Social networks were one of the fast growing phenomena of the period 2006 – 2008 and their impact on organisational communications, both internal and external, is increasing. Social software is increasingly being used in an organisational context.
The uptake in use of Facebook – now the UK's most popular member community site, with an almost 2 fold increase in usage in 2008 compared with 2007 (source TNS) and LinkedIn presents a challenge for organisations. On the one hand, they may want to introduce social software to harness individuals’latent energy to communicate but on the other hand they still want to control this within the context of an organisation’s purpose and culture. The great fear among senior executives is that staff may abuse the availability of instant messaging, personal profile pages and forums for personal use that is of no benefit to the organisation.
Traditional communications people continue to rely on mass communication techniques, press and online advertisements, print and electronic newsletters, notice boards and intranet or publishing websites to disseminate messages and information. This is at odds with the trend towards individuals learning about what is going on from social networks. These are now taking over from the ‘water-cooler’, the ‘grapevine’ and the ‘industry rag’ as places for people to find out what is really going on. That means the marketers and IT folk have to start giving control to individuals; this is one of the hardest aspects of social media for traditionally-trained communicators and technologists to understand and embrace.
The benefit of social media for an organisation is first and foremost about gaining insights about its members, its wider stakeholders and the general public. A networked community built around an organisation can provide ongoing insights about the needs, wants and behaviours of the individuals in that community. More than that the organisation can learn about the attitudes and the mood of its staff, its customers or its stakeholders.
Access to that online community can enable topics, and ways of presenting them, to be better understood by those responsible for outbound communications as well as providing valuable feedback to the organisation’s subject experts.
There are undoubtedly benefits but there are also some health warnings attached to use of social software by organisations.
In the case of forums the challenge is to what level is moderation required to ensure the discussion threads are kept alive and don’t descend into a place to have a moan or, worse still, a place to post destructive comments.
Online chat is un-moderated and more often than not there is no audit trail so defamatory or abusive language cannot be easily policed. ‘Netiquette’ is less well understood for chat than for email communication and many organisations find this aspect of online chat difficult to accept. Also, chat has a much higher rate of adoption and use among younger workers and so informal internal communications that are based on online chat may create an unwanted division between different members of the organisation’s staff.
There is much discussion about the merits of CEO blogs. They can be a powerful way for an organisation to connect with the wider stakeholder public but they need to be actively and fully embraced by the CEO if they are introduced. A CEO blog that is rarely updated or that is ghost written by a member of the marketing or communications team will quickly be seized on by the ‘blogosphere’ and the benefits can be reserved and the effects a public relations failure.
Wikis require a large community of users and contributors to justify the necessary overhead of administrators and moderators to vet and advise on contributions. Wikis also need the smoothing effect of a large volume of active contributors to ensure the content has credibility.
User generated content is a key feature of the social internet and goes further than forums, chat of Wikis. UGC includes a range of media types with photography and video the most common formats. UGC is most developed in sites such as Flickr and youtube; and this gives an indication of the level of activity and interest around UGC and the benefits to any organisation that finds a formula to harness this type of online behaviour will be considerable.
The challenge for organisations is to find the best way to seed UGC content in a way that will ensure it is viewed and commented on without appearing to be muscling in on an essentially viral behaviour.
Social networking is now a dominant force in the Internet and in internal communications. Organisations that fail to find the best implementation for their internal and external audiences risk being out of the loop and in the dark.