Through my twitter stream, I came across this post, which is quite simply a fantastic account of how a company which understands the opportunity behind promoting and supporting its employees in their external blogging efforts, can harness the power of the medium.
Today, we used our social media machine to accomplish something big and visible that we just couldn’t have done any other way.
It talks about how EMC’s employee bloggers contributed to a highly successful new product launch announcement
We’ve now got a small army of EMC bloggers who are very proficient outside the firewall. They write well, cover things from an interesting perspective, and are each “followed” by many in the industry.
and the results
Perhaps one of the most effective “big idea” launches I’ve seen anywhere in our industry, ever.
Completely unachievable with a “1.0” approach, I might add.
Then goes on to discuss some of the details of how they got there
How Did This Come To Be?
Easy.We thought having a cadre of effective external bloggers was damn important, and we invested in getting what we thought we needed.
No one thing, a lot of little things:
* We made it “OK” to blog externally. We created external blogging guidelines (not “rules” or “policy”) in the input of our bloggers.
* We created a lightweight governance function in the event that our guidelines needed clarification or application to a particular circumstance.
* We created an internal support group of people who were either blogging externally, or wanted to. We gave people encouragement and coaching.
* We asked our PR organization to embrace and leverage our external bloggers, and change how they did things sliightly.
* We gave people an internal platform to practice (EMC|ONE) their blogging skills in a safe environment.
The bloggers brought the passion and expertise, though.
We just harnessed it.
Great to see real-world examples where this is both happening and being discussed.
PS: Unfortunately I didn’t catch who tweeted the link to this, so can’t add you to the credits, apologies! 🙁
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