Social Networking: How Does Ibm Do It?

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Social Networking: How does IBM do it? Point Paper by Rajiv V [9/16/2014] CRITICAL FACTS  IBM’s award-winning developerWorks site was established in 2000 as a technical resource for the company’s global development community. (Pearlson, 2013)  Designed to share knowledge and skills related to IBM products and other key technologies, it has been a great success. (Pearlson, 2013)  The site attracts 4 million+ unique visitors a month which includes students, professionals, and developers from across the globe, who search its library of 30,000 articles, demos, podcasts and tutorials. (Pearlson, 2013)  DeveloperWorks is available in 8 languages, including Russian, Chinese, and Spanish, and about 70% of visitors come from outside IBM. (Pearlson, 2013)  “My developerWorks, a social networking function built on the IBM Connections platform, was added in 2009 to allow developers to connect, communicate and collaborate on projects. Soon the network had added more than 600,000 user profiles, as well as numerous blogs and forums.” (Pearlson, 2013, p. 134)  Its forums receive three and a half million page views and 1M visitors per month. (IBM)  Its online community is growing quickly, with 400K+ active profiles, over 1000 community groups, 800+ active bloggers, 450 wikis, and 20,000 shared bookmarks. (IBM)  “In addition to allowing established business, start-ups and partners to collaborate, it also helped IBM deflect frequently asked support questions that would otherwise go to IBM’s call centers and help desks, thus saving the company an estimated $100 million.” (Pearlson, 2013, p. 134)  Alice Chou, Director of IBM developerWorks, carefully monitored the number of My developerWorks profiles and the volume of traffic to the site. (Pearlson, 2013)  She looked at unique visitors, developer demographics, time spent on the site, and patterns of page views.

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