Organizations are wrestling with questions about how to fend off, fit in with or foster the use of social media by employees. Still, many firms haven’t considered some of the potential benefits of using internal social networks as well as external tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
These days you can find lots of advice about how to use public social media—such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—for marketing your company to prospective customers, partners, and employees. However, companies can gain solid benefits from using social and collaboration tools for internal purposes.
Setting up Facebook Groups, Internal YouTube channels, Internal blogs and micro blogging through yammer are just few tools that can be used from main stream social environment for internal communication. The richness of these platforms in terms of visual and audio capabilities make them much more engaging and entertaining alternatives to plain memos and group mails.
Internal Group Page on Facebook
One of the best examples of social media employment for internal clients is the IBM model for social media. The tech giant has had an open policy for social media and has seen employee engagement sky rocketing, providing a much improved work environment and culture in the organization. According to IBM they represent their brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. The brand is largely shaped by the interactions that employees have with customers. This decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company’s history—driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation.
Same rule, different tool
While Social Media makes a good case as a business tool with option such as:
· Listen to customers
· Promote new products, news, events, etc
· Position your organization as thought leaders
· Build relationship with new and existing customers
· Increase brand awareness
· Competition analysis
· Resolve Customer service issues
These very tools can be used to build a very good case for using social media for internal customers i.e. employees of an organization. All it needs is listening to the other side. The social media tools can be used to:
· Listen to employees
· Promote new products, news, events which the employees can then benefit from and spread news about
· Seek participation of employees in thought leadership program and thus building pride in them
· Build lasting relationship with the employees
· Increase internal brand awareness
· Resolve HR issues
· Share classified information and competition analysis
· Communicate with employees quickly during crisis
These suggestions are not without base. It has been observed the companies that use social media, achieved year on year improvement in employee engagement of 18% compared to just 1% in case of those who didn’t. (http://goo.gl/H4PP4)
While the above mentioned points are the broader areas of usage, social media can be used as a collaborative tool within an organization as well. We shall discuss how social media can be used for specific purposes in part II of this blog.