Posted on October 10, 2006 at 1:53 PM in thoughts
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
Robert Scoble pointed to a couple of newish employee and company blogs in the past couple of days, Intel's IT@Intel and an anonymous blogger at Apple known as The Masked Blogger.
IT@Intel's mission statement is as follows:
...several of Intel’s top IT leaders, who share their perspectives and invite discussion on the issues they and other IT managers are facing today. The blog offers an “inside look” at Intel’s IT operations and provides opportunities for you to exchange ideas directly with the IT experts who keep Intel’s business running and growing.
As for The Masked Blogger, his/her goals appear to be to push to improve the customer service experience. One of the first entries concludes with this focus question:
"I know there are many talented and passionate individuals in the AppleCare organisation, behind the Genius Bars in Apple stores, and in Apple's channel. How do we ensure they understand what a failed notebook means to an individual that will have 500 people in an auditorium for the keynote presentation the next morning? How do we empower them to help?"
Travis points out that the mask may not be obscuring all it intends to. Is the blog's RSS feed address giving away the blogger's identity? I could at least pick out that the person is from the UK based on use of phrases like "carrier bag" and the fact that they shop at Sainsbury's. There's more speculation over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
Our own VP of Corporate Communications Dan Greenfield did a two part interview recently with Christopher Barger, who leads the blogging initiatives at IBM. IBM has a huge number of bloggers -- 24,000 registered -- and that's still not 10% of their employee base. One of the more interesting points Barger raised is that they've always valued conversation and collaboration in their corporate culture, and that since 2001 they've put on "...three day directed brainstorming sessions that can involve all 320,000 of our employees, facilitated by corporate communications." Wow. Not having attended one of those it's impressive that anything involving that many people can come together and resemble collaboration.
For historical comparison and perspective, here's an interesting blog entry on a similar subject from IBM's Ed Brill back in 2004, comparing notes with Scoble and Microsoft. Back then IBM had just over 600 active blogs on their 'official platform,' and more on independent platforms.
Comments
To take ol' Scoble to task for a moment, he doesn't seem to realize that Apple's locked-down culture is part of a strategy--they don't want to announce products until they're shipping or relatively close. That way, consumers can actually buy the product at the same time they're excited about it.
Which is not to say that they don't regularly go overboard with the secrecy, just that Scoble seems to miss that aspect of it.
Posted by Jeff Durland | October 10, 2006 7:09 PM
See, I enjoy this unmasking because I don't really get the point of being a blogger (or robot) in disguise. Attaching a friendly face (or in the case of blogs, a voice) to a blog (esp a corp. blog) is a nice thing. It's a good thing. I think the Apple blogger is trying to make himself more interesting than he actually is by having an alter ego.
Posted by Crvs | October 10, 2006 7:25 PM
Thanks for the food for thought, Jeff and Crvs. I ended up writing another blog entry about this, and hopefully I addressed/encapsulated your thoughts there.
Posted by Dave C. | October 11, 2006 10:37 AM