Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Social Media Behind the Firewall, part 2

The previous entry here explored reasons for instituting an active social media program as part of an employee communications strategy. But it barely scratched the surface on the subject of the potential barriers to that effort.
            What are the challenges you’re likely to encounter as you launch your own social media behind the firewall? Certainly, as noted previously here, the legal and IT departments might have confidentiality and security concerns. Is there any danger of employees sharing information that should not escape the confines of the company?
            Again, I’m not a tech guy but I’ve been reassured by friends who are that software, firewall protections, and passwords provide the necessary security today.

Built-in Resistance
So assuming you’ve solved the security issue, the biggest and most difficult barrier to overcome in launching an effective social media system is the same barrier that stymies most other corporate initiatives: time; i.e., no one has enough of it. People are already overwhelmed by email and meetings, to say nothing of the time needed to do their jobs.
            Who has time to monitor social media? Who has time to build a profile page for a LinkedIn type platform?
            The answer lies in getting people to use it. The more a person uses such platforms, the more comfortable they get with it, and the more they realize that it improves their awareness and understanding of the business while adding to their own worth to the organization.
            To build use, leadership and managers must set the example. If it’s important to leadership, it is important. Because of that alone, people will investigate at first, and then start using it, becoming regular participants.
            A couple years ago, Computerworld profiled three early adopters of internal social media. Deloitte, for instance, found that early adoption was slow. The company started with only a portion of the organization.
            Patricia Romeo, who led the effort, said, “People aren’t going to go in as readily when the well is 75% empty. But with the encouragement of leadership, more people got involved and were soon demanding access to the rest of the organization.”
            Romeo’s advice is to continue to build leadership support, even after the early-stage buy-in. “Make sure support is there throughout the organization,” she says. Once the platform begins filling with valuable content, “it’s really about viral adoption.” I would add that leadership support must be in the form of setting the example – i.e., using it themselves by becoming active participants.
            As to the second point, it’s likely that nearly everyone in your organization will have a LinkedIn profile. Rather than ask them to replicate their profiles, make it easy by using LinkedIn’s API to transfer profile data.

The Threat of the New
A new way of communicating, for many in the organization, will represent change. And for most people, change is threatening. Don’t burn the boats. Rather, sustain the conventional lines of communications. As younger employees build traffic on the internal social media network, their more senior peers will come to realize that a lot of business is being conducted there without them, and will soon join in out of necessity.
            Keep in mind that resistance will be greatest among older employees unaccustomed to social media, still more comfortable with their accustomed modes of communication. Again, if the senior managers and company leadership are actively involved, they will have to get involved out of fear of being left behind, or perceived as out of the loop.
            IBM, another company profiled in the Computerworld piece, was one of the first major companies to bring social media behind the firewall. Jeff Schick, VP of social software, says that poor adoption is rarely because users don’t know how, but because they didn’t see the “why.” Help them answer that question.

The Whys of Social Networking
The Computerworld article included a sidebar that's worth excerpting here. According to Amy Shuen, author of Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, employees tend to have at least one of four goals for why they use social networks.
1.  Quick access to knowledge, know-how and “know-who.” In their profiles, people can list skills, expertise and experience, as well as previous employers and people they know. As with LinkedIn, this helps simplify the job of locating people with the knowledge they need. This is particularly useful inside multidivisional, multi-site, and multinational organizations.
2.   Expansion of social connections and broadening of affiliations. This is the Facebook model, in which the goal is to get to know people better online by interacting with them and keeping up with their personal information.
3.   Self-branding and expression of a personal digital identity and reputation. Before long, people get creative with their profiles and begin to think about how they want to be known in the company.
4.   Referrals/testimonials/benchmarking/RSS updating. On social networks, the viral distribution of knowledge becomes important. For instance, people want to know how many of their “friends” have recommended a video or have joined a community and, in turn, if they discover something cool they want to spread the word.

