Archives for Social Media

While social media such as blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking and tagging technologies have transformed the interactive web experience, corporations have been slow to adopt these ideas to enhance employee communications and collaboration.

Most of us know social media through blogs or social networking sites such as Linked-in (I’m a member), Xing (ditto), MySpace or others which house members’ personal and professional  bios and enable efficient networking, recruiting and job searches. Many executive recruiters scout these sites looking for local or global-ready talent.

I believe that this suite of Web 2.0 technologies and social networking software will be nothing less than transformational to multinational companies. Here’s why:

• Social media is a critical Gen Y retention tool
• Social media is a knowledge management tool
• Social media much improves team collaboration
• Social media is a mentoring tool

Retention. The retention issue is one that points to a potential generation gap between executives who run enterprises and younger workers who insist upon feeling connected - beyond email. “Most companies should very seriously think about the value of creating a community,” contends Thomas Lee, a management professor at the University of Washington in a recent Forbes interview. The article introduces the clever phrase “job embeddedness,” to describe the sense of community derived from social media connections.

Knowledge management. Traditional knowledge management tools are no real pleasure for employees. Such tools impose formality and process overhead on subject matter experts. But by developing wikis companies can both invite and reward expert contributions that lead to the creation and spread of best practices. Some consulting firms are opening up specific-areas wikis to customers to promote knowledge sharing. This type of interchange also cuts down on travel.

Collaboration. Corporate blogs have gotten off to somewhat of a rocky start. Critical comments and strict company policies have discouraged participation. But blogs remain a useful way of disseminating information - adding life to fairly tired corporate intranets and e-mail newsletters. I spoke to human resources executives at a recent conference who tell me that they count participation in corporate social media sites in the form of blog posts, wiki comments and so on. But beware, everything you post can and will come under scrutiny. A cool and inexpensive idea (courtesy of WebWorkerDaily) is “workstreaming” - publishing your work to co-workers who ’subscribe’ to it via RSS (really simple syndication).

Mentoring. In a distributed enterprise, it’s critical to identify and nurture emerging talent. As a manager when you’re building a team it’s valuable to read an employee’s perspective on areas they plan to study or develop in. With some corporate social media tools, you can see where a co-worker has contributed to a team wiki or blog discussion that enhances best practices and multi-cultural understanding. To an employee, connecting with the right manager in another office can help workers resolve significant project, procedural or career challenges. A company called Select Minds promotes the idea of inviting retired (or alumni) executives to participate as mentors.

Just when you feel disconnected at work, it may be comforting to know that the person down the hall you feel you had nothing in common with also enjoys playing online bridge. For global teams the impact is considerably higher. Imagine how comforting it is for a co-worker of yours in another country to discover that you have a shared passion for Broadway musicals - these are subjects that won’t come up in a thousand conference calls.

The spate of recent activity in this space lead by IT giants IBM and Cisco, mostly concern developing products to enable corporations to connect to their customers, rather than employees. By and large, corporate social media networks are much more locked-down and staid than what’s available on MySpace, Bebo or Friendster among others. Let’s face it: Corporate policy prevents individuality from running amuck. Still, for those of us who don’t have the opportunity to get to know everyone on our distributed team, any information (e.g., Ernesto has a vacation home in Guadalajara) is better than none. If you work in a distributed enterprise, especially one that spans cultures, the return on investment should be immediate.