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.

“We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”

Thousands of IBMers are the voice of the company. Such an approach might be surprising for #14 on the Fortune 500.

Edgy at 114

At 114 years old, IBM seems to be the Madonna of the corporate world, staying relevant from decade to decade. The first company to build a mainframe computer and help NASA land a man on the moon still holds more patents than any other U.S.-based technology company.

As it turns out, its decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company’s history—driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation.

IBM lets employees talk—to each other and the public—without intervention. With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM’s, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense.

“We’re very much a knowledge-based company. It’s really the expertise of the employee that we’re hitting on,” Christensen says.

No Policing

IBM does have social media guidelines. The employee-created guidelines basically state that IBMers are individually responsible for what they create and prohibit releasing proprietary information.

But the document lacks any mention of brand messages or values.

Nor does IBM corporate regulate employee social media activity. Only three people hold social media roles at the corporate level, and oversight isn’t part of their jobs.

“We don’t police. The community’s largely self-regulating, and so there hasn’t really been a need to have someone go about and circuit these boards and blogs,” Christensen said. “Employees sort of do that themselves… And that’s worked wonderfully well.”

17,000 Inside Blogs

IBMers use tools such as Twitter and LinkedIn for external activity, but take advantage of mostly IBM tools inside the company. Internally, 100,000 employees have registered on the blogging platform to rate and comment on posts across 17,000 blogs.

In this vibrant forum, employees exchange ideas, advance conversations and do a little self-promotion of their projects.

An internal wiki serves as a hub of information, drawing well over a million page views every day. Additionally, downloads in the company’s user-generated media library now total 11 million.

An IBM tool called Dogear functions like Delicious, a social bookmarking site. Blue Twit mimics Twitter. A tool called SocialBlue acts like Facebook, helping employees stay connected with former colleagues and get to know new ones.

Like Facebook, the 53,000 or so SocialBlue members share photos and status updates. In IBM’s widely dispersed environment, family photos mimic cubicle-decor and dialogue mimics water-cooler interaction.

Thousands of Voices

Run an online search for “IBM blog” and you’ll find countless IBMers posting publicly on everything from service-oriented architecture to sales to parenthood. If you want to blog at IBM, you simply start.

IBM lists all of its blogs in a simple directory sorted by the name of the blogger.

They share thoughts, ideas, presentations, photos, videos, you name it. In 2006, the IBM mainframe blog hit the big time for posting a series of videos on YouTube that linked back to the blog. The Art of the Sale mockumentaries, in The Office style, lightheartedly poke fun at IBM and corporate sales in general.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSqXKp-00hM

Additionally, an estimated 200,000 employees are on LinkedIn, with another 50,000 former employees in alum networks on LinkedIn and Facebook.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Christensen ties IBM’s social media explosion to company “jams.” In 2003, IBM conducted its first jam, not unlike a band jam, bringing employees together in an online forum for three straight days.

“It was a big, online collaborative experiment,” Christensen said. “The first 8 to 10 hours, it was very negative. Over the next 12 hours, the conversation completely changed to being very constructive. By the way, there was no intervention by corporate to say, ‘Hey guys, let’s be more constructive.’ It was completely employee-led.”

“We realized we could trust employees to engage. Employees realized, ‘if we’re within reason, we’re going to be trusted’.”

A couple of months later, IBM opened blogging platforms inside the company.

IBM now includes much bigger and more diverse crowds—as many as 500,000 people in some cases. An innovation jam in 2006 brought together employees—and friends, family and clients—to discuss more than 50 research projects within the company.

From there, they voted on the 10 best, which became incubator businesses that IBM funded with $100 million, all based on “crowd” discussion.

Smarter Planet

A few incubator businesses—intelligent utility systems, smarter transportation systems and electronic health records—were the start of what is now a major IBM movement, Smarter Planet. The initiative puts IBM computing power and problem-solving toward issues like rush-hour traffic or natural disaster response.

It really began as a grassroots movement among employees.

“There are communities that, long before IBM started talking about it, had already congregated online and were talking about these areas. We are very focused on understanding where those communities are and how we can appropriately play with them.”

Christensen himself is one of several authors on the public “Building a Smarter Planet” blog, which highlights ideas and initiatives on the topic, not just within IBM.

Here is a screen shot of the Building a Smarter Planet Blog.

But all the public IBM Smarter Planet discourse is not just about amassing IBMers. Sometimes Smarter Planet projects—which can impact millions—need public support.

“There are communities that are passionate about this, and maybe we can help to amplify some of their voices and really make some of this just happen,” Christensen says. “So social media plays a big role in it.”

The Payoff

IBM invests in creating its own social media tools. But it’s earning that back by monetizing some of those as part of the IBM product portfolio. The other part of the investment equation—employees’ time—doesn’t seem to be a concern, according to Christensen.

That’s because collaboration and knowledge make IBM what it is. And that’s a company with $12.3 billion in earnings on more than $100 billion in revenue with a 44.1% gross profit margin in 2008.

Christensen says to date there’s not an effort to tag a return on investment to its social media efforts.

“I think if you’d ask any senior executive at IBM, ‘How important is it for our employees to be smarter?‘, inherently they understand that these tools can play in helping with that,” Christensen said. “I don’t see myself rarely or ever having that hard conversation on the value of engaging employees in these spaces.”

What do you think about IBM’s social media program? What level of control have you found most effective for your company’s social media efforts? What are your favorite crowd-sourcing tools?  Leave a comment below.

At a time when businesses are using social media to promote content and start discussions, Avaya has found that listening trumps talking.