I close with a variation on an admonishment that has appeared many times in this blog: Social media behind the firewall, at the end of the day, is just another communication medium. Don’t confuse the tool with the task, which in this case is communications: the interaction between people and their exchange of information, ideas and insights.
            If social media helps people be more effective communicators, then it may be something you want to consider for your own organization. But don’t fall into the trap of adopting social media because it’s the latest trend. Do it because it makes sense, satisfies your organization’s communication needs, and adds value.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Social Media Behind the Firewall, part 1


Something new is bubbling up in the world of organizational communications. While most corporate communications managers weren’t noticing, a growing proportion of their internal audience has been bringing new habits of communication to the workplace.
            This younger contingent, the so-called “millennials,” mostly born in the 1980s, has never known a world without cell phones, computers and the Internet. From their early years through college graduation, their primary means of connecting with their friends has been through social media: texting, instant messaging (IM), Facebook, Twitter, and online role-playing games (RPG).
            Upon graduating college, many entered the business world. But their companies’ senior managers were communicating to them with blast emails and webcasts – i.e., those that were “modern” and “up-to-date.” Some still sent out paper memos and print newsletters.
            The internal company website, if there was one, just sat there inertly, with occasional news updates about the company. Maybe there was a blog, but without an interactive feature, a blog that hadn’t been updated for several months. How passé. How very boring. How inefficient.

Dipping Toes in the Water
Fortunately, some companies are addressing this shortcoming, dipping their toes in the water of social media internally. Yes, it’s a scary concept, particularly to legal departments and some IT folks.
            Last month, I attended a peer conference of employee communications managers where “social media behind the firewall” emerged as the hot topic of the morning’s discussion.
            Of the companies represented at the table, more than half had initiated internal social media to some degree. But none had yet gone whole hog. One company had opened a chat function on its internal network, but only for a fraction of its employees.
            In each case, the slow, deliberate pace of rolling it out was a means of proving its value and safety to skeptical legal and IT departments, as well as to work out the bugs and learn what does and doesn’t work. The employee communications managers were pleased with the experiment and eager to let it grow.
            So, what exactly is social media behind the firewall and why should communicators be interested?
            Social media has transformed the Internet into a place where people meet, learn, act, and react in real time. The kinds of activities that take place on conventional social media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. – are essentially people exchanging news, information and ideas electronically.
            But aren’t those the same kinds of activities that occur naturally within an organization over phone lines, in conference rooms, or spontaneously at water coolers? Yet there is widespread resistance to bringing that capability electronically into organizations, even if it does mean improved communications for multi-site organizations. The primary barrier, it seems, are IT and legal departments that fear hackers, or the spreading of confidential information.

Behind the Firewall
I’m no techie, but from what I’ve learned at social media conferences and read in various sources, embedding social media on a company’s own in-house server, behind the firewall, assures the security that companies need. Numerous vendors provide secure software, including IBM, which offers “Connections” – a suite of products to build internal social media.
            So, assuming we can clear that security hurdle, what kinds of social media should we use internally? The answer depends on a company’s culture, its size, the nature of its business, the number of employees, the number of locations, and the diversity of its internal audience.
            But wait: Let’s remember that social media is just another communications tool and should never be seen as a substitute for the real communicating that goes on between people: personal exchanges of information, ideas and insights.
            So your chosen social media tools should satisfy one core objective: to enhance and facilitate communications among and between employees, managers and leadership. That said, consider three possibilities…
            A LinkedIn style platform for multi-site companies would enable people to connect across departmental and national boundaries to discovery one another and their respective capabilities and talents. Individuals could readily find people of similar backgrounds and areas of specialty, and participate in relevant discussion boards where those in similar fields would discuss common challenges – just like the real world LinkedIn.
            A Twitter-like application might provide a venue where employees could post rapid-fire comments on everyday issues, as well as to provide links to helpful and relevant internal and external websites. Managers and leaders could use it for quick communication of important, timely messages. At the same time, it would be advantageous for employees to “follow” company leadership, as well as their operational or functional management, in addition to their fellow team members to stay atop important developments.
            An internal Facebook type app would allow cohorts to stay abreast of one another’s doings, particularly as it relates to working toward the company’s strategies and objectives. Again, leaders and managers could use the app to spotlight important news, both inside and outside the company.
            Meanwhile, leadership can eavesdrop and participate in the discussions at will, from wherever they are, whenever it’s convenient. Social media, then, can help leaders fulfill an important component of their jobs: staying abreast of what’s going on within their organizations – the “listening” part.


In part 2 of this two-part blog, I’ll explore areas for caution as well as some of the barriers that have to be overcome to assure that internal social media are effective and useful.