The power of community   Blog enabling IBM An ear to the blogosphere   Policies and risks Strategic blogging   IBM blogging technology

Interviewees are Harriet Pearson (HP) and Willy Chiu (WC).

HP - "Social networking, that is, people connecting with each other enabled by new technologies that, like blogs, wikis, the web generally speaking, instant messaging, other forms, peer-to-peer are enabling people to reach out and connect."

WC - "If you look at what blogs do really is allowing individuals to post their expertise, talk about topics of interest."

WC - "So you immediately create credibility on the Internet with these blogs and the blog postings and the customers who reach out and look for those for content, identify who the experts are. And you begin to build this relationship."

HP - "I think people are motivated to share their expertise and to share what they know. And I think if you can tap into people’s desire to share what they know and to be relevant and important, you can tap into a very powerful motivator."

HP - "One of the must-dos in any corporation's blog strategy is to have your ear to the ground, is to be listening to the chatter and the conversation happening, not just in the regular channels, not just the press, or others who might follow your business but actually, now, to the whole world."

WC - "A CEO is interested, first of all in the opinions that are out in the marketplace about their company."

WC - "So from the point of view of opinions, being able to look at the millions of blogs out there, there are like fifteen million blog pages."

WC - "Increase that by eighty thousand every day, it& 39;s an enormous amount of information to process."

HP - "One of the other emerging policy issues, particularly a global or international company has to grapple with and understand is that from country to country, society to society, cultures embrace social networking and personal expression in very different ways."

WC - "And in some cases you can actually see the trends before they have a really dominant impact on the business. So you have this headlight that you can look into and you can mine the information on these blog pages."

HP - "You have to be strategic and proactive in deciding how to engage, but one element has to be keeping an ear out, listening."

WC - "A company, how do they know they're ready for blogging? I think one of the most fundamental questions is how open do they want their company to be?"

WC - "When you unleash the power of blogging to your employees, you're really communicating to the world. You're communicating to employees, and from employees to customers directly."

WC - "Having blogs gives businesses an edge in, first of all, helping them create customer loyalty."

WC - "Secondly, they are also very excited about blogging because it helps speed up innovation."

WC - "And thirdly is the whole area of teaming. Part of this whole collaborative set of services."

WC - "Blogging is the glue that brings all the experts together within the company."

WC - "That reaches out to business partners and customers as well."

WC - "We believe having blogging as part of our on demand strategy, being able to respond to new business needs, being able to provide a blogging environment where it communicates the urgency of new business threats or new business opportunities is absolutely a strategic consideration that every CEO needs to look into."

HP - "We have been encouraging blogging for quite some time now. And by last count we have about twelve to fourteen thousand active bloggers in IBM who are active from - can you believe it? - about seventy or seventy-three countries at the last moment.".

HP - "It's actually an international phenomenon at IBM.".

WC - "We have an internal IBM blog facility that's called Blog Central. We have over 12,000 users that, that post blog pages regularly.".

WC - "We also have a blog site where we have a technical community relationship with the technical developers out on the Internet, where our technical experts available on developerWorks dialog about standards, Linux or XML standards or Web services or service-oriented architecture.".

WC - "And over the past year alone, the number of users, the number of entries has quadrupled. So you can see the rapid rise in interest within IBM's community.".

HP - "One of the elements of our guidelines asks our employees to be quite vigilant and don't disclose information that's private. That means private as in confidential information, information the company would not want to disclose because it's valuable to our competitors, or it has something to do with financial statements, earnings, for example. You wouldn't want to have that disclosed on a blog, or anywhere else, for that matter."

HP - "I mention the process we used to develop our blogging guidelines. And that process was very grassroots-oriented. You know, finding a group of bloggers who had already come to some collaboration and some creation of guidelines and really working with them to refine them."

HP - "Engaging in blogging is no different from talking on the phone or e-mailing each other or being in a meeting. The same kind of expectations and rules have to apply."

WC - "One of the innovations is how do you scale? You know, when you have a large number of blog users, creating large numbers of postings, and being able to handle the massive increase and the rate that you increase is one of the innovations that we've created"

WC - "We have business intelligence. We have data mining. We have many, many years of experience of mining information. But what is published in weblogs is really unstructured data, unstructured information. And that requires different search techniques to do advance analytics."

WC - "We also provide interoperability which is a standard so that you can actually publish, not only internally but publish out externally."

WC - "So you have all those innovative ideas that are in our research labs, our development labs, that can be unleashed."

WC - "Those are the kinds of tools that will be made available to come into the marketplace."

My name is Willy Chiu. I'm the Vice President of High Performance On Demand Solutions, I'm part of the Software Group. My job is to work with leading edge customers to implement highly scalable, high performance on demand solutions. I'm also responsible for building IBM's Blog Management System with the idea of helping customers enable their businesses with blogs.

My name is Harriet Pearson. I'm currently Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Chief Privacy Officer for IBM. And I've been engaged in leading a team of folks at IBM who've been developing and working on our blogging initiative.