From tweeting PRs to blogging CEOs, many employers have now embraced social media as a means of informing, sharing and engaging with employees. Jon Barker reports:

The BBC is abuzz with Obamamania. From the reporter travelling to Washington equipped with a box of  media tools that enable instant communication in text and video, to the back-office programmer near Marble Arch responding to a discussion thread via his mobile phone – the President’s inauguration speech is being debated and disseminated across the BBC’s internal network via a host of social media tools. But  'Auntie’ hasn’t always been this way.

In the past, the BBC has rarely communicated with staff outside the traditional corporate communication channels. Yet many staff now blog, share and collaborate both internally and externally, providing valuable insight into what is going on behind the scenes. And it’s creating a virtual loop of information that is  fostering greater understanding and participation among its staff.

Social media pioneer Euan Semple kicked-off proceedings back in 2003, nurturing channels and connections for more open communication via a series of internal wikis and blogs. He began spotting opportunities  where people could be talking with each other, using internet tools to build up a mutual interest. This ‘Trojan mice’ approach – putting in lots of small tools that may or may not work – was largely an ongoing experiment.

In six years, Semple’s baby, an internal discussion board called The Forum, has evolved beyond recognition: it is now ‘talk.gateway’ and features largely self-managing discussion threads on everything from the future of the BBC to the abundance of Mars Bars in the canteen. It’s part of the BBC’s central intranet site,  Gateway, which includes a space for the corporation’s weekly internal magazine, Ariel, and a raft of social media – with the promise of more to come.

“The BBC has a reputation for being a forward thinking organisation and it is full of highly creative people,” says Phil Edwards, manager of Gateway. “Social media is widespread on the website and, naturally, people started to use the tools to open up discussions internally. We’re making great progress with wikis, blogs,  discussion threads and forums, in order to develop conversations outside of email. Wikis are very important to the more tech-savvy areas of the BBC, as a quick and cost-effective way of agreeing processes and policies within living documents.”

Particularly successful was the trial of Microsoft’s Sharepoint ‘teamsites’, which the BBC found particularly effective for coordinating activities, resources and people during the its coverage of President Obama’s inauguration. “You can share documents across borders and discuss what was going on with a variable number of users within a closed group, so only a select and relevant few teams have access to a space in which to collaborate information,” says Edwards. “It negates the need for blanket emails and gaining access to shared drives. It’s a great example of the successful use of new technology.”

Yammer time
Yammer is another social media tool taking the BBC by storm. It’s a relatively new form of micro-blogging that takes root from Twitter but with an important difference: it’s a closed community. “Yammer is more for business connections internally, whereby only people with a BBC email address can access the BBC forums and discussion threads,” says Edwards.”It’s hugely popular.”

Tom Barton, head of PR at business and technology consultants Cap Gemini, is a prolific tweeter. Notably, he applies the same tone of voice whether he’s relaying details of an event or a general view on something completely unrelated to work. Tom also champions the rise of Yammer. “We’ve seen a huge upswing in numbers over the last six weeks, with some 1,500 users of Yammer within the organisation,” he says. “It’s happened fairly organically too, simply through word of mouth. People can choose to follow topics or people, or even a set up a temporary group for a project team to stay in real-time contact as they work. It also integrates with email as well – a social networking tool, with real-time micro-blogging and current-topic searching, as well as being a web service.”

One of Cap Gemini’s alliance partners, Intel, recently launched an integrated social media campaign to consolidate its ‘islands’ of blogs, forums and wikis and add new capabilities such as the people connection that professional networking brings. In her company blog ‘Why Intel is investing in social computing ‘, one of the things that employee Laurie Buczek suggests is that too much time is lost to find people and information to do your job. She says: “The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience and expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity and opportunity. Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action.”

Spanish telecoms operator Telefonica pushed the envelope further by combining Yammer with an internal video sharing service. Researchers working on projects get two minutes to explain their work to their colleagues via video clip, making it far easier to surf through information and get what you need than sifting through a huge document repository.

