I could be rehashing a topic that has been addressed many times before, but recent conversations within my own organization have resurfaced this for me and I know it is something that other peers are still sorting out as well. Companies are very much implementing social technologies to engage audiences externally, but still struggle with the advantages of implementing it internally. And this is something that I, in particular, am very passionate about. So, I’ve updated a blog post that I had written late last year focusing on this topic and have included what I hope is some fresh, relevant information and resources. Enjoy!

***********

I love how social media has made our world just a little smaller — bringing people together across the globe who might not have met otherwise. For business, one of the biggest and most under-realized advantages to integrating social networking tools is its ability to humanize a corporate workforce beyond just the typical four walls of a cubicle or office. Without social networking tools, companies risk problems not being resolved, ideas becoming stagnant and employees feeling underutilized or underappreciated. So, if you’re a company wondering how you can unify your global workforce, social technologies are an excellent step to building a more collaborative, productive and HUMAN workforce.

The Elephant in the Room

Every company acknowledges that social technologies is a growing trend that is a new way to engage with employees, but why is it such a hard sell to senior leadership? For most, it’s the elephant in the room that no one really knows how to address or, more importantly, how to implement. And why is that? Here are just a few of some of the reasons I’ve heard:

• Social technologies decrease productivity rather than increasing it
• It doesn’t align with our business goals
• It’s more valuable for external marketing campaigns than for internal engagement
• It costs too much money
• There’s no way to measure the return
• If we implement social technologies, aren’t we admitting we don’t know how to motivate our own employees?

To be perfectly honest, social technologies is a different way to communicate within an organization that most companies aren’t used to. Rather than top down communications, the essence of social technologies is to invert that traditional communications pyramid and allow conversations to be generated from the bottom up. Yes, putting some control in the hands of your employees. Scary thought for most senior leadership? YES.

It’s also been a struggle to get senior support because of the misconception that implementing social technologies is admitting that your company doesn’t already know how to motivate or engage its workforce. Absolutely not true. What it means is that you CARE about your employees and value their input and ideas, and that you are INTERESTED in them.

There are quick ways to measure engagement through web analytics (click-throughs, page views, etc.), but the real value of social technologies requires an organization to think longer term and more broadly. It’s somewhat an intangible ROI that is hard for a company to financially support when there are no direct correlations to the bottom line. But employees who feel engaged stay at the company longer, they perform better and produce more results, and they interact and connect with their colleagues more effectively.

What Business Priorities Can Be Addressed

• Strengthen and change corporate culture by building innovation and engagement with employees
• Extending beyond the brick and mortar corporate walls to unify a global workforce
• Increase productivity through collaboration and communication, giving employees a platform for knowledge share and expertise
• Creating a high performing workforce where employees understand how their work is connected to business strategies and are executing results
• Internalizing external marketing messages so that employees understand your products and services

Questions You Should be Asking

• How networked are your employees?
• How engaged are your employees?
• How do you bring them together?
• How do you bring down the silos and walls?
• How do you tap into and foster employee ideas and collaboration to propel business results?

Where Companies Can See the Benefit of Social Networking

• Cross-functional projects
• Standardized forms used daily by sales/service employees
• Collaboration among geographically dispersed employees
• To get all employees up to speed on new information quickly
• Providing employees with common answers to their questions
• Ensuring things explained in person are also in writing
• Enhancing member or customer communications
• Market research
• PR, industry recognition

[ source: Ways to Engage Employees Using Technology That Deliver ROI ]

What Social Networking Can Do for Your Company

Community and Collaboration

Social networks enable community building which is an essential part of employee engagement. Communities on social network sites generally fall into one of the following categories: ad hoc groups (e.g., clubs), project teams, or communities that are more formal, such as those recognized by management (e.g., professional practice areas or forums for company-sponsored programs). For cross-functional projects that involve key stakeholders spanning multiple organizations as well as continents, group collaboration through social networks is a great platform for document management, project updates and management.

