By Kirsten Robinson
I have a confession: I love Facebook. I use it to communicate and keep in touch with friends and family dispersed globally—and the platform’s functionality makes it easy to do so. In fact, I probably communicate more with out-of-area friends now than I would without the network. Working and on different schedules, it’s often difficult to catch a friend for a phone conversation. Facebook enables me to share photos of what I’ve been up to, and shoot a quick “thinking of you” message that does the trick until we can catch up in full later on.
Even if you don’t use Facebook, odds are that you know at least 2 (or 200?) people who do for personal communications. What if you could transfer this massively popular method of communicating into your business?
The question is, does Facebook, or a tool like it, have a place in your internal communications strategy?
An executive in our Intranets Working Group recently posed this question, starting a dialogue among members. The majority was in favor—as one Senior Manager of Online Comms said, “Business success is often built on strong working relationships, and internal social media can foster those across the organization.” But, they also recognized that tool management is key in order to avoid misuse. Here are a few key takeaways from their discussion:
Uses
- Connect names with faces. In large companies, it’s often difficult to remember who’s who if you don’t interact that often—especially across programs or leadership levels. An Internal Facebook’s profile information can provide basic info about an employee, accompanied by their photo.
- Share photos. Similar to posting photos on personal Facebook accounts, employees can use an internal network to share pictures from company events or activities around the office.
- Seek and offer expertise. As one member said, an Internal Facebook not only fosters collaboration, it also makes it easier to find the person—and the knowledge—needed to solve business problems. Joining groups within the network helps connect those with related interests. Another executive would love to access their profile and see questions such as “What are you working on?” or “What do you need help with?” at the top of their wall.
Management
- Create guidelines. A certain level of socializing beyond work is natural, but what happens if employees begin to misuse the network as a social distraction? One executive’s company ensures that lines aren’t crossed by creating a governance document, or “rules of the road,” that states the tool is for business use. This gives some latitude, but also provides support for managing discussions that are far off track.
CEC members, what do you think about using an “Internal Facebook”? We want to hear why you think it’s a good—or bad—idea.
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on 14 July 2011
Respond
We at Philips have launched an internal “Facebook” that is powered by Socialcast. For us it is an integral part of our internal comms strategy.
on 14 July 2011
Respond
Yes, we are planning for the launch of a full set of social media tools to all employees, powered by Jive. It will become the main component of our online internal communications strategy. Our goal is let the tool be used for social activities at work and not just “business.” as a way to build better affinity among our employees.
on 14 July 2011
Respond
I believe this sort of platform to be a breakthrough in employee engagement. It obviously facilitates all sorts of peer-to-peer communication, offering many opportunities to dispense with the inorganic “one to many” executive communications model in favor of true engagement. But beyond that, as a digital platform the opportunities for measurement and analytics is immense, offering for the first time a platform-based approach to understanding major business issues like the effect of collaboration on innovation, who the real leaders are in the company, the effect of collaboration on productivity and speeding problem solving, etc. If you think about this only in terms of making employees happier and improving morale, you’ll miss the real upside.
on 15 July 2011
Respond
We use both Yammer and SharePoint today. We find Yammer to be an extraoridinarily effective tool for breaking down business unit and global barriers. Even more important, it flattens the organization from a communications perpective. The lowest member of the organizational chart has an equal footing with the executives of the company when it comes to discussions on Yammer. We are in the process of implementing My Sites on SharePoint 2010. We are already using other collaborative components of SharePoint. We will be looking at whether to use the native “feed” for the SharePoint My Site versus the possibility of integrating the richer experiiece of Yammer onto the My Sites.
on 25 July 2011
Respond
We are planning to launch a social network, based on a community approach. We start from the point that people belong to several communities: project, job, personnal, interest… An information shared by a member of your community have a different impact than an information sent by the corporate communication. But we have to convince: it’s a new way to collaborate and the managers could be disappointed by this new “virtal hierarchy”.