IBM Social Computing Guidelines

One of the things we observed in our post about Facebook is that members are asked for the name of their employer. The same is true for Linkedin and a many other social networks and some multi-participant blogs. Your employees are representing you whether they intend to or not and whether you want them to or not. IBM addressed this head-on and a set of guidelines were developed and have been updated.

The most interesting aspect of the IBM guidelines is the context in which they were created:

[E]merging online collaboration platforms are fundamentally changing the way IBMers work and engage with each other, clients and partners.

IBM is increasingly exploring how online discourse through social computing can empower IBMers as global professionals, innovators and citizens. These individual interactions represent a new model: not mass communications, but masses of communicators. …

As an innovation-based company, we believe in the importance of open exchange and learning—between IBM and its clients, and among the many constituents of our emerging business and societal ecosystem. The rapidly growing phenomenon of user-generated web content—blogging, social web-applications and networking—are emerging important arenas for that kind of engagement and learning.

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IBM Social Computing Guidelines

Blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds and social media

In the spring of 2005, IBMers used a wiki to create a set of guidelines for all IBMers who wanted to blog. These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice—and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.

Below are the current and official "IBM Social Computing Guidelines," which continue to evolve as new technologies and social networking tools become available. available here

For the skeptics in our audience, the final admonition is:

Don't forget your day job. You should make sure that your online activities do not interfere with your job or commitments to customers.