“Collaboration is a very human characteristic. Many groups have a natural preference for defining themselves by working together peer-to-peer, rather than acting solely on commands from a higher level in a hierarchy. It is hardly surprising that the tendency should be reflected in the commercial (or public good) enterprise, when a collaborative structure is feasible.” [ source: Collaboration through Web 2.0 ]

Conversation Streams

If you can’t have the physical watercooler, then having a social network truly is the next best thing — connecting the workforce across the globe and providing a platform for realtime conversation and dialogue, and virtually creating the natural social synergy that you would have if you were physically next to the person with whom you are communicating. Some companies, such as Oracle, have developed their own internal versions of Twitter.

“When employees update their status, they can also send tweets to their networks, groups. Each tweet that appears in the Activity Log includes a link to the tweet that opens in a new tab/window.  If you want to reply, you can click through to see the tweet and reply. Or you can share links to useful information, communicating info much more effectively (and less intrusively) than an email could.” [ source: Oracle’s Connect: Building Engagement with Internal Social Networks ]

Knowledge Share

Your company is full of in-house experts that are willing to share their expertise — in fact I bet they’re dying to. Through social networking tools, you can allow each employee to create an “expertise profile” for themselves to identify their knowledge or skills on any number of topics. These profiles are not intended to replace your basic employee directory… although, the two can, and probably should, leverage the same basic data. What we’re talking about is a place for employees to list bios, skills, interests and projects that are inclusive of their current core duties as well as their personal interests. It’s about putting faces to names and being able to connect visually to colleagues that work in the next state or on the other side of the world. These profiles would be searchable by other employees to find the matching “experts,” and allow them to reach out to that colleague and seek their guidance or recommendations.

User-Generated Tagging

Every company I know has one consistent complaint from its workforce… they can never find the content they are looking for on the internal portals despite having a Search capability. In my experience, Search is a more passive approach that only performs as well as the content that has been pre-tagged. It also makes assumptions on what the business thinks is important to the employees, which doesn’t always align to what employees actually need. In an Enterprise 2.0 environment, knowledge sharing is made more effective by allowing employees to create user-generated tagging of other individual profiles, links, documents or pages — giving employees the ability identify content that is relevant to them and potentially to their colleagues.

…tagging, or the attaching of label-like keywords to a person’s name in a company directory, documents, images or pages on the Web. In the context of expertise-locator systems, employees can have tags that describe the work they do, information on their division or group, external affiliations, hobbies, memberships, location and names of projects. Employees can also use tags for evaluation purposes, such as noting whether an expert has been helpful in the past, and for tagging their own areas of expertise as they evolve.

What is particularly useful about tags is they are generated by the expertise seekers and experts themselves, not by a team assigned to maintain a database. This relieves the company of any need to dedicate resources or training to the practice, and makes the tags more likely to be relevant and properly maintained over time. [ source: Who Knows What? ]

Idea Generation

Some of a company’s best ideas for process improvement or product enhancements come from the very individuals who develop or use them — the employees. Often times there is a gap between communicating company business goals and getting employees to understand the relevancy of these goals in their day-to-day work. Creating a social network for idea generation is a great way to address this gap because it provides a platform where employees to foster ideas that support these goals. It’s a great way to recognize and acknowledge employees, make them feel valued and build a culture of innovation.

“By enabling communities to post, critique, collaborate on and refine ideas, companies are certain to reap the benefits of accelerated innovation. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of genius. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be valuable insight in another.” [ source: What Enterprise Social Networks Do Well: Produce Higher Quality Ideas ]

Discussion Forum

Not only are discussion forums another great tool to drive participation, but they are also your next best thing to a corporate help desk. Having a place where employees can pose questions that can be answered in almost real-time by either other employees, or by moderators, is a fantastic way to make employees feel like their concerns or questions are being heard … and answered. When I think of my ideal discussion forum for business, I think along the lines of an internalized version of getsatisfaction.com.

You Are not Alone in Your Effort

It’s only natural that everyone wants to know what everyone else is doing. Building an effective enterprise social technology strategy means looking into what other companies have deployed and whether or not they have seen positive results from their efforts. With that in mind, I’ve researched many other companies and have come across a few excellent case studies and examples. The credit for the creation and management of this list really goes to Jacob Morgan, who performed or found some of the case studies found in this list for his own blog, Jacob Morgan: Social Media Globetrotter.

• Extensive List of Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies

Has your company implemented any of these social technologies? If so, have you seen any increase in engagement from them and / or do you see an high-level of usage with them? If so, I would love to hear from you!

