IBM Internal Corporate Blogging Strategy Thoughts

Philippe Borremans, PR Manager, IBM Belgium & Luxembourg, commented on my IBM post about numbers today "total number of entries: 30913 posts, total number of comments: 13155, with an average of 1255 posts each month in the last 6 months. Let me know if you have more questions." 

That would mean with 3,600 blogs there would be an average of 2.9 posts per month per blog.  Hmmm...I thought that although IBM has a lot of blogs they might not have a lot of blogs that have a lot of content. 

I congratulate IBM on its strategy of internal blogs.  Both IBM and Microsoft have a very organic strategy to blog growth encouraging as many bloggers to blog as possible.  Other companies have a different strategy.  Now I think the strategy might work in terms of catching blogger who are diamonds in the rough.  But I wonder if IBM's recent announcement about encouraging every IBM employee was more an attempt to capture some PR. We have more blogs than you etc.  Though I would think IBM would be a little disappointed to see so many stories in the news when they have done so much to contribute to the corporate blogging environment.  However it’s difficult to reveal too much when most of your company’s blogs are internal.

I am very curious about the implications of having so many blogs and their usefulness with internal blogging.  I believe IBM is gaining a lot from internal blogging.  But as its internal we just don't know what is going on.  While IBM’s external blogging is more limited in terms of product development when I compare them to several other well-known software companies.

Don't get me wrong, IBM is one of the leaders in the industry, and IBM’s employees have made a substantial contribution to the blogosphere.  I do wonder about their blog strategy for customers and how effective it is in pushing product development, any thoughts Philippe?