Stuff IBMers Say — Following a # Conversation on Twitter

The last 24 hours have been a lot of fun and laughs tracking the IBM Twitter conversation about common IBM sayings, hashtagged #stuffibmerssay.

 The impressions were on their way toward a million (granted there are over 400,000 IBMers), several hours ago. I've shared the URL with a few friends, and no one was quite as amused by it as I was, lol. I'm not sure if you have to be an IBMer to really "get it", or if working for a large corporation would be sufficient.

Two things about the thousands of contributions really struck me:

1) I've not seen any metrics about this yet, but I would say there were more sayings about conference calls than about anything else — IBMers obviously spend a lot of time on the phone working on teams that are spread across countries and across the globe. (For instance, I only have one other teammate on the West Coast. The majority of my team are on EDT or CDT. I work early hours compared to most other Californians.) We participate on calls at all hours, and have a lot of common sayings. (I'm going to be self-conscious now every time I say, "Who's joined the call?" or "I was talking on mute", lol)

2) We use collaboration tools all of the time — we are eating our own Social Business cooking, as the saying goes. I hadn't realized how ubiquitous so many of them have become that we don't even think about how we use them daily. Communities, team rooms, status updates, expert locators, full function instant messaging where you can drop in a screen grab or file, pull other people into a conversation, instant web conferences, you name it. We use these social collaboration tools without even thinking about it any more.

At a glance, working for a company with 400,000+ employees spread around the world sounds large, intimidating, impersonal, distant. This Twitter conversation has shown me once again how social — social networking, social business, social collaboration — connects us all, personally.