Original Post: Using social media to improve internal communications, simply-communicate.com

As a social media agency, FreshNetworks is often asked to help clients develop and implement a social media strategy.

This was the case with Vets Now – a provider of out-of-hours veterinary care for veterinary practices across the UK. The goal was to engage internal stakeholders through social media.

Vets Now is the type of business where employees work not only alone, but also unsociable hours. By using social media, Vets Now hoped to increase communication and engagement amongst employees who don’t get the opportunity to interact with each other in person, let alone with anyone else.

Vets Now also hoped that increasing interaction among internal staff and stakeholders would help with knowledge sharing that would, in turn, help regulate and improve clinical standards and best practice across the industry. By doing this the aim was to position themselves as global experts in veterinary Emergency & Critical Care (ECC).

As Vets Now also wanted to use social media to help sell their internal training courses and to recruit staff, FreshNetworks felt that the best solution for them was to build an online community for their internal stakeholders.

The first stage was to help Vets Now pin down their objectives for the project so that the content – and the way the community was developed – helped to achieve their key aims. As Vets Now already had an intranet site, the community was integrated within that site so that all internal web-based communication tools were aligned and located in one place.

Using FreshNetworks’ social media software platform, an online community called VETECC (the “ECC” stands for “Emergency Critical Care”) was created. The community is managed by an experienced veterinary practitioner to ensure that all information and content is accurate and informative. The site has been up and running for over three months now and it has already achieved some of its primary objectives.

Traffic stats

The community currently has 924 members. 60% of Vets Now internal staff are signing on to VETECC at least once a day. More impressively, over 95% of the internal team are visiting the site at least once per week, proving that the community has successfully encouraged internal stakeholders to engage with each other and Vets Now itself.

The community also has a low bounce rate of just 20% and the average time each user spends on the site is 9 minutes, which means that people are taking time to absorb content and interact with other members online.

Recruitment and training

VETECC.com has also been the source of 10 different direct job applications in just 3 months. In real terms, 10 applicants equal approximately 3 recruits, which is a projected ROI of £5250 in the first 3 months. So projected ROI from recruitment alone is £21,000 per year. Further more, Vets Now previously sent out a monthly printed newsletter with information about their events, training and news from the profession. Since the launch of the Vets Now community,  a weekly e-news, hosted on the community platform, has replaced the monthly printed newsletter and Vets Now are saving around £14,500 per year in printing costs.

VETECC has also become a training resource for employees, linking to adverts about educational workshops and other events. Most importantly, the community has become a best practice platform, enabling vets to talk to each other and offer advice about medical cases in a private space that belongs solely to them.

At Unstructure.org’s 5th Annual Global Meet in Orlando last week, Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, delivered an extremely compelling message in his Opening Address. He described how, in the new reality for any organization to successfully attain business goals in a post-recession world (“The New Normal”), it must first invert its value pyramid and place employees at the top, creating an environment where the employees are the initiators of transformation and the managers are the supporters who make that transformation reality.

Although, you might think this is not a novel business approach, within the context of Unstructure.org’s MENSA-type thought leadership discussions and within the context of the “The New Normal,” this message really resonated into four main points at a much deeper, more personal level.

The New Normal 1: Value is Created in the Interface of the Employees and the Customers

The learning from HCL’s transformation journey started five years and seven days ago, and is very relevant in addressing the new normal. The value zone in manufacturing was very closely aligned with the control zone. With this philosophy, what happened is that you have the control leg and the value leg and both of them are working together. And you run faster than everybody else. However, over time, what really happened is that things changed. The service economy and the knowledge economy grew. What changed? The control zone remained where it is but the value zone moved closer to the customer. So, what is the value zone? Value is created in the interface of the employees and the customers. Whether it is an airline industry or an IT services industry or a retail industry, that’s a value zone. Once the value zone moves away from the control zone, organization structures became irrelevant.

The New Normal 2: Look UP for Change, Not Down

So, if what you do is challenging, what is the mega idea? I think how you run the company could be very, very interesting to think about. And we have learned that from Southwest Airlines, from Starbucks and from the experiments which we have done in HCL – what you do and how you do could be a very interesting way of thinking about change. So, how do you execute the change in how you run your teams? If we outsource our thinking and believe that the real responsibility of bringing about transformation really belongs to the CEO, I think we’re making a mistake. Each and every manager can bring about a fundamental change in the way he runs his company and teams, and I think he will succeed significantly more than if he looks up to somebody else to bring about a change.

