IBM has taken to blogs and podcasts in a big way according to a pair of articles in the Journal News, a paper serving Westchester County, NY, the site of IBM’s corporate headquarters.

The first article, by reporter Julie Moran Alterio, describes IBM’s enthusiastic and well thought-out approach to blogging. After discussions with bloggers inside the company, IBM management decided that it was in the company’s best interests to encourage employees to learn about blogging “‘…for the same reason it asked them to get savvy about Web commerce in the 1990s…’” according to “Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s vice president of technical strategy and innovation and the company’s highest-ranking blogger.” So, IBM adopted a three-pronged strategy for blogging in the company:

• The company is hosting blogs on topics important to its business, such as video games and health care.
• IBM is encouraging employees to create blogs for internal consumption on the company intranet.
• Employees who do blog on the Internet have IBM’s blessing — providing they follow some practical guidelines.

The rules include identifying yourself as an IBMer if you talk business, not revealing company secrets and stating clearly that your opinions are your own.

There’s good stuff in the rest of the article related to blogging in a number of forward-thinking corporations, along with a sidebar* providing links to all the sites mentioned in the story, and a few bullet points on “Corporate Blogging 101.”

The companion article, also by Ms. Alterio, follows the (inevitable?) expansion of the blogging program into the realm of podcasting.

*Many newspapers maddeningly don’t hyperlink inside the text of the articles—perhaps in a pre-CSS need to keep one set of source text for online & off-line uses?—so, using the sidebar for this purpose is a great solution. Thanks, Journal News.

(via Intranet Blog)

Technorati Tags: ibm, blogging, podcasting, intranet