Ethan McCarty

Editor-in-chief, IBM

Biography

Ethan McCarty

Ethan R. R. McCarty is editor-in-chief of IBM’s global intranet and manager of alumni relations

Ethan McCarty leads a team bringing IBM’s internal communications practice and alumni relations team into the world of Web 2.0 and participatory communications. A former journalist, Ethan came to IBM in 2000 on the heels of the dotcom bust to manage the internal and external web presence for IBM’s $6 billion/year research division. After two years in that role, he moved to IBM’s strategic communications team where he helped to co-author IBM’s groundbreaking blogging policy, contributed to the launch and popularization of the IBM intranet podcasting platform and worked on IBM’s award winning annual report to shareholders. For the past four years he has served as the Editor in Chief of IBM’s global intranet, also known as w3 or the On Demand Workplace. In late 2007 he began managing IBM’s global alumni relations effort, The Greater IBM Connection, which has grown to a community of more than 90,000 memberships.

He finds fascinating the implications of user generated content in the enterprise; social computing and new methods of information discovery for large organizations; and the role of the individual in a networked society.

Ethan also enjoys playing guitar and writing songs with geographically distant collaborators in his virtual band, Indelible Beancurd.

IBM

IBM has been well known through most of its recent history as the world's largest computer company and systems integrator. With over 407,000 employees worldwide, IBM is second largest (by market capitalisation) and the second most profitable information technology and services employer in the world according to the Forbes 2000 list with sales of greater than 100 billion US dollars.

IBM holds more patents than any other U.S. based technology company and has eight research laboratories worldwide. The company has scientists, engineers, consultants, and sales professionals in over 200 countries. IBM employees have earned five Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, nine National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science.

Presentation

Social media or editorial? Both!

Case: IBM

Online communication, Conference Day #2, Thursday May 6th, 1.00 pm - 2.00 pm

IBM’s intranet serves more than 400,000 employees world wide by providing them a highly customizable aggregation point for content and applications.  No surprise, social media and collaborative technologies and practices are an integral part of the experience.

In this presentation, Ethan McCarty, IBM’s Intranet Editor in Chief and Manager of Workforce Enablement gives an overview of how he and his team manage the global editorial program and a federated constellation of nearly 2000 publishers through social media and community approaches.

Ethan will also show several examples of how his team is integrating social media into “traditional” intranet editorial to achieve communications objectives – user generated content, video, live twitter feeds, Lotus Communities, commenting, rating and tagging.

See slides online

Philadelphia 2010: Why noise is essential on websites and intranets