The New Normal 3: Create a Star Organization by Maximizing the Value Created in the Value Zone

If you look at the control pyramid, which is very critical in running your organization, I think you have to leave it intact for governance reasons. But if the value pyramid could be inverted, we have to ask three questions of ourselves. Where is the value of the company being created? In the interface of the employee and the customer. So, what is the business of the company? To maximize the creation of the value in that value zone. So, therefore, what should be the business of the management of the company? To maximize the value created in the value zone. If all companies focus on that, they can maximize the value that is being created in the value zone and the management will be infusing, encouraging, enabling, rather than controlling and reviewing.

So, how would organizations work? There is a pyramid structure which is a control structure. And then you create a reward structure, which is a value structure. And you will create, what I call, a star organization. So, the control structures continue to remain. However, for value accountability, the management and the manager becomes a servant, or are accountable to the employee as the employee is to him. The moment you do that, you create the value zone and the control zone comes closer together, and the explosion of growth happens as it happened in HCL. So, if you remember what we said in the last GCM at HCL, we do believe the recession is an opportunity not an excuse. And therefore, we grew 21 percent even in the recession. We are the only IT services company that grew.

The New Normal 4: Energy from Your Employees is More Valuable Than Fear Delivered by Your Competitors

We launched no new idea, no new service, no new geography; nothing new. And yet, all of you supported us to grow our business, because I think you saw the passion in the eyes of our employees.The energy the employees were exhibiting was a lot more than the fear which some of our competitors were delivering in your value zone and you saw us as a solution rather than as a problem. And with that little change, I think, we could deliver significantly larger value for you, because we inverted the value pyramid in the organization and we made us accountable to the employees who were delivering the true value for you.

You can read the full text of the Opening Address here.

What is Unstructure?

If you haven’t heard of Unstructure before, and you’re a knowledge seeker who questions the status quo, then Unstructure might be an organization in which for you to get involved. Unstructure is an open discussion platform that leverages the power of online communities to create innovative ideas and uses the wisdom of business and technology professionals, bloggers and thinkers to discuss and debate action ideas that would aid the evolution of business and to mentor these ideas into actions, insights and solutions which can be consumed by business. Unstructure conversations are centered on questions in three categories – business, technology and people.

In driving social technologies within an organization, the number one question that I hear from top level executives is “what problem would this be solving for us?” And trust me, it’s hard for me to contain myself when posed with this question and not stand up on my soapbox about how social media can drive engagement and collaboration. But, the bottom line is that the successful integration of social technologies within a corporate enterprise isn’t just about innovation or enablement, but it is also the ability to fill a business need. And, from an internal communications perspective, finding the right balance between social technologies and existing communication channels is especially important. When you’ve identified this, that’s when you see the biggest executive support, employee adoption and measurable results.

For just a moment, separate out the business strategist within you from the social media geek. And, take a look at some of the following issues that often need to be addressed in order for social technologies to gain a foothold within your organization:

Business Priorities versus Enablement Enthusiasm

I have never been able to see a social media strategy get executive support without it being directly tied to a business priority or strategic imperative. I repeat… NEVER. It’s extremely easy to get caught up in the enthusiasm of the social media whirlwind, but it’s essential to make it relevant not only to the employee, but also to the business.

In my day-to-day, it’s easy for me to align social media strategies to the business objective of driving employee enablement to increase productivity.  In HR speak, that means using social technologies to bring as many HR transactions forward as much as possible to drive self service (e.g, time management, payroll, benefits, manager tools, etc.). What are the goals for your company and how can social media technologies drive the company to meet them?

Innovation versus Invasiveness

When working with a large enterprise, you inevitably have varied adoption levels towards new technology. One of the coolest trends I’ve seen lately, is the demo of a collaboration site that contains Facebook-like notifications not just for activity on employees’ social profiles, but for alerting employees to task-based actions that are tied to HR transactional systems: filling out a time sheet, creating performance objectives, approving expense reports, etc. It’s an innovative way to push information to employees that require a timely response; however, for each employee that doesn’t mind a company pushing desktop alerts, you will find another employee who finds it invasive. So the challenge, then, is to balance the use of innovative tools against the comfort level of your employee base — otherwise you risk an extremely low adoption rate and very little ROI.

