Internal social media: the least understood hype

75% of the 200 internal communication professionals who attended the Internal Communication in Practice conference in mid-April indicated they had insufficient knowledge to be able to work with social media. The congress – entitled 'Social media: tool or power?' – provided excellent real-life examples from Microsoft, Achmea, TNT Post, the Dutch Ministry of Defence, the South-east Brabant Police and Vodafone. The 200 attendees were less sure of their ground. Which is why Jungle Minds was invited to the conference to reveal the best social media. A few real-life tips and examples from the Public Works and Water Board, Ordina and the municipality of Amsterdam.

75% of the 200 internal communication professionals who attended the Internal Communication in Practice conference in mid-April indicated they had insufficient knowledge to be able to work with social media. The congress – entitled 'Social media: tool or power?' – provided excellent real-life examples from Microsoft, Achmea, TNT Post, the Dutch Ministry of Defence, the South-east Brabant Police and Vodafone. The 200 attendees were less sure of their ground. Which is why Jungle Minds was invited to the conference to reveal the best social media. A few real-life tips and examples from the Public Works and Water Board, Ordina and the municipality of Amsterdam.

Some background figures

Fortunately, communication professionals and their managers feel the urgency of having to do something with social media in the coming year. How to deal with the hype is another story. Jungle Minds' Social Media Update 2010 revealed that 2% of respondents in 2006 had started using social media, which increased to 9% in 2007. It started really picking up in 2008-2009, rising to 26% and 46%, respectively. Which isn't so strange if you consider that social media have been around for six years or so. Apparently these things need an incubation period of about four years. With the exception of a Dutch version of Wikipedia, which has been around since June 2001, and LinkedIn, which has been here since 2003, Facebook, Hyves and Flickr also saw the light in 2004. Twitter dates back to 2006 and YouTube has only been available in the Netherlands since 19 June 2007. Hard to believe, if you think how securely embedded these media are in our daily lives.

Jungle Minds' study focused on social media in general, rather than specifically on internal communication. Experience shows that social media initiatives penetrate market environments more quickly than internal communication environments – notwithstanding some exceptions. So there's less experience to rely on. Conference organizer Corner Stone conducted a study prior to the Internal Communication in Practice conference that focused specifically on the use of social media for internal communication. It revealed that barely one in three organizations use social media for internal communication purposes. The most frequently used social media in organizations are Twitter (and the corporate version, Yammer), different versions of social networking/digital 'face' books and finally the blog.

No such thing as the best social media

An open book, you would think. But just in case, because Jungle Minds is asked this question all the time: you can't generalize and say which social media are better or worse. There are simply too many factors involved, e.g. the organization itself and how the media are introduced. The degree of participation does not reveal all either. According to intranet guru James Robertson, the average degree of participation in social media is about 15%, whereas you can only really call it successful if participation reaches 80%. This norm causes many initiatives to sink the water, and besides, the degree of use can fluctuate.

Basically, the point is that you should think hard in advance about how you are going to use social media. This means scrutinizing the medium's features. Then, depending on the type of organization you work at, the kind of users and your communication objectives, decide what you think will work most effectively. And to dispel another misconception: experimenting doesn't work. At least not entirely. You first have to take a good look at your objectives and ask yourself how you can achieve them with a specific medium. That means organizing things well, and it means warming up your colleagues to it. According to Corner Stone's study, employees are barely stimulated to use social media. But if CEOs have no idea what to say on their blog themselves and have no clue what moves people, the fun will be over before it started. Or there's the example of an HR manager who wanted to use social recruitment because it's cheaper. He asked his communication consultant if ICT could also get her one those LinkedIn thingies (this really happened, and in 2010 to boot!). So first educate the organization internally. Once you've started using social media you can experiment, but not the other way around.

Targeted us of social media

Social Media Landscape Guide for CMOs provides a useful overview of the different features of external social media in relation to objectives. The dominant culture of an organization shouldn't be underestimated when it comes to the success of social media. In a control-oriented organization that focuses on controlling and monitoring, and where information comes from management, people are not likely to share extensive knowledge that can't be monitored on a wiki. This kind of organization is better off coordinating or providing its information socially (RSS, alerts). On the other hand, sharing knowledge through a wiki or a slideshare or a blog is well suited to an organization focused on developing and facilitating and strengthening the cohesion of its employees, as is the cohesive power of a social network. Organizations that rely primarily on their power of innovation will most likely do more with voting, blogging and feedback. If they use these media to communicate with clients, then chances are the media will be used internally by employees as well. Enterprises driven by results and output are generally receptive to quick, targeted solutions. Think of tagging, for example, or rating content, both of which enable employees to obtain relevant information more quickly.

