IBM recently announced layoffs of 15,000. It also announced plans for a massive corporate blogging initiative. But SiliconValleyWatcher suggest that the two are connected at this post (emphasis added by me):
Early next week IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging
initiative in a bid to encourage any of its 130,000 staff to become
online evangelists for the company.The move comes on the heels of IBM’s most recent quarterly financial
report, which missed Wall Street expectations and led to announced
layoffs of 15,000, with more than 13,000 of those lost jobs in Europe.
The company hopes blogging could help stem further losses if it can
galvanize employees into an army of online evangelists for IBM’s
products and technologies.
I dunno about this. I can see how Scoble has shifted the tide of support for Microsoft, but this sounds like a wacky connection on first blush. That said, if there does turn out to be some statistical correlation (e.g., for revenue or for diminishing layoffs), it would be interesting to measure the marginal effects based on cost of blogging versus cost of traditional marketing.
Update (5/17/05): As related to blogging at IBM, here is their published corporate policy on the subject.