Social Media - business tool or personal communication channel?

As per Sue's intro on me - I'm a real fan of Social Media and a self-confessed Facebook addict, in the past year I've been truly amazed how this tool (and others like it) have created a whole new type of interaction with friends, acquaintances and contacts.

Whilst I probably use Facebook now as much as I used to used mobile textmessaging (thanks to the wonder of the fab new Facebook app launched for blackberry) - e.g. taking a pic then loading it with tags and captions on the spot, as an internal communications professional I'm still waiting to see if this new channel/style of communication holds any opportunities for improving our internal communication within Siemens. Currently my conclusion is that at this stage it really does depend on the demographics of your employee base. Whilst I do know of organisations that are already sucessfully launching internal facebook style sites, my hunch is their employee base is probably predominately generation Y or those core business has a technological slant who are probably fearless with technology and very comfortable with the very different style of interaction Social Media provides.

And so to Siemens.......well despite being an organisation world famous for technological innovation, we are in essence a German engineering company and most of our work-force (with the exception of IT and communication teams) either haven't heard of Facebook, are very untrusting of new generation sites or are just plain skeptics!

Comments

[Mark Darby]

Hi Kirsty

Welcome to the blog - I look forward to more of your postings this month.
I still sit on the fence on social media in the workplace (despite being a huge fan of facebook outside of work).
It's a tongue in cheek comment, but one of my colleagues said "Social media? Not here to be social. Here to work."

My personal issue is still around content and action - I love youtube and facebook because it's interesting, and I don't need to do anything as a result! Most stuff we post internally on our discussion forums and blogs is important but very very dull - and nobody goes and does anything as a result.

I can still be convinced though!

Mark

[Casey]

I'm in no doubt that there is a place for it, and that it is inherently positive. But I'm still wondering about the best way to harness it. Facebook in particular.

Monitoring is all well and good but I'm hesitating over whether publishing corporately is a positive use of the tool or an invasion...

[Indy]

One thing I've found useful is to separate the concepts of "social networking" and "Facebook" and look at them in turn.

I probably wouldn't advise anyone to build their own social networking setup, but I think it's useful to think about what it can do for the business internally in isolation from the raft of opportunities and problems that come with being connected to "everyone else on the planet" through Facebook.

I'm in a techy mood this evening, so I'd pinpoint the "social recommendation system" as one key difference between a social network and other communications technologies that Siemens no doubt already has (e.g. email, intranet, etc.)

So for example, I'm sure innovation projects already have email lists and project web pages to distribute status reports and news about presentations etc. And to some degree, depending on the quality of your setup, it's pretty easy to put people on the lists and for them to find the webpage.

So what can "social networking" offer? Well, in any large organisation there are too many projects for everyone to be aware of. So you start off by making a webpage, putting all official project participants on the email list and then publicising the project web page to "unofficials" by announcing it through the usual channels.

Of course, the usual channels are stuffed with information about all sorts of things, so employee X skims it, doesn't notice this new project that they would be interested in and so never gets involved as an "unofficial."

Let's say that 10% of the people who might have something to contribute as an "unofficial" actually go to the project web page and get on the distribution list, one of whom is Jim.

Where social networking comes in is that X and Jim have already made contact on the "Siemens FaceSpace" and discovered they have some common interests. So if Jim signs up to the Project group, when X sees this on Jim's profile, X has a reason to suspect this is an interesting project and maybe sign up themselves.

This is just one scenario, but it shows how the technology could be beneficial, in the abstract, without requiring us to grapple with all the implications for corporate transparency that using Facebook itself would involve.

Which reminds me, anyone have a link to a good summary of pros/cons of corporate Facebooking?

[Quick aside, the value of "unofficials" is all about the serendipity of innovation and knowledge diffusion, that's why I feel the described scenario might be useful.]

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[Samuel]

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