Quintessentially Digital: Social Media For Internal Communications

Unfortunately i was asked to remove my awesome preso on 'Social Media for Internal Communications' due to intellectual property issues but considering i wrote the whole thing and no corporate data was used i really don't see what the problem is apart from the fact that i used my work computer to write it.....but that's another story (apparently my brain no longer belongs to me).

Anyway, what i really wanted to write about is how social media tools, applications & general initiatives can and should be leveraged within the workplace.

We spend day after day planning social media strategies for our clients but outside of personal usage do many of you actually use social media to communicate internally with your co-workers?

This is a question i have asked myself and the answer came up lacking....

Many of my friends over in Australia work in digital media (i know i need to get a life but that's just how i meet people!) and having asked a few of them what social media they use to communicate with eachother internally, other than IM, there was nothing!

Why is there nothing? That's crap. We are all preaching about social media to our clients but none of us have actually taken it and made it part of our working lives.

So here are my top suggestions for social media applications we can take and use successfully for internal purposes:

WIKI's

Wiki's are awesome. fact. So why not use them as a central knowledge database for internal purposes? You can privatise them and have your own Wiki domain so it's all completely secure.

How many grads pass through our industry doors in the average year and how often do we train, retrain & train again. What if they had access to a Wiki which explained what a CPM is or how to negotiate or what adserving means?

TWITTER

I love Twitter, i'm an addict. It's like IM but to the masses. So why not setup a GroupTweet account for private tweets between you and your colleagues?

'@zoescaman - can we all meet at 3pm for a catch up on this proposal?'

Perfect! It beats email anyday and gives you all access to eachother all the time. You can also send links to news, information or files.

RSS FEEDS

Data aggregation! woohoo! We all subscribe to blogs, news, reports, whitepapers blah blah blah so why not use RSS Feeds for the company or department and house the top stories or key information in one place where everyone can access everything of interest?

BLOGS

How many companies or departments have a centralised blog? Ok i know some thought leaders do but you'd be surprised at how many big, global networked agencies don't have one...

Many people write blogs individually but we should all be practicing the art of sharing information not only with those outside of our workplace but also with those INSIDE our workplace.

BOOKMARKING & TAGGING

This kind of falls under the same arm as RSS Feeds but also includes data filtering so we can cut down on the sheer mass of information and ensure that at least we are all reading the core elements that are of direct interest.

SOCIAL NETWORK GROUPS

Seriously this is painfully simple, just set up a Facebook page or group for you company/department. It promotes a sense of 'togetherness' (couldn't think of a less cheesy word sorry) and brings people closer.

Ultimately it's inexcusable for us to NOT use social media internally. We preach it, we sell it so let's bloody use it!

To further hammer home my point i have listed below the outcomes you could achieve by implementing the above:

•informal knowledge sharing for teams and groups
•networked innovation using social tools
•distributed learning communities
•re-inventing the intranet
•generating human-scale communication, rather management jargon
•integrating and developing corporate culture
•cross-silo networking building
•replacing newsletters with two-way conversational blogs
•better peripheral awareness

And now for some examples of the big corporations that have already implemented it and implemented it well:

Sun Microsystems Wiki