It is an interesting time we live in. In a world where high-tech meets social networking things can run on the hairy edge of information leakage or brand management, especially in a public company. However, during 2008 and 2009, when big companies were trying to figure out what to do within the ‘social media’ fray, I was working at EMC and EMC did a fantastic job of embracing social media and using it to their advantage to drive a number of very positive initiatives. So much so that I believe in August of last year they won an award (or were at least publicly recognized) for their use of social media. I have to commend Polly Pearson for this. Driving a brand with no less than 20 bloggers (probably more), among them the likes of Chuck Hollis, Barry Burke and StorageZilla, all of whom tweet as well, one would think would take quite a bit of corralling. Interestingly though, it didn’t. The main reason, trust.
Each person at the company who blogged took that ‘role’ very seriously. Each person I knew who blogged wanted to not only be the top EMC blogger, but the top blogger in their respective area of expertise. EMC bloggers are very smart people and have a desire to be the best at what they do. EMC bloggers have driven some of the most authentic and original blogs with great thought leadership in the storage industry. It is because of the desire to deliver great quality content that they lived by a set of rules that anyone who worked for a public company would adhere to.
- Don’t divulge any company secrets – which is a part of your employee agreement anyway
- Don’t say things that are untrue or could get you in trouble in the future
- Deliver great content
And if there was ever a question, there were always folks internally who you could bounce your thoughts and ideas off of before posting. It was for these reasons, as well as trust that propelled EMC to the top of the high tech social media ladder.
EMC also took social media thing to whole other level. EMC uses twitter to chat with users who have questions and inform their following of product announcements to keep them informed. EMC also has multiple facebook pages ( some for different products), a YouTube channel, LinkedIn Groups, friendfeed and even a flicker page. It seems like EMC understood that these outlets provided avenues to get information to their customers in the way they like to receive it (which is what social media is all about) and that because EMC is a vehicle to drive a lot of thought leadership content, customers look to them as a trusted advisor which in turn drove their brand.
In 2009, at EMC World, EMC had a bloggers lounge, sponsored by ZDnet, where anyone employees, press, analysts, and even users could go and blog about the event, it was brilliant and generated a ton of activity.
Then, after the acquisition of Data Domain, a chunk of the blogging wall started to crumble. As the management from Data Domain took over in the new BRS (Backup / Recovery Systems) Division, bloggers (in the BRS division) who had driven a great deal of thought leadership, for both the company and for their users, were asked to not blog and that there would be a ‘new’ blogging policy. However, if you felt you needed to blog, you could do as they did at Data Domain and just regurgitate a press release to keep your readership informed. Additionally the BRS group was trying to drive a new blogging policy across the company as noted by the number of times EMC bloggers ‘Disclaimers’ have changed over the past few months.
I guess this is what happens as big companies get bigger, the need for more control and I find that more control tends to drive less creativity and innovation. High tech companies even do this in R&D. Take a look at EMC’s R&D budget and divide where the money goes between innovation and acquisition. More of it is spent on acquisition these days.
The icing on EMC's social media cake however came the other day when I got this message in my LinkedIn Inbox after I had posted my latest blog link in their EMC World Group in the discussion area. The purpose was to offer an alternative to storage tiering by using data compression.
And then my discussion was gone.
It seems now that EMC has stooped to censorship in their need to control what information their customers see. I find it ironic as I did not mention the name of my new company in the blog post. As I said, I simply offered another alternative (a thought leadership alternative) to solving a complex storage problem. An alternative that EMC claims they have as well (though not quite as robust in its implementation).
It got me to thinking. In 2008 EMC claims that 8000 people came to EMC World, if 1500 of these people were employees, then there were about 6500 users. In 2009 they had half as many attendees at 4000 with about 750 employees – so say there were 3250 users. The EMC World Group in linked in has a total of 308 people. Approximately 50% of these people are employees, analysts, press, students and partners, the other 150 are users. I would hardly call what I did as “spamming” the EMC World Group.
I know the Group is an EMC group and they can probably do whatever they want to control the content but where does Linked In draw the line between an invited member to a group being allowed to share their ideas, which is what the group is all about, and censoring the content to only be what the group administrator (who isn’t even a storage technologist) wants it to be?
This is one of the main reasons why I love Wikibon and think they have a fresh idea on thought leadership. Smart people can put content in the wiki and then if other users have an alternative to the solution, they can comment or add to the post. This is what helps users to be more successful in their roles, not censorship.