Take a pulse of your employee base and see how THEY would like to receive information. And, once you’ve determined this, don’t send the same information to your employees using all of your internal communication channels. Instead, make content delivery relevant to them by prioritizing and segementing what information you will be making available to employees via these social technologies and ensure that this information is unqiue from other communication sources.

Information Delivery versus Your Corporate Intranet

The past couple of years have proven that we are in an ever-evolving world of information delivery. This change applies to the corporate world as well. Where once the only means to deliver “corporate speak” to an employee base was through corporate e-mail, we now have a plethora of other methods at our disposal through collaboration sites, RSS feeds, Twitter-esque notifications, etc. In terms of internal communications, social media is a powerful tool in delivering information to employees beyond the traditional walls of existing communication channels such as corporate e-mail and your intranet. The key is to balance the synergies of the two. If your organization has been investing significant capital into a completely enhanced corporate intranet to drive more employee traffic TO it, then it might not be as keen to implement a social technology that delivers content in lieu of the intranet and takes users AWAY. So, if not taken into consideration appropriately, your social media and  internal communications strategies could end up working against one another.

Engage your internal communications and HR teams to make sure your enthusiasm for social technologies doesn’t override any goals and objectives they might have. Work together to figure out the best delivery method for various communications — news stories that are pushed via RSS feeds don’t necessarily need to be duplicated by a dedicated e-mail. Or, see social technologies as a means to deliver abbreviated messaging to employees, while still directing employees back to the corporate intranet for full-length information.

Do you have thoughts on this topic? By all means… share them here!

Original Post: Social Media and the Internal Brand

Here’s my take on why companies are using social media internally:

1. To inform employees. In its most straightforward way, social media can be just another medium to communicate and inform employees. Blogs in which departments inform their staff, a newsletter with options for employees to give comments, twitter as a micro instant communication channel to employees.

2. To create a shared vision. This takes internal communication to the next level. Using social media to engage with your employees with the objective to embed the company’s mission, vision and values. A CEO internal blog in which he discusses the vision, seeks feedback for improvement and explains how staff can become internal brand ambassadors.

3. To increase productivity. This is all about using social media as a collaboration tool. Social media helps bringing documents, people and planning together. in the form of sharing documents, sharing feedback and synchronising project tasks.

4. To engage employees. Engaging in open conversations is the essence of social media. Like companies are opening themselves to their clients, with using social media for internal communications, management are opening themselves for their employees. Which means that employees are enabled to talk about how they feel, what they like to do and how they like to work together. Management has to actively engage in these discussions.

5. To support the strategy. Bringing all of the above together, using social media for internal communications should ultimately drive the implementation of the company’s strategy. Which can be measured in terms of revenue, cost reduction, profit or market share. This means that implementation of an internal social media programme follows the same steps as an external programme. Who am I targeting, how can I group them, what content is relevant for them, what social media tools do I use, how do I engage with them and how do I measure the effectiveness.

By using social media internally, companies open up their brand as much as they use it externally. By engaging with their employees, management can make the mission, vision and brand values come to life. Which in turn transforms employees in brand ambassadors. A role which they will take when talking to stakeholders outside the company. That’s why it is important to bring all social media activity together in the company’s social media hub. An internal website, or network of web site, that employees can go to to share, publish and engage and giving them access to all the social media tools the company makes available.

Finally, by using social media internally, companies can start to learn the concepts of content creation, sharing and engagement, in a “protected” environment. And when they feel confident, they can then leverage their experiences externally and use social media to engage with their customers.

Carmen Hudson’s presentation to HR Executive Forum on Web 2.0 for HR executives: Social Media: Why Should We Care?

Carmen Hudson is a Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition at Yahoo! Inc. She overseas Yahoo’s sourcing team. Prior, Carmen served as Manager, Global Strategic Sourcing at Starbucks Coffee Company where she was responsible for leading the team that develops strategic sourcing strategies for Starbuck’s retail, non-retail and international business units. She has established herself at other marquee companies such as Microsoft and Amazon.

