Pfizer enterprise 2.0 technology manager Simon Revell said it took a punk rock attitude to drive the adoption of wikis, blogs, and other social computing tools at the conservative pharmaceutical maker.

"We had to challenge the culture," said Revell, speaking Wednesday at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. "We had to get them through the fear barrier."

The rebellious approach has apparently paid off.

Workers at the company now routinely post articles to a wiki called Pfizerpedia that's grown to feature more than 10,000 articles and numerous how-to videos. They also access bogs to communicate with managers working in different time zones and regularly rely on RSS feeds for external and internal news related to their jobs.

"You're handicapped if you're not thinking about RSS," said Revell.

Even Pfizer's ultra-cautious regulatory affairs group is using the wiki to generate ideas. "They've embraced it," said Revell.

Revell said starting off with small projects targeting limited groups of users was key to overcoming resistance at the company to social computing. It also took some nomenclatural sleight-of-hand. "We didn't refer to the blogs as blogs," said Revell, conceding that, for some in the company's upper management, the term still connotes "something that's frivolous."

There's also the fact that blogging does not come naturally to some workers. "Blogs are one of the most difficult aspects of Enterprise 2.0 to get off the ground," said Revell.

To overcome resistance, a colleague of Revell's worked up a graphical slide deck that depicted how "Charlie", a fictional Pfizer employee, could use social computing tools to accomplish daily tasks and become more productive.

The slides found their way on the Internet and "Meet Charlie" became a viral hit, garnering more than 120,000 views.

It all started, said Revell, with a few "corporate punks" and a campaign that "was designed to be edgy."