by Marc Wright

 

Falling for Social Media is a bit like falling in love with the boy or girl from the wrong side of town. You’ve had the first date, you’ve fallen in love and now you want to introduce your new passion to the people back home.

 

But guess what? They’re not impressed.

 

As you present your proposals for blogging and employee forums you imagine the tumbling of communication hierarchies; they see management anarchy. You envision an interconnected workforce, they see a company dating agency. It’s like introducing a pole dancer to your maiden aunt.

The trouble is that social media looks just too much like fun for it to be a serious business application. Sure we want conversations in the company, but only if they are on-brand and aligned to the business mission. Yes we want collaboration, but not on Facebook. The sad truth is that internal communications is the last bastion of feudalism in 21^st century life. Today we can laugh in the face of politicians, ignore the strictures of bureaucrats, create and destroy celebrities with the push of a text, but we are still supposed to kow-tow to our employers like serfs at the annual hiring fair.

 

At a recent simply-communicate conference on social media I asked the audience what were the top 10 barriers to introducing social media into their organisations.

 

 

Top of the list was the lack of a demonstrable business case. Three quarters of the audience felt that they could not justify the cost of implementing these new tools. Now where have we heard that one before? Oh yes, back in the ‘70s when a few brave souls had the temerity to propose that PCs should be placed on every desk with a small printer round the corner. The centralists in the IT department soon put their digits in those cracks; only to have the dam crash around them when they were up to their necks in the demands of personalised computing power.

 

  

And PCs and printers were serious investments in corporate cash. With the relatively low costs of social media the barriers to entry have shrunk to barely ankle-high. Internal communication will fall to the pressures of Web 2.0 and social media will become the mainstream inside companies just as it is on the outside.

  

But it won’t be an easy ride. The feudal barons of Compliance, Security and Legality are not going to loosen their grip too easily But there’s hope: I predict that there are four Trojan Horses that you can use to get through the gates of Troy and bring down the walls of hierarchy, cascades and megaphone communication.

  

 

Staff Directories

 

 

Every company has them. Black and white columns of company employees in small type lists grudgingly revealing their title, their location and a telephone and email address at least a year out of date. And yet when each of those human beings was originally recruited they came brandishing a cv with full details of the mountains they’ve climbed, the books that changed their lives, the languages they’ve learnt, the awards they’ve won. All that colour and sense of brio now lies locked away in the HR archives, and we are now just Brian Smith, Mgr Claims in SB/Unit39. The bald directory on the company intranet reduces us to the level of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, forever objecting: “I am not a number…I am a free man!”

 

And yet just hop across the webfence to Facebook and there we can be seen in our full colourful personalities – telling the world our innermost thoughts and trumpeting our tastes to all and sundry from the towers of web 2.0.

 

 

Imagine that you want to set up a virtual team to work on a project; or you are looking for a mentor to help you in your new job; or you want to interview someone about your company’s operations in Prague. You can stick a pin in the directory or you can harness the richness of information about people’s personalities that social media trumpets on a thousand profile pages.

 

  

And the wonderful thing about social media directories is that they are as near to free as you can get in corporate communications. The coding has all been written for a thousand networks before yours, and of course it’s always up to date because users care more about their own profile than any other of the deteriorating information sitting inside your corporation. When the forward-thinking, ever-flexible chaps in IT demur, just point out that 3,000 of the company’s staff are already on Facebook and if the IT Department doesn’t revamp the directory it will only be a matter of time before the rest of the company join them.

 

  

User Group Forums

 

 

Here’s a second idea that will appeal to the Sales and Marketing functions. Good companies love to listen to customers, in fact they welcome criticism for what it truly is: free consultancy. When those customers are other large companies then they really listen: just think how much BP spends on airlines, or Accenture on hotels. So User Groups are really important to companies; they provide feedback on what is going right and what is going wrong with a company’s services and products.