“At the BBC, online video and vblogs are not as widespread as you may think of a media organisation,” says Edwards. “However, plans are afoot to make the Gateway homepage a more effective internal  communications tool. We want to have more conversations, make better use of blogging, discussing how we are doing with objectives and trailing up-and-coming programmes to give staff an insight into what’s going on and what’s coming up. The idea is to foster inside knowledge to help BBC staff be ambassadors for
the organisation.”

Big Twitters
As a phenomenon, social media is just a new born. And with that comes teething problems. After all, when there’s a two-way conversation going on, surely there’s always the propensity for some employees to say things you might not want them to say?

Occasionally, organisations are given good reason to be cautious. Not so long ago, the Twitter account @BBC was busily spitting out headlines from the RSS feed of news.bbc.co.uk and had collected over 7,600 followers before anyone realized that it wasn’t the BBC behind the tweets. Eventually, Twitter handed the account over to the BBC and all the previous tweets and followers were deleted. But the incident served as a lesson to companies, even those who are sceptical of Twitter, to protect their brands in that space.

In terms of the company blog, many a CEO’s post can seem contrived – as if written by their PA or an internal communication executive. It may also be updated only once a month. But some get it bangon: Sun Microsystems’ CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, for example has a knack for making the company appear human; his views are generally regarded as being straight form the horse’s mouth. His candid take manages to have a respectable blog ‘authority level’ – the number of other blogs linking to your blog – without compromising the company’s image.

“Generation Y expect the internal culture of a company to reflect what they are used to, from school, university or other companies. To be at odds with the tools they’re familiar with could push them away”

Generation why?
There are certainly tangible business advantages to opening up a dialogue with staff too. Take the case of Best Buy in the US. The online retailer introduced an ‘internal information market’ that allowed employees to place bets on business outcomes like sales forecasts. By going outside of the planning department and involving people on the front line, Best Buy was able to produce forecasts that were more accurate than what had been generated by its internal experts. With participatory technologies such as social media tools, it seems success is more likely when companies pick the right users.

As Tom Nixon, director of social media experts Nixon McInnes, points out, “In terms of using social media tools for HR and recruitment too, the level of sophistication is rising and some organizations are now taking a multi-channel, integrated approach.”

Ernst & Young, for example, has a Facebook page, Twitter feed and YouTube channel that work together to support the firm’s staff retention efforts. “E&Y even has an online social network on Linkedin for its alumni with over 9,000 members – rather a large and powerful repository of institutional memory,” says Nixon.

With the internet celebrating its 20th birthday last month, it’s fair to say that much of the modern workforce has never known pre-web ways of working. “To dismiss all of social media is to deny social change,” says Andrew Hyatt of recruitment and employer marketers, Bernard Hodes. “Generation Y would expect the internal culture of a company to reflect what they are used to, from school, university or other companies. And that means Tweets, blogs, Facebook, wikis and online video. To be at odds with the tools they are familiar with could push a potential recruit away.”

Besides, the occasional session on Twitter or Facebook at work could make you a better employee – that’s according to a recent study from the University of Melbourne. The study asserts that people who use the internet for personal reasons at work are about 9% more productive that those who do not. Apparently, short breaks, such as web browsing, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net  concentration for a days’ work - and as a result, increased productivity.

Social media goes large

What happens when your mum is embarrassed about where you work? Moreover, what if there’s a word for the kind of job your company provides and it’s not a compliment? Your brand might be one of the most recognised on the planet— but how do you improve employee loyalty and pride in the face of a huge perception gap? This was the challenge facing David Fairhurst, chief people officer at McDonalds. And the situation was turned around by, among other things, creating a hard-hitting online video and an innovative lifestyle and development website for employees: ‘Our lounge’.

“Think MySpace for McDonald’s – a community site where employees can get business info, prepare for their career, find out what’s-on and gain advice on everything from passing driving tests to caring for sick relatives and gaining GCSEs in English or Maths,” says Phil Lane of Barkers, the media recruitment and employer branding agency that designed and produced a video, a microsite and an HTML email for the McDonald’s campaign.

The use of inspirational communication across different media allowed employees, new recruits, media and influencers to look past the ‘McJobs’ myth and showed employees that the company was listening – and that it cared. The direct result was a markedly happier workforce: a 15% increase in employee pride. David Fairhurst was also voted HR Director of the Year.

 {rokintensedebate}