Conversation 12: Empowering the workforce with social media

June 4, 2009 by Deborah Crooks 

Last week, the board asked for examples of companies using social media to empower its workforce. While it’s ever more common for companies to fold social media marketing tools into their customer communications kit, how transparent the workplace is in terms of its use of Social Media by employees is a little stickier. A survey of the blogosphere yielded some opinions of whose making it work…and where in-house social media runs into issues:

Setting Limits
JacksonMG: @socialmediaclub internal train. for individ, corp strategy to define limitations, get employees excited FIRST so they will join in. #smcq12

“Employee Involvement: An Unreachable Utopia?” by
Kieron Shaw, portrays the often unspoken fear about full internal use
of social media, with some solutions from the business world: ‘WAKE-UP, CEO: Your employees expect to tell you how to run the business’

“”It’s a matter of degree,” says Monika Stafford, head of group
internal communication for LloydsTSB. “In terms of shaping the company
strategy, there have to be clear limits and specific focus around who
gets involved on what. But, equally, if you’re involving everyone in
what goes on the canteen menu, it would be a waste of everybody’s time.
So structure and limitations are essential.”

In Practice:

Sales: “Social Media for Knowledge Management and Sales: Fast Facts” by Nicki Jameson

“While smaller business focus their social media efforts outwards,
according to Aberdeen’s research [Aberdeen Group Report on Social Media for Knowledge Management and Sales Collaboration], larger companies are first of all
focusing inwards, on the (internal) collaborative power of social
media. What’s constant is that  it is driven by the business challenges.Thus, obtaining more leads doesn’t necessarily translate to having
10,000 “followers” on Twitter, or 5,00 “Friends” on Facebook (if at all
they are on Facebook), rather, it may in fact begin with understanding
the customer’s unique challenges then meeting them, then connecting
with more customers through collaboration tools with a shared outcome.”

Engineering:

“Should Engineers be Social or Not?” By Jim Cahil “I believe engineers, on their plant intranet networks, outside the firewalls and DMZ,
which separates this network from the plant’s control network, should
have access to these social media applications…I also believe there is benefit in experience sharing with some
of these social media applications like wikis, blogs, and microblogs
hosted internally, inside the firewall, but also not connected to the
control network….My thoughts in summary… keep that pressure on the IT folks to
open up the plant networks to social media applications, but not the
plant control networks.”

Doing Social Media Right:
Mari Smith opined in an interview on “Most Valuable Tweeps” that many companies are getting it right, with online shoe store Zappos leading the pack: “Zappos is among my top pick for social media role models. CEO, Tony Hsieh, has a wonderful attitude and culture that empowers his entire workforce to utilize Twitter with the simple directive of a) be authentic and b) use your best judgment. Zappos’ use of social media helps augment their exemplary customer experience, which is at the very heart of their brand.Other brands I give the two thumbs up to are Ford’s @ScottMonty and Comcast’s Frank Eliason @ComcastCares.”
Related Links:
“Best Buy: A Social Media Case Study” We are Social, by Robin Grant, May 2009
“Internal Use of Social Media,” Transparancy Not Technology, by Scott Kelley March 2009
“Case Study: Financial Firm Empowers Global Staff with Flexible, Multilingual Search Solution“, on Michael Gannoti Social Media Talk, May 26, 09
We’ll be talking more about this topic on Saturday, June 7 10am PST on Blogtalkradio.
#SMCQ12

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Comments

3 Responses to “Conversation 12: Empowering the workforce with social media”

  1. Storytelling and knowledge management for projects « Fredzimny’s CCCCC Blog on June 27th, 2009 12:54 am

    [...] Conversation 12: Empowering the workforce with social media (socialmediaclub.org) [...]

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    [...] Conversation 12: Empowering the workforce with social media (socialmediaclub.org) [...]

  3. Jim Cahill on July 9th, 2009 6:09 am

    Deborah, Thanks for the shout out on the social engineer post! It reverberated quick a bit around our world of process automation.

    Take it easy, Jim