Eating one's own social networking dog food

I had a very good meeting yesterday at IBM IOD 2009 (iod2009) with Jeff Schick, VP of Social Software at IBM and Don Neely in analyst relations for Lotus Software. We discussed a large number of recent IBM wins for their social networking and collaborative offerings with the emphasis of the conversation focused on Lotus Connections. Not sure if these are yet referenceable accounts and so names won't be mentioned, but suffice it to say that IBM is getting good traction in the collaborative space with some very large organizations, including a 35,000-seat deployment that went into production yesterday.

Some numbers on IBM's use of its own social networking capabilities:

• Currently 410,000 IBMer profiles and an additional 75,000 contractors in its system.
• There is an average of six million lookups each day, or roughly 12 per profile each day.
• IBM's internal microblogging capability went from 0 to 150,000 users in the first 10 weeks after its introduction.
• There are currently 5,600 social communities across IBM representing various products, sciences and other groups.
• Every IBMer profile contains his or her social networking posts, enabling access to a growing variety of information on expertise, travel plans and other content.

Clearly, IBM is getting some significant traction with its offerings externally, and is also making good use of the technology internally. We also discussed how the value of social networking is measured in a company -- IBM has published an interesting way of measuring the value of social networking that I am looking forward to reading.