Internal Communications: A Social Media Freshman Among Upperclassmen
This is a guest post from Jason Anthoine of workplace communications firm The Cohesion Group. It’s the result of an email Jason sent me asking whether I’d covered social media usage within organizations and a nice follow-on to an earlier post of mine looking at internal communication systems. I was intrigued by Jason’s email and asked him if he’d be interested in writing about it here. Enjoy.
Remember in high school how, as a freshman, you were relegated to the uncool tables where all the kids with braces, bad haircuts and square clothes sat? Freshmen weren’t allowed to mingle with the upperclassmen, even the sophomores, since they were still just kids.
In my job as an internal communications consultant, sometimes I feel as though I’m dealing with a whole bunch of freshmen all the time. Let me tell you why.
About four times a year I conduct a workshop through the Advanced Learning Institute about the impact social media is having on internal communications for companies and government agencies. I’ll be the first to admit I’m no expert when it comes to social media. But I know more than your average bear, I guess, especially as it pertains to internal communications, which is something I do know a good bit about.
One thing I do before the workshop is conduct a short survey of the participants to find out where they are on a social media scale. They rank themselves as being either a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, teacher or principal. This gives them a chance to plant a flag in the ground about their own capabilities, and it gives me the opportunity to fine-tune the workshop based on their responses.
The vast majority of them rank themselves as freshmen. True, they probably wouldn’t be at the workshop if they were more advanced in their usage of social media at work. But this number has remained rather steady over the past couple of years I’ve been conducting this informal poll.
Mind you, these are, for the most part, mid-level to senior internal communicators at corporate and government positions, meaning they have roughly 15 years experience in communications. Most have direct line reporting structures to senior human resources, corporate communications or executive leadership positions. And most of them freely admit that they’re scared to death to go on Facebook and haven’t the slightest clue what Twitter is or does.
We spend the bulk of the morning’s time going over the basics of blogs, RSS, Facebook, podcasts, Twitter, Yammer, LinkedIn and wikis, as well as measurement of these tools. We also spend some time on the many open source tools that allow you to quickly create communities like Kick Apps and Ning.
Despite a slow and plodding pace, I feel as if I’m asking them to drink from a fire hose as we go down this list of social and new media basics. By the end, we’re all a bit exhausted and there are dozens of questions in addition to all the ones we’ve discussed along the way. We usually run out of time before we run out of need for time.
I’m afraid that these folks are the norm within most organizations. There are a few organizations that are doing social media internally very well, namely IBM, Nortel, Microsoft and British Telecom, among others. But most are still stuck with one-way, decidedly unsocial ways of communicating with their employees, i.e. newsletters, bulletin boards, email and static intranet sites. Of course, none of these tools are irrelevant. They may just be outdated as they are being used.
As I’ve said before, it’s a shame that we have so many of these new, wonderful communication tools we can use internally yet they are so underused. People leave their jobs and join and participate in social communities while at home, where they learn and grow and share and better themselves and others. Then they return to the office and it’s 1993 all over again. Or 1973, depending on the location!
The good news? We didn’t have to sit at the freshman lunch table throughout high school. Eventually we moved up to being sophomores, juniors and seniors, and earned entrance into the cool section of the lunchroom.
Internal communications is slowly growing up and will eventually join its cooler siblings in advertising, marketing and public relations when it comes to social and new media usage. It may take a while, but the wheel is turning.
It could be worse: we could be stuck at the same table with human resources.
- Jason Anthoine is head honcho with The Cohesion Group, the workplace communications firm. You can find and connect with him on Twitter and at his blog plaintalk. He runs slower than your average bear.
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11 Responses to “Internal Communications: A Social Media Freshman Among Upperclassmen”
Completely agree, Ari – sadly Jason and what he's trying to do is outnumbered by the less forward-thinking companies. But… they are getting there, slowly but surely, which is a definite plus!
Indeed, the wheels are turning slowly, Ari. But there's starting to be some interesting uses of these technologies for internal communications. One that comes to mind is WorkBook, a Facebook overlay that helps to connect people behind the firewall and on a corporate network in much the same way Facebook connects people beyond the firewall. You can read more about it at http://www.myworklight.com
Once the Legal and HR departments get more comfortable with lots more conversation going on than they can control or would want to, you'll see the wheel turn a bit more quickly.
But you're right: you can almost hear it turning now it's so slow. It's sorta like watching paint dry sometimes.