More information on Carmen Hudson is available at: Peopleshark

Original Source: Get Real: Social Networking in the Workplace, Information Management

For most serious business professionals, social networking has become a punchline, if not a downright nuisance. When we think of Facebook and MySpace, we picture teens and college students throwing sheep, sending virtual flowers and playing Mafia-themed games. We certainly don’t picture a productivity tool that can improve performance and cut costs.

Yet while this impression of traditional social networks such as Facebook are largely accurate, we shouldn’t let preconceived ideas prevent us from understanding and taking advantage of the potential power of social networking in the workplace. The key to successfully using social media in the workplace lies in understanding that it is a very different animal from its consumer cousins.

Strengths of social networking to the workplace, include three main uses: Building teamwork, organizing around a project and organically building a knowledge base. Each of these activities is a key success factor for most businesses, and each can be greatly improved by the use of social networking principles.

Building Teamwork

Historically, businesses have spent a lot of time and effort to build teamwork with staff meetings, holiday parties and offsite company retreats. What do these all have in common? They take place face to face. There is no substitute for actual face-to-face interaction, but company retreats are difficult to justify during tough economic times. We need to draw inspiration from the world of social networking.

Social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter can provide an impressionistic sense of the activity around you, much like the buzz in a busy office. But the problem with these tools is that they require their users to actively publish their activities. This works fine for consumer social networking, since these applications thrive by providing quick bursts of entertainment and diversion (I often hit my Twitter account when I have five minutes between meetings) but less so for the workplace, where every second is precious.

What’s needed is social networking that doesn’t interfere with one’s workflow. That’s why the concept of workflow-based notifications is so powerful; the act of doing your work automatically generates the kind of short notifications that generate implicit awareness.

Organizing a Project

Workflow-based notifications tie in neatly with the next major opportunity for social networking in the workplace, which is organizing around a project. The default mechanism for organizing most work teams seems to be the email list (formal or informal). Yet these lists quickly break down. While they’re easy to start, their lack of structure makes them difficult to maintain and manage.

In contrast, social networks have become a magnet for organizing events like parties – they allow many-to-many communication between the participants, they allow the participants to collaborate on the particulars and they are largely self-organizing. These same principles (communication, collaboration and self-organization) can be applied to the workplace.

By incorporating project management concepts like tasks and milestones with social networking-style communication and collaboration and wiki-style self-organization, you can build a powerful platform for organizing around a project. Just remember to insist on the ability to set role-based permissions and authorizations.

Building a Knowledge Base

Many social media enthusiasts have said that their networks are like a hive mind; it’s common to see blog posts or tweets asking for advice. But this approach is too noisy for the workplace. Indeed, in many ways, it already exists in the practice of emailing questions to company mailing lists. We all know how well that works!

To make social networking successful for managing workplace knowledge, we need to add a more persistent structure. The trick is to preserve the informality and ease-of-use of the social network, which makes it so much more usable than the typical knowledge management application. One approach is to allow relatively unstructured knowledge input, such as with a wiki-like approach, but then provide more structured ways of slicing into that knowledge. More sophisticated searching, tagging and classification can take the information hoovered up by the social networking approach and make it more easily distillable into useful knowledge.

Bringing Social Networking to the Workplace

Ultimately, while focusing on specific uses like building teamwork, organizing around projects and managing knowledge can help you make social networking useful in the workplace, each company is different. One-size-fits-all social software suites promise a simple solution, but often bog down in implementation and adoption, much like previous generations of enterprise software. Indeed, many companies have already been burned by previous Web 2.0 initiatives.

Take a cautious and incremental approach. Find tools that allow you to solve specific business problems, and build on these smaller successes. Pretty soon, social networking in your workplace will go from nuisance to necessity.

Original Source: Get Real: Social Networking in the Workplace, Information Management

Original Source: Using Social Media to Improve Employee Engagement, Inside Voice

Last week, The Inside Voice focused on how to introduce social media to your employees. A few years ago, using social media to communicate with employees was new and unproven. Even today, in my conversations with HR teams, many still feel that social media is something that is used for consumers, and rarely for internal communications.

