What a difference a couple of decades makes. Today IBM is one of the most prominent adopters of social media. Here are the numbers on usage of different tools by its 400,000 employees:

• Internal blogs: 17,000
• Members of the Beehive social network: 60,000
• Daily page views on IBM’s internal wiki: 1,000,000
• Participants in its four Innovation Jams: 500,000
• IBMers on Twitter: 3,000
• IBMers on Facebook: 52,000
• IBMers on LinkedIn: 198,000

Big Blue applies social media both to internal and external communications. Because more than half the employees work outside of a conventional office, media like blogs and podcasts have become essential elements for tying teams together on projects.

Adam Christensen is Social Media Communications Manager at IBM. In that capacity, he helps define policies and best practices for dissemination across IBM’s global workforce. Not surprisingly, he’s also an active blogger, tweeter and member of multiple social networks. He tells David and Paul how IBM’s embrace of social media is opening up the company and making it more efficient.

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Paula Berg (Ragan Communications photo)

This week we talk to Paula Berg, Manager of Emerging Media for Southwest Airlines and the team leading the airline’s efforts in blogging, podcasting, and other social media.

In a corporate blogging world that has turned in mostly unspectacular results so far, Southwest is a standout.  The company uses ordinary employees — not high paid executives — to tell its story, and they do so with marvelous candor and enthusiasm.  Nuts About Southwest has a joyful irreverence that reinforces the airline’s offbeat, slightly goofy image. Recently, Southwest added video and podcasts to the mix in a manner that truly looks planned.

Southwest has done a lot of things right in this world, and we find out how customer conversations have changed the company’s policies, how Southwest gives its people lots of leeway in choosing what to contribute to the blog, the online “voice of the company and how its first Twitter-based “screenplay” came together in the past couple of weeks.

(17:08)

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Since the book came out, Forrester has been at the center of controversial research that indicates that corporate blogs are missing the mark by failing to communicate with customers in meaningful new ways. Businesses are still casting about to find a means of engagement that works for them and blogs just aren’t doing the job at the moment.

Bernoff believes that corporations will find the right tools, but the bigger goal should be to humanize interactions between them and their constituents. In his frequent writings on the Groundswell blog, he argues passionately that years of cost-cutting and automation have robbed many businesses of their personality. Now they have the means to become genuine, but too many companies simply use new media to force the same old message down the pipe. No wonder Forrester Research has recently shown a corporate blogs have less credibility than advertisements. In this interview, he talks about how social media continues to shake up the status quo.

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Here are a few stories that dramatize the role that citizen media played in the coverage.:

• A couple that survived the Mumbai terrorist attacks are interviewed on Charlie Rose.
• On The Media interviews Arnab Goswami, chief editor of one of the Indian English-language TV networks, about their role.
• On The Media interviews Gaurav Mishra about whether all the Twitterers were responsible or aided the terrorists.
• Amy Gahran on PoynterOnline talks about lessons learned and how Twitter uses can do better with real-time reporting.
• And Mindy McAdams has ten rules for online journalists here.

David and Paul also remark upon the blockbuster announcement out of Detroit this week that the city’s two largest dailies will scale back their print operations and move much of their journalism online. Is this a bold new innovation or a Hail Mary pass?

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Krista Gleason

Eastman Kodak Company has been transforming itself from a maker of film-based products into a comprehensive maker of imaging products and services. With a growing line of digital photography, output and online services, the company has been trying to remake its image through multiple channels, including social media.

Kodak maintains blogs devoted to products, photography and the business of graphic communications. It’s also active on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other direct-to-the-customer channels. The social media conversations are based on contributions from some 70 corporate bloggers, who provide a constant stream of information about the company, its markets and its customers. Krista Gleason joined the company a year ago after a career in government and she is learning to apply blogging to the company’s public relations efforts. In this interview, she talks about how Kodak manages multiple blogs, chooses people to represent it online and the remarkable freedom it provides its staff bloggers to write about what they choose.

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Shel Israel

When Paul and David were reporters working for major tech publications, they used to occasionally get pitches from a PR guy named Shel Israel. Israel’s been around the business a long time and knows the ins and outs of pitching reporters. He also understood very early that the rules were changing and that power and influence were moving into the hands of individuals.

In early 2006, Israel teamed up with superblogger Robert Scoble to publish Naked Conversations, the first book to dramatize the increasingly powerful effects that bloggers were having on markets. The book’s success catapulted Israel into the category of industry thought leader. Suddenly, people like David and Paul were calling up asking to interview him!

Which is precisely what they did for this episode. In an interview set up via the great democratizing agent called Twitter, our hosts spent a half hour with Shel Israel talking about the continuing evolution of markets into conversations. In a session that really is more conversation than interview, Israel spoke about the impact that Naked Conversations has had on his career, but more importantly about the changes that social media are engendering in the public relations field. It’s not a matter of if PR pros should engage with online influencers, he said, it’s a matter of how quickly they can rush to learn the new rules.

Shel Israel is brash, funny and very opinionated. This half-hour clip should give you an indication of why he’s become such a prominent voice in new media.

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That is one big bunny!

As EF Schumacher once wrote, “Small is beautiful.” This week, David is a dinner guest at Chez Gillin in Framingham. We use the f2f opp to interview his lovely wife Dana about her own bunny-related podcasts and related Web properties. We talk about the importance of smaller, more focused markets, which is ironic given the level of alcohol consumption made us anything but focused. The moral of this podcast is to find your passion, develop that passion into a niche and dominate it completely with your various Web-related efforts. (We apologize about the poor sound quality, and promise to do better with future podcasts.) Paul’s jeer is about the frequent rescheduled appointments from PR people and how much time is wasted therein. David has a cheer for Jeanette Maher, IBM’s PR doyenne, and hope we can reconnect with her soon.

You can download the podcast here.

Procreation is like Windows Explorer – it’s built into the operating system. (Weren’t you starting to wonder if Bill Gates was God?) The default mode is pregnant. And here’s the thing – you’ve been using the pop-up blocker! So turn it off already … and let nature take its course.

You can download and listen to the episode here.