March 10th, 2011
Get Social, Do Business Part 1 - Living in Two Worlds
Well, the Big Dog has come to play in the world of ‘social’. Welcome to all the people from my employer, IBM who are this year being challenged to “Get Social, Do Business”. To my friends who created the social world of the Yellow Bubble (largely Business Partners and staunch defenders of the faith inside companies) here are my friends and colleagues - IBM - please be gentle as they learn the ropes.
Many of you know that I’ve been blogging for some time. It started out because Richard Schwartz said once at Lotusphere: “Where are all the wimmin?” Because almost all of the early bloggers were men. I decided to blog about Notes Admin and other stuff, and if you read through my archives, there’s as much ‘other stuff’ there as there is anything technical. Frankly the explosion of blogs and wikis and decent search engines makes anything technical I publish sort of duplicate work.
But there’s something else. I live in 2 worlds - Certainly I’m a ‘blogger’ - one of the weirdos of the Internets who thinks anybody cares what I say, but also as an IBMer I’ve been writing official developerWorks articles for many years . Now this new toy called a wiki allows me to post stuff ‘officially’ that is interesting and helpful (like the C&S Schema) without going through Blue Tape (which is what I call the processes that all big corporations use to slow everything down). So now I can basically post stuff to an official product wiki that I would have posted to my blog in the past and it becomes part of the ‘official’ product knowledge for the people who follow in our career paths (or historians after the product is dead, depending on whom you choose to believe). And here’s the thing - purely selfishly, I get ‘credit’ for posting to the wikis and dW that I really don’t get posting to my own blog.
It is in my personal financial career interests to continue posting as part of official product support team. And those who know me know that I will continue because I am not stupid. Yet, I’m a bubble person, I’m a yellow bleeder, I hang out with the bloggers and business partners at conferences because I know more of you and you have incriminating photos. You scare my Blue brethren and many of them don’t know you exist. (Sorry, but its true). We’ll discuss PlanetLotus in a later blog post as I teach my colleagues about you.
So now here come this horde of strangers wanting to get all friendly and do stuff and have no idea of the mores and rules of the swamp we live in. It’s not Facebook - and that’s as social as most IBMer have gotten in their personal lives - we bloggers do tweet - most of us, most don’t use Connections for our socialness and frankly the largest communities I’m in are Skype communities. It’s going to be a challenge living with the new kids who are barging in all ready to ‘be Social’. We are indeed being exhorted to do so by our management - and I will ask you to help me with an assignment I’ve been given soon.
But friends, they’re here. Finally. IBM ‘gets it’. What they get is that the world that’s out here - where we live is where THEY should be, because WE made it worthwhile. Like young puppies, their huge paws will step on things and they’ll track hair and dirt all over the beanbags and sofas and they’ll change names of things you love and you’ll get mad. Property values will rise. But - IBM is celebrating its 100th year. I don’t always agree with management direction or choices, but I believe they’ll be here for more years than I need to work, because even if they don’t innovate always - as with geographically challenged coworker Watson, they’re moving - the elephant is taking dancing lessons.
So give my clumsy, awkward, mom and dad-like, country bumpkin or Harvard educated IBM dorks a break. Let them try their hands at this ‘social’ stuff. We may get a few new friends.
More soon - I need ideas!
