nice to see this from what I think are an American outfit although many of the companies are British based, such as the keynote by BT on – you guessed it – intranet. I so want to go.

The summit is actually on 2 days, with a pre-summit workshop….. well before it. Not sure what is in that.

Back home

Been back almost a week now. Just getting back into the swing of things, sleeping, cleaning, shopping and working.

It takes a while, forgot all those passwords, what I do, how I do it.  Surprising how slow it is to remember some things yet cycling to work has been oddly easy.  Perhaps all the walking we did kept strength in my legs – it certainly didn’t do a lot for all the food I was eating.  So much of it and so nice.

Quite easily the most enjoyable time we have had in Taiwan.  May be it is having the kids grow up or just feeling more at home their or even understanding more Chinese than I used to, which is only thanks to my daughter who is totally fluent now with a great accent too.

A couple of days before we left I was chatting to a mummy in the park, she lived in Canada previously although born in Taiwan, where she had been working for the last two years. The opportunities she mentioned were quite eye opening.  She even offered to introduce me but I was leaving two days later and then she was off to China to work on a new business project.  Shocked I could earn more in Taiwan than here in the UK (and also get to learn Chinese which is one of my person goals.)

May be after a few weeks the dream will fade?

Innovation ecosystem and employee communications

That is my job for the next year.  Getting employees, partners, clients and influencer’s interested in innovation.  To be precise much of it will be about telling our communications story… that’s employee communications not telephones.

IBM is way ahead in using new media and social networking tools to enable employees to connect, collaborate and communicate themselves.  Our Media Library, hosts podcasts, videos and the like, has 14000 items and had getting on for 5 million downloads.  The vast majority of those are not produced by the communications function but by regular employees creating and communicating with their communities.

On our blogging site, BlogCentral, we have 42,500 users. How is this helping? Building virtual teams and communities all over the place, making connections and links that would never had happened because most of us wouldn’t pick up the phone to a random person 4000 miles away to chat about LPARS or marketing strategy.  Like mobile phones, we wonder how we got by without them.

Something we borrowed from Yahoo! Hack Day is also kicking off again and provides a great opportunity for us now to get a vast array of people involved in innovation and development that would otherwise not know how…. possibly finding a few great little apps or offering.

Some exciting stuff as usual to happen this year and I haven’t even started on Wimbledon yet.

The Greater IBM Connection

Well I finally got round to joining this Xing group for current and mostly former IBMers.

Having taken up the role of New Media in UK Communications (whatever that means) this seems like a logical step to make, not only to expand my network and keep in touch with old friends from IBM but also to see what it is all about. Is it different from LinkedIn and Facebook?  Well yes, very different from Facebook but LinkedIn, not so sure… need some more investigation.

Anyway, if you are an old IBMer sign up and see some old faces.

greateribm.xing.com/index.html

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and then something went pop!

saturday morning I had just about had enough of the tonsillitis, it was getting more painful as one side of my throat got ever bigger.  I got up and made breakfast and was sitting, trying to read nursery rhymes to my daughter then got up for the thrid cup of tea (as that seemed to be soothing it somewhat.)

As I switched the kettle on there was a strange feeling in my neck, a release of pressure and a rather vile but glorious taste… whatever it was that was holding back the wall of pus had burst and the pain was gone (more or less).  I was so happy… the taste and smell from my mouth totally foul but the joy and relief was unbelievable.

I’d just spent the last 5 days sweating for England in bed, hardly eaten a thing and it was pretty much all over. the headaches, the earache, the constant stabbing in my throat, the endless waiting for the next batch of pain killers and the lump under my chin was getting smaller.

I was so excited on Saturday morning I went out looking at bikes instead of going to the hospital to plead they stab something in my neck to relieve the pressure.  However, I realised by 12 that I still wasn’t 100% as I collapsed in a sweaty, tired but happy heap on the bed.

I’ve never had tonsillitis like this before and hope I never do.

Started with the Chinese again

I found an old CD when searching through the garage the other day, it is the first 8 lessons of Pimsleurs Mandarin Chinese.

Now I have been trying to learn for years and haven’t really sustained any effort but revisiting this CD it turns out to be really useful.  If you haven’t heard of it this is a very simple system of repeating words and phrases, adding in new words along the way and then revisiting old words again as the “teacher” asks you things like, “Say you are English” or “Ask her if she is American” etc.

What I find where this system is better is that you have to think and remember words in a more natural way and in context – much like a child just starting to speak.  The growth is more organic rather than individual phrases and word lists.  Saying out loud is obviously important and this is emphasised in the course.. you need to train your voice to say the words – not just think them.

The full set costs about £225 – which is a total of 90 (30 min) lessons.  You can try a quick start which is the first 8 lesson of most of the languages they do (for about £10) which I would certainly recommend you try – quite a few libraries have the quick start cd’s too.

I also cannot stand the written English Pin-yin.  If I learn to write I think I would rather try  the Chinese pin-yin and characters..at least it would be more use when I Taiwan.. the only bad side is that Taiwan uses the tradition characters, not the simplified – so it makes that job a little harder still.