Social Media and Employee Communications

Suppose company X is considering eliminating the printed version of its employee newsletter in favor of an alternative method of sharing interesting and important stories of interest to its people. Its executives are all too likely to pick up on buzzword’s like Social Networking or Web 2.0 and ask the legitimate question, “Is there any technology that can help?” Like most buzzwords the answer is yes, or no, depending on what the meaning of “help” is.

In applying the term “Social Media” we are really talking about using technology as a conduit to facilitate communication. With modern technology the overhead costs normally associated with traditional media, such as printing presses and broadcast licenses, disappears. This allows us to discard the old model of one person communicating to N number of people, if we wish, with a model of N number of people communicating with M number of people. 1..N becomes M..N.

This is why social media is collaborative in nature, while traditional media is directive. And it can be a curse as well as a blessing. For internal corporate communications, the professional working in a communications department might very well be forced to spend all of his or her time policing collaborative communication, doing damage control and swatting down rumors rather than staying focused on getting out the message the company wants to get to its staff.

Nevertheless there are versions of technologies that more or less fit the social media model that may be appropriate, enough that it is worthwhile to take an inventory of the technologies currently available, and place them into appropriate categories.

Communication

Stuff in the Communication category encompasses Blogs and Micro-blogs, Forums, Social Networks, Social Network Aggregation and events.

Blogs, such as blogspot, livejournal, or typepad, allow one or more users to create a webpage to post very short stories, opinions, photos and links on one or more topics. Some bloggers concentrate their efforts less on original work and instead post link’s with comments to stories from other blogs or traditional media web-pages, acting as a form of editor. Others exist to distribute original content.

The “Micro-Blogs”, such as twitter, are generally used to let a person’s social network, of friends and family, know what they are doing at that moment. These facilitate ad-hoc events like joining up for a dinner or going to a show. Used with mobile phones, the idea is that you can check to see if friends are available for something you want to do, or if they are doing something of interest to you.

Forums are centered on threaded content, you may post a question or comment as a means to solicit answers or additional comments. A forum topic can generate a large number or replies, including replies to replies...

Social networks, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, contrary to popular belief, do not create social networks. That is to say that people rarely, if ever, use them to find new friends. Instead they are used to surface already existing social networks. These are obviously popular among youth, especially since it demonstrates their social network in concrete terms, while being less popular among adults, whose social focus tends to be more on immediate family.

Social Network Aggregation, like FriendFeed can be used to combine different social networking sites into a single display.

Event sites are used primarily to leverage email as a means to invite your social network to a party or other event.

Collaboration

Collaboration sites include Wikis, Social Bookmarking, Social News and opinion.

If a blog is a diary, then a Wiki is an encyclopedia. The largest of which is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an example of crowd-sourcing, where you make an open call to an undefined group of volunteers to produce a product. In Wikipedia’s case, any person with knowledge of, or an interest in, any topic can edit or create a page and write an entry. (Here is the entry for Easter Seals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Seals_(US) as an example.)

Social Bookmarking is a way for social groups to share links to common web-pages, as well as rate various web-pages and blogs. Social News Sites such as Digg, are built around rating news related web-content to encourage the reading of the most popular stories.

Entertainment

These sites include photo and video sharing sites, such as youtube and Photobucket, Livecasting sites that stream live video content from amateurs such as UStream, Music sharing sites like ccMixter, and massively multiplayer online games (MMORPG) like Eve and World of Warcraft.

This post has already gone on too long, so I’ll go back to addressing my original hypothetical, the elimination of the paper copy of the employee newsletter, in the next post.