Action Research Project: Enabling social listening at IBM

Earlier this year I designed and led a four week Action Research Project. The aim was to gather insight into how sustainable, pervasive social (listening) research could be enabled within IBM's marketing and communications practice.

This project was not about developing specialised, highly trained social listening teams within IBM -- we have those teams in place. This project focused on testing ways to enable social listening to increase the surface area of a function by allowing staff to identify and respond to opportunities themselves.

In July 2012, 16 voluntary participants completed guided action learning cycles. The participants were broadly representative of the marketing and communications function: from 11 disciplines across 10 countries, ranging from senior executives to recent graduates. Data was compiled, analysed and presented to the business in a research report with recommendations.

Listening Action Research Project Report from Rowan Hetherington

I'm interested to hear from anyone else who is conducting similar research.

This project method is being re-run within IBM as an organisational learning system for listening, with results backing up the findings from the initial action research project.