By Chris Lee

You may be using social networking tools as part of your marketing strategy, but what about internal communications? Social media can play its part in improving the flow of information within an organisation too, according to social media software provider, WebJam.

NMK caught up with WebJam’s marketing director, Marc Campman, to gauge best practice in this area.

Who’s using social media for internal communications? Is it big enterprises, small businesses, who?

In the past 12 months, we have seen an increasing demand from enterprises wanting to bring together their employees from across teams, departments or locations, using a fully integrated social intranet - sometimes called enterprise social media.

Many of these enterprises have a significant but disparate workforce across different sites and would like to help their hundreds or thousands of employees to easily engage with each other through ongoing conversations; to share information and capture ideas within a knowledge centre; and ultimately improve efficiency across different teams and departments.

What platforms are best for internal communications?

It is important for companies to consider flexibility and scalability when choosing the best internal social platform. One size doesn’t fit all. We advise our customers to work with companies who allow organisations to create their own basic platform, but with the ability to add specific features as and when they need it. Social intranet is an ongoing project and constant development is needed to keep the network live. A module-based approach would work best for organisations who wish to tailor their social intranet to accommodate specific requirements at different stages.

What’s a good example of social media-led internal communications in action?

One of our enterprise social media clients is JWT – an international advertising agency, and part of the WPP advertising group. The agency would like to improve internal communications within its London office across all levels of staff and management; to incorporate collaborative tools to develop and manage internal projects; and finally to spark creativity by enabling employees to share and comment on ideas to win clients or improve the business.

Working closely with JWT, a secure private internal network with a collaboration infrastructure was set up within weeks. As a result, over 300 staff can now share ideas and inspiration across a network of co-edited blogs and forums. The open social functionality offers an unlimited platform that can contain any open-social compliant feature, whilst the flexible privacy settings have allowed them to keep complete control over the viewing of their content.    

What are the five key things to consider when using social media for internal communications?

User-centric approach: Companies are more likely to succeed when an enterprise 2.0 approach is taken, and when employees are invited to be involved throughout the process. A user-centric strategy is ideal for driving a corporate social network strategy.

Pro-active community management: Moderation, or rather pro-active community management, is often necessary to keep track of objectives. We recommend organisations nominate ambassadors in social networks, who are passionate about what they do and are eager to initiate involvement from others.

Sharing ideas is the first step of innovation: In a corporate environment where businesses need to achieve certain sets of objectives, social media provides a purpose to drive communication between employees, sharing ideas and coming up with collective solutions.

Identify talents through individual initiatives: A private social network within an organisation provides a transparent platform for managers to identify the next leader through their initiatives to help others and ability to tackle issues.

Clear user guidelines and social network policy: Clear user guidelines should be provided to managers and employees, along with basic training. A social network policy is also needed to prohibit verbal abuse or aggressiveness towards constructive criticism.