 

The trouble is that running User Groups involve taking your clients to a hotel, arranging a conference, wining and dining them – only to hear their whinges and complaints. You can imagine how popular these events are with your senior executives. Who wants to be lambasted about problems they don’t know about in a forum where they cannot be set right until you get back to the office.

 

But here is another irresistible benefit of social media by creating an online forum for your company’s user groups. Suddenly they have somewhere they can blow off in real time and share opinions with other customers. If it’s an unjustified complaint then other users will tell them so – in a way that is far more effective to anything you could say. The customer isn’t always right – but it might take another customer to tell them so.

 

 

And if there is a buzz growing around a faulty product or poor service then you can identify it earlier and act more quickly. That way the problem can be acknowledged, sorted and your brand improved before the next User Group Meeting. The technology is simple – it’s just a forum. And if you don’t start using them, then there are plenty of unofficial pressure groups who will fill the vacuum and set one up instead.

 

  

Video library

 

Now this one really is a no-brainer. There are hundreds, if not thousands of video programmes knocking around the average Fortune 500 company. Some are best left buried, but many explain issues or can inform debate, if only people knew where to find them. VHS tapes have long been confined to the rubbish skip of history while CD-ROMs and DVDs, thanks to their very slimness, have all long since disappeared behind drawers or been turned into coasters.

 

But video compression and the net were made for each other and now any video can be Mpeged or flashed into cyberspace. Which means they can always be found (provided you tag them correctly), and it won’t be long before the videos themselves will become searchable thanks to products like www.intra.tv. And not only is distribution cheap, the cost of video production has plummeted and the number of recording devices available in the average company means that there is usually a lens to catch that significant moment, when a target is broken or a customer gives praise.

 

So look at archiving all your videos on your company server – or find a reputable supplier who will do it for you. Remember that anything on video about your company is capable of ending up on YouTube anyway, so better to manage your media assets rather than let them languish. I predict a time when internal communications departments will run their own company web TV channels. Who knows, they might even run their own daily soaps to keep employees informed through entertainment, in the same way that the British radio soap The Archers was first created to keep farmers up to date with best practice.

 

Project wikis

 

 

Thanks to wikipedia we all know what a wiki is, but do you know just how useful this software can be for your company?

 

A wiki is simply a web page that anyone can edit. You can limit it to particular groups or teams, who have to log on using a password to make changes. Wikipedia now has restrictions about who can and cannot update its pages, but this has not stopped it becoming the most powerful encyclopaedia in the world.

Wikis make even more sense inside companies. Here users are far less likely to abuse a wiki by deliberately inserting inaccurate or misleading information. You trust your staff with the firm’s resources, brand and customers; why should you treat them as a lunatic fringe just because they are dealing with you online? Instead a wiki allows you to collaborate with your colleagues in the most efficient manner known to man. You always have access to the very latest version of a document; if you spot errors you can correct them immediately; changes can be tracked to individuals so you know who wrote what.

 

In these days of virtual meetings over teleconference and instant messaging, wikis are becoming the only anchor point in a sea of ambiguity and change. They are cheap to set up and no one needs training to use one. The only challenge is to encourage people to use them and this requires you to remove all other forms of written communication.

 

Indeed I used a wiki to create and edit the edition of The Gower Handbook of Internal Communication that you are reading (http://internalcommshandbook.pbwiki.com/Preface). All contributors to the Handbook posted their contributions to the wiki where they cpuld see my revisions and edits as the book progressed.

 

Oh and ‘wiki’ just means ‘quick’ in Hawaiian.

 

Return on Investment

 

Staff directories, user group forums, video libraries and project wikis are the four easiest ways to get Social Media into your organisation. Employee forums, better internal search engines, instant messaging, video enabled VOIP, folksonomies, RSS feeds and web-enabled widgets will all follow in time. As people feel the benefits of social media in their lives outside the organisation, the faster they will demand the same features inside.

 

As for making the business case, don’t be too concerned. It’s all just code and data and it’s getting cheaper every day. Forget about making cases for the Return On Investment – wait a couple of months and the investment will be negligible, if not zero, while the benefits are only just starting to be measured

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