How IBM Uses Social Media to Spur Employee Innovation
“Be yourself.” It’s one of the rules of social media. If you’re blogging, tweeting or Facebooking for business, be real—or you won’t be followed.
Yet, how do you pull off “authentic” while maintaining the company brand message?
It’s tough enough for a small business. What if you’re #2 on Business Week‘s best global brands list, with nearly 400,000 employees across 170 countries?
At IBM, it’s about losing control.
“We don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation. 
9 Ways to Get More From Twitter
If you talk about social media, invariably someone is going to say something I’m sure you’ve heard a lot: “I don’t have time to chit-chat. Time is money, and I don’t care about a bunch of nerds’ opinions anyway.” …or something along those lines! Twitter is often the target of such criticism.
Now, reading Social Media Examiner, you might be surprised to hear that sometimes I think people who say this have a point. Sometimes.
Fact is, if you see Twitter or any other social media service as a venue for chit-chat, and that’s how you use it for hours a day, then you’re likely better off doing something more productive with your time.
On the other hand, there are ways to get a lot of value out of Twitter. As with most things, it all depends on how you use it.
We programmers have a saying: “Garbage In – Garbage Out.” This essentially means you get out what you put in. If you put in chit-chat, don’t be surprised if that’s all you see in return!
Here are nine benefits I’ve personally seen through my couple of years of Twitter usage.