Jason, that's an interesting analogy. Let's hope that social media adoption rates do follow the pattern which you describe above. Unfortunately, in the UK at least, firms seem particularly reluctant to recognise the potential thereof. Even though many of these platforms have been specifically designed to develop the conversation, fear of the 'new' continues to represent a major deterent to organisational implementation.
Whilst your post specifically addresses internal communications, it is also directly applicable to communications which the organisation has with external stakeholders. Essentially, I think that the problem falls upon organisational mentality. At the moment, I don't think that genuine customer satisfaction is at the foremost of organisational thinking; or at least not to the extent that it should be. If it were, then greater attention would be placed upon addressing the customer's needs in whichever forum which these customers deem necessary.
At present, even those firms which do employ some social media strategies tend to follow a platform checklist (blog, Twitter, etc). Indeed, they seem to lack the foresight to adopt emerging platforms before they become mainstream.
TLR
TLR, you bring up an interesting point about a "platform checklist." Many companies do seem to go down a list of tools and put them in place simply to say they've done so. There's not much effort going into making the tools as robust as they could be. We see it a lot with blogs, in that a senior leader wants one, tries it for a few weeks (with comments turned off), and then lets it die on the vine, forever dooming blogs to be proclaimed a failure at the firm because of this one ill-defined attempt.
I guess when more companies believe there is value in the conversation, not just in the tool, you'll see more internal adoption. Sadly, most companies don't care what their employees have to say or what they think as long as the widgets are produced on time. That's ignoring the strongest growth engine the firm has, its employees. And it's doing so at great peril, especially in highly competitive, global markets where most firms operate these days.
You make a perfect example, Jason. Too many companies do ignore the employee, and in this day and age, that's almost akin to business suicide. I've long been a vocal advocate of encouraging greatness from the ground floor up – after all, even the most successful of CEO's had to start in the equivalent of the mailroom. They'd do well to remember that great ideas aren't judicious in their choice of origin.
And let's not forget that energising the employees to willingly engage in social media initiatives can produce an extra channel for engagement with the customer. Such a channel can be implemented for almost zero cost, whilst encouraging the employee to feel passionate about their organisation.
TLR
Sadly, I think this is an inherent problem with UK companies on a great many levels, Chris (and, as you know, I say that as someone who lived and worked in the UK until 2006).
For some reason, Britain has fallen behind in the business innovation model – strange, given her history in leading the way for new discoveries and inventions. Yet when a survey says that more than 70% of UK PR companies don't have any kind of online strategy, and Government 2.0 seems a pipe dream, should we really be surprised?
Maybe UK businesses and corporations should look at how the individual is embracing the new models – they could learn a lot.
Thanks for the topic–definitely overlooked, and one that interests me. The communications staff I oversee handles both external and internal communications, and we're not using any new tools yet.
We're part of a much larger organization, and a couple of us who are on Twitter have talked about using that, or maybe Yammer, to connect everyone who's so spread out.
No matter what tool or platform we choose, there will be a learning hurdle that some of them have to get over if they're not already in that space.
To state the obvious: I'll continue to use email in addition to whatever I land on. Email is a common tool that I mention because it is a means of carrying on a conversation. I think we're so excited about the new shiny objects we often leave it off the list, and doing a better job of using email for internal communications would be a vast improvement in many workplaces and committees.
@SuzeMuse wrote a blog post on managing email recently that may be of interest: http://suzemuse.netfirms.com/2009/01/13/what-away…
@BarbChamberlain
Email continues to be an important internal communication tool, though it's value is diminished by the spam and unimportant messages we receive in our inboxes every day, especially those that are the result of a "reply all" response.
We conduct email usage surveys for companies and find that the majority of managers say that they receive a majority of email that doesn't apply to them and wish they could filter it out before it hits the inbox. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell what internal mail is important and what isn't until you open it. Despite its shortcomings, though, it remains a critical tool.
I think you'll find Yammer worth your time. It's a fairly easy concept to grasp and allows for quick snippets of info to be exchanged fairly rapidly (like Twitter). Another you might look into for far-flung team members is instant messaging. Having your whole team available practically instantly on your desktop is a great help when coordinating communication activities. Our firm relies on instant messaging more than we do email and it's a critical business tool for us. Yahoo, Google and AOL offer some good solutions that are easy to implement, usually without involving your IT department.
Thanks for your thoughts, Barb. Your experience is very helpful!
Jason, we need more people like you out there
You'd be surprised to see how slow the wheel is turning. In my experience with my friends, even when people know and use these new technologies they seldom think of them as intra-company business tools.
Good luck in your sessions.