Jungle Minds – an adaptation of Quinn and Rohrbaugh's competing values network

Real-life examples

Below are three examples from real life and the reason for their success.

Example 1: Blogging – and more – at the Public Works and Water Board

The Public Works and Water Board launched a new intranet site in late April. A corporate intranet for the entire organization. The underlying strategy embraced the following terms: Personal (your widgets, news, homepage and tailor-made search function (à la iGoogle, via RSS); Involve (respond immediately to all content, intranet is one big wiki), blogs and chats that have already gone live; and Connect (via Yammer at the Public Works and Water Board, but also at its umbrella organization, the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, and [external] colleagues and partners).

Sharing knowledge and connecting seems a logical goal for an organization the size of the Public Works and Water Board (more than 9,000 employees), which depends on up-to-date information, has many employees on the road and works with many different partners. Blogs and wikis would seem a practical option for them. What's clever about the Board's team is that they launched the discussion on blogs before going live. This enabled them to prepare the organization for it. Something else that could contribute to their success is that if there is an incident with a lockkeeper, for example, they will be able to respond reasonably quickly to the situation on a blog. The Board is going to measure the impact of social media and the new intranet after having gone live.

Example 2: Discussions at Ordina via Yammer

Ordina chose for the rapid employment of the corporate micro-blogging tool Yammer. The organization, which has a staff of 4,000, noticed that its employees were talking a lot about the organization externally. Which makes sense, keeping in mind that many of its employees spend months or sometimes years working with clients externally. So in this case it was important for Ordina to maintain a feeling of solidarity with its employees and offer them a platform for this purpose. Moreover, the organization preferred discussion to take place internally because then something could be done about it. A result-driven company, Ordina opted for a quick and inexpensive market solution: Yammer, easy to use for web-savvy employees. People at Ordina can use Yammer to contact and send short messages to each other, so they can keep tabs on where everyone is at a given point. But they can also share files or exchange feeds.

The use of Yammer in April 2009 was a success: following a trial period of one and a half months, about 700 people were actively using it. It's a fast medium, easy to use and fits the organization. What undoubtedly contributed to its success is that people are allowed to do anything through Yammer. There are no rules or restrictions. Employees can say anything they want. This was explicitly mentioned when it was introduced. At Ordina it works.

Example 3: Connecting at the municipality of Amsterdam with the internal networking tool LINK

There is a great deal of internal collaboration within the municipality of Amsterdam. One of the cooperative alliances is the DevelopmentAlliance, a collaboration between various municipal services, such as the Department of Infrastructure Traffic and Transport, Urban Planning and Economic Affairs, the Development Company, the ProjectManagement Office and the Engineering Office. These services work together on urban planning issues. They are organizations where knowledge plays a dominant role and experts from a variety of disciplines work closely together on a project basis. In order to promote connecting and collaborating among colleagues from different services, the organization opted for the development of a social tool, LINK. This enables people who do not know each other personally to find the right people with the right expertise. They can have online contact (by means of messages, groups and discussions) and keep each other informed about the latest news or relevant events. The tool enables users to create a personal page or start a group. A crucial factor in this is an advanced search function that provides relevant hits.

The tool is currently still in development. The organization has chosen to have a tool made itself based on open-source software. The most important reason for this is that existing systems inadequately protect information. Among other things, a link is made between a person's personal details and their profile page. In addition, the organization can fine-tune the tool precisely to the wishes, needs and expectations of the users and the organization.

In conclusion: tips for the effective internal use of social media

A few tips to sum up:

1. Based on your strategy/objectives, your organization's culture and your users, determine which type of social media is most suitable (don't be misled by requests such as: 'shouldn't we have a wiki too?' and don't be solely motivated by technological possibilities).
2. Use social media in a highly targeted way for specific goals and, if necessary, specific groups, and ensure that it dovetails with a tangible need, just as Ordina has done or as the municipality of Amsterdam is planning to do.
3. Carefully plan the use of social media: not everyone has the expertise, skills or inclination to start using it. Prepare the organization, just as the Public Works and Water Board did.
4. Try to give people in the organization freedom, within limits, or like Ordina give them total freedom.
5. Measure the degree of success and make adaptations where necessary.

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