“We’re listening to social media and responding,” said Paul Dunay, Avaya’s social media ringleader, who is global managing director of services and social media marketing.

“There is no Tweet that goes unturned. No forum post that goes unturned where our name is mentioned.”

What began as a way to engage and support customers has evolved beyond even Avaya’s expectations. And if Avaya ever doubted its investment in social media, those concerns are now put to rest.

A recent quarter-million–dollar sale, which began on Twitter, soundly answered that question.

Making the Case

Avaya started in 2000 as a spinoff of Lucent Technologies, but its legacy goes back more than a century to the original Bell system. From the earliest phone systems to advanced, unified communications, Avaya and its predecessors have been – and continue to be – at the forefront of the field.

It makes sense then that Avaya would be wherever people are communicating today. The company’s social media activity started informally and grew organically. First, it was mostly a matter of supporting – and keeping – existing customers, many of whom need replacements as old phone systems are retired.

At the time, Dunay followed Avaya mentions on Twitter, which were mostly questions that he forwarded to support reps.

“The old 1.0 way was a call center or inputting tickets on the web,” he said. “2.0 is we’ll try to reach out to Avaya support which is, by the way, me on Twitter.”

With the growth of social media, those mentions soon became too much for Dunay to simply watch on his own. He brought his case to Avaya’s CMO, and left with official backing to build a cross-functional, global, and virtual social media team.

“It was very easy for me to build my business case on retention of existing customers because it’s so expensive to get new ones,” he said

Customer Conversations ‘Everywhere’

Through word of mouth, Dunay found early social media adopters within Avaya’s 15,000 employees, starting with seven people across communications, marketing, support, legal and other business units. As the team began organizing Avaya’s social media strategy, they chose to focus on four main tools: Facebook, blogging, forums and Twitter.

From there, Avaya’s social media was “literally an explosion,” according to Dunay. That team of seven employees has now grown to 50 – all of whom volunteer to participate in social media on top of their regular jobs.

Today, the company has 42 Facebook groups, five Facebook fan pages, one external blog with 10 regular Avaya writers, 10 global Twitter accounts, and 12 LinkedIn groups. Internally, Avaya leverages social media just as much, with 14 internal blogs, 15 wikis, about 3,000 employees on Yammer and some on the recently launched Socialcast.

Facebook serves as the hub, with events, news, discussions and links to blog posts. The blogs discuss trends, innovations and cultural insights. Twitter allows them to post quick bits of information, respond to support requests, and monitor mentions of the brand and competition. Forums enable customers to get help from each other or from Avaya tech support.

With significant momentum, Dunay reported back to the CMO. “She asked, ‘Where are we talking to customers?’ I said, ‘Everywhere!’ She asked, ‘Where are we holding conversations with partners?’ I said, ‘Everywhere!’ We’re holding all the conversations in the same places with each one of those constituencies – and then some.”

Contests, videos and other resources engage Avaya’s Facebook fans.

The Eyes and Ears of Avaya

With active listening as the team’s main approach, members found they simply couldn’t be everywhere at all times – especially as mentions of the Avaya name grew to between 1,000 and 2,500 weekly. They turned to Radian6 technology to listen to and measure all social media mentions of not just the company’s name, but competitors’ names, product names, and types of conversations.

“We identified conversations we wanted to go deeply into,” Dunay said. “Wherever conversations about small business and communications happen, we need to be there.”

Avaya tracks a dashboard of mentions, and can choose to either ignore or respond to each. When one member “hears” something requiring further action, he or she posts it on an internal wiki and it’s assigned to someone on the relevant team to address it. That might be support, billing and finance, engineering, a partner, and so forth.

Dunay stresses that none of Avaya’s responses are automated. Who knows what a customer or prospect might say? If your response isn’t tailored to their comments, then you’ve missed the opportunity to connect on a personal level.

The 58-Character Sale

On average, Avaya interacts with a couple of dozen customers through social media on a weekly basis. By listening, the team also comes across sales opportunities. In June of this year, 58 characters of a simple Tweet started the relationship with a potential customer.

“shoretel or avaya? Time for a new phone system very soon,” the Tweet read.

“In less than maybe 15 minutes, we had seen it and figured out what the heck to say to this guy,” Dunay said. “I wrote back, ‘We have some highly trained techs who can help you understand your needs best and help you make an objective decision. Give me a call.’”

Dunay referred the gentleman to a business partner, and 13 days later, they closed a $250,000 sale. At the same time, the new customer’s follow-up Tweet went out: “…we have selected AVAYA as our new phone system. Excited by the technology and benefits…”

“We were there. We were listening. It pays to listen,” Dunay said. “I can’t say we hit 100% of the conversations where we’ve wanted to be, although it’s probably 60–70%. But on our brand name, it is 117%. We’re on every one of those.”

Avaya proactively identifies and responds to support issues using Twitter.

One Tweet Away

By proactively looking for mentions and conversations, Avaya sees issues before they even arise, before anyone contacts the company. A response to a social media mention truly makes an impression on customers, prospects and partners. “We are the early response center for things happening in the marketplace,” Dunay said. “They love knowing you’re one Tweet away.”

Avaya’s social media team grew quickly, but Dunay has an even bigger vision for social media.

“I don’t think it should be 50. I think it should be 15,000. Everyone should have a hand in it,” Dunay said. “We definitely want more people deeper and broader in the organization.”

“Our goals are to have deeper, more interesting and more pervasive conversations with as many people as we possibly can,” he added. “Why wouldn’t you take every opportunity for your brand to build better and deeper relations with every customer you can?”