I believe one of the best skills for an effective blogger is someone who fervently researches and reads — finding not only inspiration for content but also supporting facts and figures. A lot of people ask me what sites or blogs inspire my own content for The Social Workplace. After spending some time compiling this list, I realized that I was overlooking the very resource that I used when I was first started looking: Alltop.com.
As an enthusiast within the social media space, you will inevitably find Alltop’s topics on collaboration, enterprise or general social media of significant use. However, as my own research became more focused towards internal technologies and employee engagement, I found that these topics were either too broad or slightly off focus (e.g, the enterprise topic is more about infrastructure not strategy). What I found I needed was a topic that listed blog posts and articles related to social technologies that bring about the essence of the internal social workplace — employee engagement, intranets, productivity, knowledge management, social learning. Therein lies, corporate social media.
Imagine my delight, then, when L.P. “Neenz” Faleafine at Alltop.com accepted my proposal to create a new topic category that was specific to this area. In fact, the original intent for my “List of Social Intranet, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Engagement, and HR Technology Experts” was created as my first steps towards compiling a list for Neenz to populate this category.
I’m extremely excited to say that this list is now live: http://corporate-social-media.alltop.com/
Tagged as:
alltop,
corporate social media,
neenz,
social knows,
social media
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, and brings global colleagues and peers together to collaborate and communicate with each other who might not have otherwise known to use each other as resources. 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.
A “networked company”: everything working everywhere. everyone working together.
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
- HR matters
- 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
Tagged as:
corporate social media,
social networking,
social networks
I recently came across this post by Lawrence Liu called, Social Media and New Roles For Employees. It is a wonderful post regarding employee roles in social media, the importance of aligning with marketing so that employees understand go-to-market messaging, as well as some thoughts on being translucent as opposed to transparent. This post also ties very nicely in with Jeremiah Owang’s discussion on the five ways companies let employees participate in social media.
Dan Schawbel recently posted a blog entry with the same title and suggested the following social media oriented roles for employees to take on:
- Messenger: As an employee, you can hold our own viral campaign by tapping your fellow employees for support, enabling them with a sharable message and link, and then empower them to promote. Just like you, they have their own personal brand, with a following of friends that can carry your message to an even larger audience.
- Spokesperson: Social media has given rise to a world where anyone can become a spokesperson for their company, whether endorsed or not. There may be corporate policies in place that prevent you from being aggressive online, but as long as you are transparent and use common sense, your company should sanction your participation. Typically, employee bloggers have to cite a disclaimer on their blog, stating that “The views expressed on this site are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or its clients.” Even though you have a disclaimer, you still have to be a good corporate citizen!
Tagged as:
corporate social media,
Dan Schawbel,
Employee Engagement,
employees,
Lawrence Liu
