How does it feel to be the best-known blogger in one of the largest companies on the planet and still wake up every morning in paradise?  I asked IBM social media evangelist and uber-blogger Luis Suarez that, via Skype, yesterday, just after he returned from the beach to his home in a small village on the island of Gran Canaria, third largest of the Canary Islands, a Spanish-owned archipelago located in the Atlantic Ocean 210 km from the northwest coast of Africa.

"It feels wonderful," Luis says. "A unique experience... even more when my boss, Gina Poole, VP Social Software tells people she has an employee in the Canary Islands and she knows more about him through social software than most of the folks she hangs out with at her own office. It's quite interesting because many people that I bump into tell me that."

Luis has been living and working on Gran Canaria exactly four years ago today, having persuaded his bosses in IBM Netherlands that he could accomplish more in his knowledge management, collaboration, and community building work than working in Amsterdam. He started an internal IBM blog on December 13, 2003 and in 2005 decided to launch a personal/business public blog called Elsua. A year later, he was invited to blog on knowledge management on ITtoolbox.

If Scoble was the "Microsoft blogger," Luis Suarez became the "IBM Blogger." Through his blog posts he created enthusiasm for social media to the point where he began being invited to participate in conferences, webinars, workshops, customer meetings, external conferences, and so on to deliver the IBM story on how social computing is disrupting IBM for the better.

"I had been playing a very interesting role of evangelist all along, creating lots and lots of demos and tutorials on how to make use of social media in a business environment, including proving its business value and what the corporation gets, as well as what the employees get from all of it," he says.
 
His efforts were not lost on the brass in Armonk. When Gina Poole was assigned to create a Social Software group, she recruited Luis to be an evangelist, a post he's held for the past several months.

"My last three assignments have all been provided to me because of my blogging efforts," Luis says. "The fact that such a large corporation like IBM is allowing all of its employees to fully explore the potential capabilities from social media is what makes me want to stick around, and help people get on board.  The really great thing about all this is the freedom IBM is giving its employees to explore."