Recently, Talent Management did an article that disputes this mindset. It shows that social media is becoming an increasingly important tool that HR departments use to keep employees engaged. This is based on a recent Employee Engagement Survey completed by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and Buck Consultants.

The results surprised me. The number one communication method that companies in the survey used to engage employees and increase productivity was social media, with 79% of the respondents using this tactic. Other, more traditional internal communications were less popular on the survey rankings: email (75%), intranet (72%), face-to-face meetings (50%), website (36%), and employee newsletters (28%).

Blogs are the social media of choice for companies, with 47% of companies currently using blogs. Which social media are companies planning to use in the future? Discussion boards (33%), Wikis (31%), Yammer (29%) and podcasts (28%) top the list.

What are some ways your company can leverage social media to communicate with employees? Here are some ideas to get you started:

-          Internal blogs. A regular blog posting from the president or management team providing insight into new product launches, sales trends, and new market opportunities can help employees feel more a part of the company, and help them understand how their role affects  the company. This communication is not a PR piece, but provides an appropriate level of information can be especially valuable in times when sales are down, or when there may be bad news on the forefront.

-          Wikis and Yammer. Both of these are great tools to boost productivity, especially for project teams.  Wikis allow multiple employees to make changes on one master document, so employees don’t spend time looking for the most recent version of a document – they make changes online that go live immediately. Yammer allows project teams to touch base internally in a Twitter-like communication, just to the people that need to receive the updates, or who have the answers to pressing project question.

-          Podcasts. Training and education are the perfect opportunities to use podcasting. Simply record the training program, and employees can listen online, or download longer programs to their MP3 player so they can listen at their convenience. This is a great medium for product training, sales tips, new benefit introductions, and topics that people may want to hear multiple times.

Original Source: Using Social Media to Improve Employee Engagement, Inside Voice

Parker LePla’s branding experts, Briana Marrah and Joe LePla, led a workshop at the Advanced Learning Institute’s Internal Branding Conference. They spoke on how to leverage social media tools to engage your employees and create effective brand champions.

Social media tools have added more visibility to your brand, providing a channel for anyone’s opinions and experiences to be distributed to the world almost instantaneously. If this isn’t enough to make you a little nervous, what about the fact that conversations in social media aren’t limited just to your customers? Your employees are online sharing their opinions about you, too. Your employees’ lives and jobs intersect online where the lines between public and private are blurred at best.

Don’t be deterred by this reality! Your employees, if given the right incentives and tools, can become the biggest champions of your brand. They are the most important audience in any brand effort because they both deliver the brand experience and influence public opinion. If you re-examine your internal social media policy through this lens, your employees look less like a ticking time-bomb and more like message mercenaries.

In this presentation, learn ways to utilize social media tools to help, not hinder, your brand. Specifically, you’ll learn:

• Examples of how social media has enhanced and destroyed brand value
• How social media can be used to drive deeper engagement
• Ways to overcome hurdles to implementation and gain organizational buy-in
• How guidelines can ensure that social media touch points stay true to your brand
• Tactics and strategies to successfully leverage and measure social media effectiveness

Leveraging social media in employee engagement

Original Source: Definitive Guide to Corporate HR Blogging

Real-time social networking via Twitter, Facebook, etc. is certainly all the rage. But fundamentally, blogging still remains the best way to build brand, authority and thought leadership. Lots of companies blog and more and more are joining the world of blogging on a regular basis. Corporate HR blogging on the other hand has a long way to go.

Ben Yoskovitz and Susan Burns have written a definitive guide for corporate HR blogging — a practical, how-to guide on how to setup a blog, get management approval, write great content and build traffic. The guide is 31 pages long – but it’s broken up into small chunks that are easy to read and digest. There’s a list of Top 10 Corporate HR Blogging Tips near the end, along with a list of great online resources for blogging, HR and recruitment.

What you’ll learn:

• Why blogging is important to your success in HR/recruiting
• How to develop the business case for blogging
• How to get management approval
• How to handle bad news and negative criticism
• How to start a blog – the technology, definitions, and more
• How to write a blog – editorial calendars, story ideas, research
• How to build traffic – linking, social media, commenting, etc.
• How to go beyond blogging – Twitter, social networks