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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Social media in the enterprise: Part I

Fun’s fun, but let’s get serious. David Murray, in his editor’s column in the Journal of Employee Communications Management, asked:

Is social media The Next Big Thing in our business? I know you???ll let me know by answering this urgent call for essays. Please, readers. Please try to succeed where Allan Jenkins has failed: teaching me (and your colleagues) about how social media can make for better internal communications.

The Allan-Jenkins-failed nonsense aside (it was not a goal of Allan’s blog to teach David anything), I have no doubt that social media can enhance a company’s performance by altering the nature of communication within the organization. But rather than simply evangelize the various ways that might be so, I put out a call to communicators I know in companies where social media have been implemented. As responses come in, I’ll post them here.

First out of the gate is Brian Kramer, manager of Global Web Communications for McDonald’s:

From our global intranet, we are using secured blogs as a way to share best practices and better align individuals, departments, and subject matter areas.  Blogging helps fill a gap that sometimes exists in our current online environment with more traditional one-directional websites or applications. By providing for real-time, two-way dialogue between individuals and groups of individuals over the web, blogs can help break down geographic barriers and allow for improved sharing of best practices and provide important links to existing content on the intranet. Our President and COO, Mike Roberts, was our first internal blogger, and almost immediately he found the blog to be a great way to gain insight and feedback from people at all levels of the company. In some of his first posts, Mike had more than forty comments from multiple countries providing ideas on a number of items including ways to improve our operations and sharing innovative ideas from different markets.

Thanks to Brian for the contribution. I’ll post more as they arrive in my inbox. Anybody else who wants to share successes in deploying social media internally, comment here or drop me an email. Let’s see if we can collect enough real-world tales to convince David that social computing, if not the next big thing, is at least a big deal.

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12/31/69 | 5 Comments | Social media in the enterprise: Part I

Comments

  • 1.Shel:

    As I mentioned in a comment on Allan's post, the more I blog, the more convinced I become that they will have a greater impact on internal communications than on marketing.

    I wrote this week about a colleague who blogs and who has found that the blog is read more frequently by partners and resellers than it is by prospects.

    In other words, though it's available to the public, it's serving primarily as an internal communications vehicle.

    The McDonalds' example you cite is another great use ... the sharing of information and best practices across the company, as well as providing a forum for discussion with executives.

    John Wagner | April 2006

  • 2.Thanks, John. I've heard similar tales of external blogs serving largely internal functions. Another example of that is Jonathan Schwartz's blog at Sun, which is public but widely read by employees. Schwartz even used it to address employee leaks (not nearly the draconian approach Steve Jobs used to address the same problem: a lawsuit against the 19-year-old student/blogger who received leaked information from an Apple employee).

    To me, this is a no-brainer. Work is social. Most organizations fail to understand that, but it's true. In fact, the word "organization" is defined as a collection of individuals who organize to achieve common objectives. Given that, it makes extraordinary sense to allow employees to BE social. I'm not just talking about online. I was with an executive once who saw two employees talking in the coffee room. "Ladies," he said (no kidding), "you need to stop talking and get back to work." What he failed to understand is that they WERE working. Social interaction is how knowledge is shared.

    The suite of online social tools make it easier for more employees to engage, with greater focus on business issues, and with a lot of other employees. I can see incredible value in letting employees vote for the most important news and information (like Digg) or use a program like the one behind Memeorandum.com to find the items attracting the most attention from employees. I can see utilities like LinkedIn that let employees find one another for projects, teams, job-filling and any number of other uses based on existing "six-degree"-like social networks. I see project blogs -- employees interested in a project can stay on top of it while the team can reach out for help when needed. How much better is that than a weekly status report circulated to half a dozen people as a Word email attachment? We can talk wikis, podcasts...there's no limit to how these can be implemented to the company's advantage.

    Like Michael Pusateri, I am excited about how these tools can be applied to problems and to capitalize on opportunities -- but I would never counsel a client to start one just to start one. I'm old enough to remember what happened when every department in the company got its hands on Pagemaker. ;-)

    Shel Holtz | April 2006 | Concord, CA

  • 3.Shel--

    What you say here is just so absolutely true I want to stand and cheer. Yes. Work is social, and the reason any of us have "passion" for our work--at least those of us not directly dedicated to curing cancer--is due to social feelings of wanting to be a part of a group of people who are succeeding together.

    This feeling of connectedness was severely maligned in the 1990s when corporations laid 30% of the workers off and told all the others not to be sentimental about the company. (These messages were often sent through cold, formal, one-way communication vehicles bled dry of any social "human interest" stories that we dismissed as old-fashioned "babies and bowling scores.")

    If social media can help restore employees' connections to one another inside organizations--and you paint a compelling picture of how they can--then yes, they will have a big and wonderful impact on employee communication.

    The next question, and the one I'm concerned about as an editor who serves employee communication executives, is: What can employee communication execs do--and what should they stop doing--in order to promote these connections. Or does it have little to do with employee communication execs, who, like ghostwriters doing a CEO blog, can only suck the spontaneous life out of the social media phenomenon by their participation in it?

    One way I've thought an employee communication could encourage social media conversations is to start a personal internal blog of his or her own. Another way is to create a participatory internal publication. I've seen few examples of these kinds of efforts.

    I'm happy to see Brian Kramer's post, and invite Brian and anyone else who's interested in contributing on this score to the Journal of Employee Communication Management to e-mail me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

    Meanwhile, thanks, Shel, for these constructive posts.

    Best,

    David

    David Murray | April 2006 | Chicago

  • 4.What communicators can do, David, is actually pretty simple. But it requires being (don't cringe) strategic. Rather than say, "Here's a great tool called a blog and everyone's using them so we should, too," communicators should...

    1. Identify business issues that can be affected by commnication
    2. Determine which of these can be addressed using social media
    3. Present management with a plan to improve the business situation with metrics to support the decision -- that is, show how this tool will measurably affect the outcome. You can even forsake calling it "blog" or a "wiki." Just tell executives, "This is a tool that will help accomplish this goal. Let me show you how it will work."

    Shel Holtz | April 2006 | Concord, CA

  • 5.Hi Shel,

    After more than 3 years of internal blogging at IBM I can tell you that it is not about the tools and that you still have to explain the "what's in it for me" to people (managers and employees alike).

    One social medium that is starting to take off with people managers is podcasting... And of what I see, it will become more popular than internal blogging for this specific audience within the IBM organisation.

    Still, there is a lot of basic education to do about social media in a lot of organisations. I agree with you Shel; it is not because this is "hot" for the moment that using wikis or blogs will solve communications problems.

    Philippe Borremans | April 2006 | Bellingen, Belgium, Europe

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