News from Social Sandy @ IBM
by Volker Weber
Read the invitation first, and then click on it (or scroll down).
Comments
This is serious.
That's very funny.
Hi Vowe! ROFL!! Hilarious, indeed! Perhaps this other tidbit may help explaining things a bit: "At IBM, we don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID". Will you be joining us on May 3rd? :)
That's who I want advising me on how to get "social" alright. What a cluster*!&%
Luis, when you have 8% of your employees on Twitter, you can no longer have an "official" account? Come on, you have analytics, you have Watson. Figure something out to give us the interesting stuff aggregated into one stream.
I guess somebody has lost the password. Or the company has lost the person that created the account. :-)
Nearly missed it - as you say, need to click on the invitation graphic to get the point.
The word that comes to mind is 'despair'!!
Hi Volker! Thanks for the follow up comments! Actually, that's not the case; that IBM account, from what I know, was created by someone else and IBM claimed it back in the day; it was never meant to be an "official" account, because it's been IBM social media policy to not have a single voice, but to let it down to those IBMers using social tools to become the IBM voice. And that's been like that, since the early 2000s when the first few hundred fellow colleagues had their blogs up and running. IBM has never established an official account for any of the social networking tools out there and it's not going to start now.
It was just simply a matter of claiming that account back and have it come back to life at some point as another voice, not *the* voice, so that's still happening. And for a very specific reason that folks will find out about in its due time ;-)
Ah, that's interesting.
Why would you have an IBM Brasil account and completely neglect a global IBM account? I mean you could at least explain in a tweet from that account where to to look elsewhere. At least point so something like whois.ibm.com, only for Twitter.
have it come back to life at some point
"Wait for us, we are the leaders." :-)
Like I said, the fact that the account is there AND "inactive" doesn't necessarily mean it will be inactive for good! In fact, I know for a fact it's the process of channel through a specific set of interactions and will be brought back to live shortly. The fact, there is an IBM Brazil, like a bunch of other countries and products / offerings, is because someone within those organizations has decided to make use of Twitter using that handle; it's a combination of official accounts and personal accounts.
The key point here, Volker, is that there isn't A SINGLE Twitter voice flagged as "IBM"; to be honest, it will be rather boring considering the complex ecosystem IBM has got going on. But, like I said, that @ibm account is "dormant" at this stage and waiting to be active shortly (Will nudge the folks behind it to come along and perhaps drop a comment over here as well...)
All understood. But:
Some simpletons like myself find a "protected" feed for IBM really really funny.
It obviously needs explanation, but there isn't any, right there.
If there was a single tweet like "IBM has many voices on Twitter. Start here: ibm.com/twitter. And stay tuned for more.", people could follow the account and wait for the wonderful things you are alluding to.
One twitter account implies that IBM has one voice and theme. The only unifying theme (smarterplanet) is so vague as to be useless.
IBM is the United Nations of IT. The only things that can be agreed upon are things that are blindingly obvious or 60,000 vaporous.
One thing that is clear is that if IBM did get a unified voice, it would say things that Loti would really, really dislike.
Thanks, Volker! On
1. Yes, I agree! It's hilarious! Just like those other hundreds, if not thousands, or millions of protected accounts that may have a very good reason for doing so, without giving an explanation. @ibm should have one and it will come. In its due time, my friend. Hang in there for a little while longer (Got that confirmed today ;-) hehe)
2. Yes, it needs to probably have an explanation, but from what I found out today that explanation will no longer be needed, since it's been worked on as we speak to bring it back to live under a specific context already hinted in this post :)
The moment I know the account goes live, not to worry, I will be letting you know as well about it :) For the time being, there are a whole bunch of other accounts worth while tapping into and converse, don't you think? :-D
Coming soon:
IBM Smarter Twitter
Here's another example of how NOT to do a twitter account, although I imagine that this is what IBM's account will be like.
Disney is/was testing an official account for folks visting Disneyworld:
http://twitter.com/#!/TodayatWDW
It has really useful comments like:
"When the weather heats up, cool off in our many air-conditioned indoor attractions. #disneytips"
and
"You may find dining locations quieter and with less wait times between 3 - 4:30 p.m. #disneytips"
It's almost as good as "I just became the mayor of", "go team go", "i am sitting in 12a", "great meal today", "i think i just farted".
I talked about that same Twitter id at the beginning of March to the same answer.
I think the point here is that IBM is pushing hard on the social business front and continues not to clean up the existing in-house social architecture. Letting hundreds of thousands of IBMers tweet is awesome, if you only knew where were offical and which were not.
IBM is on Twitter 40 Billion Times, Who Do I Follow?
That post broke the Notes 32k limits so it had a follow-up that started
@Chris, a bit puzzled about your comment on the concept behind "official"; what would be the difference between an official IBM Twitter ID account and that of an IBMer? Aren't they both managed by people at the end of the day? Are you saying that all of the other IBMers with Twitter IDs are not "official", with their own voices? Trying to understand here the difference ... Thanks!
@Craig, that's an easy one! Yuk! I would be the first one to unfollow such an Twitter ID account; in fact, I may already have a bunch of times! ;-)
