We hear almost every day we about companies that either display great finesse or attract epic public scorn with a Tweet or Facebook post.
Social media clearly is cooking on the front burner of just about every external communications and marketing team on the planet. The battle for “likes,” “shares,” clicks and tags is on, and lots of us are getting pretty good at it.
But there’s an equally big opportunity that exists behind the firewall of every institution, and any team that isn’t diving deep into this pool to discover its treasure is missing an equally big opportunity.
Start with the bottom line — something every CEO and CFO mentions once in a while. A McKinsey study, The Social Economy, reports that companies using social media platforms can improve productivity up to 25%. A lot of that comes from time saved plowing through emails and web searching when there are resident experts who have a lot of the answers. More productivity comes from getting to solutions faster and avoiding costly mistakes that our colleagues have made. McKinsey has quantified it all.
Even bigger opportunities come through collaboration, ideation and innovation processes that can be encouraged, facilitated and even driven by internal social media. As with any employee communications capability, it’s all about the fit between culture, resources and the energy put behind these platforms. If you’re new to this kind of social network, here are five things you can do to start diving in:
Educate yourself on internal social media platforms. Whether it’s Sharepoint and Yammer or Bright Idea and Jive, there are many to choose from. Learn what they can do, and how they match the needs of your enterprise. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/10-Collaboration-Platforms-To-Consider-For-Your-Business-884210/
Deploy change management — big time: Launching internal social media platforms won’t fit the “build it and they will come” model. Not all of us work for technology companies where new tech platforms can be quickly embraced. For many organizations, the only way to make these platforms work is with some serious care and feeding. Like any new enterprise-wide process or tool, a change management discipline applied to the introduction (and ongoing support) of these tools will serve you well. You’ll need to incorporate internal platforms into your social media policy, too. If you have change management communications skills, use them. If you don’t, find someone who does to help you introduce your social media platforms and sustain employee engagement with them.
Adjust/augment your social media training: Lots of companies are launching social media training for broad employee populations – but it tends to focus on external stakeholder social media tools. The new opportunity with internal social platforms is to support employee skill development with the same kind of energy — and training. Give them examples, invite them to sign up and join a conversation, gamify their experiences, and motivate them to engage. It’ll bring the ROI on your company’s investment to the surface much faster. And in case you missed the plug for change management, jump back one paragraph and pay $200 to get out of jail.
Apply the outside/in. Julie Hamp, Chief Communications Officer at Toyota, has a simple and highly relevant mantra that’s all about bringing the outside in and the inside/out. With social media, internal communications professionals should partner with external communications and marketing professionals to take the best of what’s happening in the programs they’re driving – and apply the lessons learned to internal social media training and programming. Think crowdsourcing is just for Facebook? You’ll learn fast that you can use internal social media platforms to do the same thing – only faster and in a more controlled digital space.
Build internal social media communications as a competency: That’s right. This is a big enough emerging skill set that it’s a definable competency that every communicator and marketer should start building. I hosted a webcast on HR.com on this very issue a year ago, and the skill sets required to effectively drive internal social media platforms are even more complex today. It requires partnership and problem solving skills with IT, HR, Legal and other internal functions that could make M&A and crisis communications work look like a walk in the park. Let me know if you’d like more on this.
Whether it’s engaging employees as brand ambassadors for your institution or helping them understand how they can save time and money and build solutions faster, internal social media is taking shape as one of the biggest new opportunities for communicators and marketers. The trick is to figure it out before that next-generation of employees arrives and expects internal tools to perform as effectively and socially as those they already use. And P.S. – those next-generation employees? They’re already here.
