Calling all Corporate Social Media Workers

I manage Dell’s deployment of blogs for internal use globally — the URLs are inside our firewall. We’re currently at nine official communities (based on Community Server) and hundreds more informally (based on MOSS). The formal blogs feature posts and comments in six different languages (English, Spanish, Portugese, Japanese, Chinese and French). We’re a listening company and our employees appreciate it.

Bruceericatdell

Bruce,
I’ve heard Dell has a small army working in this space. Any of them blog externally on their own?

@Tac — yes, the most prominent is @Richardatdell (Twitter) on his personal blog here: http://richardatdell.blogspot.com/, pretty easy to find out there. I’m sure there are others (@Lionelatdell, our chief blogger), @johnpatdell (who runs our consumer blog) and many more on their own. How many are discussing tech issues versus fly fishing or underwater basket weaving, I don’t know. I’m in the latter category with my personal blog: http://bruceeric.wordpress.com. How about on your side?

bruceericatdell

Hi Tac

a small army is certainly an over statement :-). More like a handful of us keep in touch, listen and engage online with customers or others interested in Dell. In addition we have numerous external blogs focused on specific customer interests. These are authored by people at Dell passionate about what they are doing and wanting to connect online through blogs. The blogs include: Direct2Dell our main blog with versions in Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, and Norwegian, Dellshares for investors, our blog for Business information tech interests, one for small business, cloud computing, yourblog for consumers interested in digital life…as examples. We all have additional responsibilities, so our blogging keeps us grounded.

I blog externally and personally and I am search will locate it

and that pic is Lionel from Direct2dell, mine is in yourbloglog

Thanks for the comments Richard. But honestly compared to most companies even a handful of dedicated employees would be an army compared to most companies that have one or two employees who also cover social media. Kudos to you guys.

I consider myself a good teacher of 2.0. I have been on the side of trying to sell New Media/Social Media to businesses and I am currently (for the time being) in the corporate world force feeding the Kool-Aid.
Because times are tough companies have to evaluate the “need” and “value” of a CSMV and sometimes as much as you educate, they still don’t get it.
That is ok! I now understand the a bit of the internal workings of the corporate world…and I know that there are companies out there that see the value & need in a downturn market of Social Media…those that embrace will prosper.
-jen

Kelly was telling me about this blog. I’m now subscribing.

I’m looking forward to listening and being part of the conversation.

I have a ton of research that I’m trying to get out over the next 6 months but have been busy working on a new startup. I’ll make some time to get some blog posts up on my blog Furrier.org

I think that this is a great forum and site. Kudos to all. Let me know how I can help or participate deeper.

Thanks for doing this.

John

I don’t exactly blog for hp but i twitter for them and run the hpnews twitter service (twitter.com/hpnews) and a hp blog aggregator (which is in dire need of a new template and exception handler) of all hp corp blogs, etc. (hpblogs.infoslut.org)

Maybe hp should consider running an internal blog dedicated to Voice of the Workforce and have extracts from those up on their CSR external blog.

Cheers & thanks for taking initiative on the call Tac!

My company, AAA (national office), moved me from Public Relations practitioner into social media (still in the PR dept) about 10 months ago. We are slowly getting more involved in social media and may be starting blogs within the next few months. I believe AAA’s officers do “get it” but are more comfortable moving a little more slowly/deliberately than some other companies. My husband and I will be launching a blog shortly — when it’s ready I’ll come back and give you the URL.

Hi, I’m Stuart Brown. i work at The Open University in the UK, specifically online conversations / communities / social media. I blog at Social Communications here http://conclave.open.ac.uk/SocialCommunications/

I work for IP Commerce, a payments software company. We’ve had a “Platform Evangelist,” Tyler Hannan, blogging at http://tylerhannan.blogspot.com/ and talking about our company for several months with great success establishing awareness within financial institutions, software developer community, and payments industry. We also have another corporate blog for developers, http://commercelab.ipcommerce.com/Developer_Blog.aspx that several people contribute to. Our CEO has an internal blog for employee announcements.

I was hired about a year ago to do more traditional marketing communications and public relations, but my role has since expanded to social media and online community management. (I’m actually working on updating my job description now, which is how I found you.)

I started my blog about social media about a month ago, http://marierotter.blogspot.com/ because I met a lot of people that were interested in social media, but didn’t really understand it. My blog not only helps me understand it, but hopefully helps other people get better at it.

Thanks for being such a great resource!

I am employed at World Resources Institute, a non-profit environmental think tank (http://www.wri.org/”).

I manage my own personal blog outside of WRI’s website (http://dooleyonline.typepad.com/) as my content primarily deals with social media, online marketing and web analytics — important stuff but not relevant to our core WRI audiences.

I also am part of the standard social media sites — twitter, friendfeed, facebook, digg, del.icio.us, linkedin — which you can get to through my blog.