Enterprise Social Media: Using social media for employee engagement
Enterprise Social Media
Key drivers for Enterprise Social Media
More and more companies are looking to adopt social media as a strategic tool for reaching out to their key stakeholders. Whether this is for managing their online reputation, building online communities or enhancing social engagement between employees within the company.
The reasons why companies use social media internally are: 1. To inform employees. In its most straightforward way, social media can be just another medium to communicate and inform employees. Blogs in which departments inform their staff, a newsletter with options for employees to give comments, micro blogging as an instant communication channel to employees. 2. To create a shared vision. Using social media to engage with your employees with the objective to embed the company’s mission, vision and values. A CEO blog in which he discusses the vision, seeks feedback for improvement and explains how staff can become internal brand ambassadors.
Vignette - Social Media in the enterprise
In talking to our clients we see more and more companies implementing social media for internal purposes. Gartner revealed a set of predictions on the use of social software and collaboration in the enterprise. They include: •
By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
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By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include micro-blogging
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Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.
Overview The emergence of social media is changing the internal communications landscape dramatically. By using social media internally, companies can start to learn the concepts of content creation, sharing and engagement, in a “protected” environment. And when they feel confident, they can then leverage their experiences externally and use social media to engage with their customers. By engaging with their employees, management can make the mission, vision and brand values come to life. Giving employees access to social media tools enables them to share and publish knowledge and information, unleashing creativity and improves productivity.
3. To increase productivity. This is about using social media as a collaboration tool. Social media helps bringing documents, people and planning together. In the form of sharing documents, sharing feedback and synchronising project tasks. 4. To engage employees. Engaging in open conversations is the essence of social media. Using social media internally, management are opening themselves for their employees. Employees can talk about how they feel, what they like to do and how they like to work together. 5. To support the strategy. Using social media for internal communications should ultimately drive the implementation of the company’s strategy. Which can be measured in terms of revenue, cost reduction, profit or market share. Enterprise Social Media allows companies to open up their brand as much as they use it for external purposes. By engaging with their employees, management can make the mission, vision and brand values come to life. Which in turn transforms employees in internal and external brand ambassadors, a role that they will take when talking to colleagues or stakeholders outside the company.
Enterprise Social media: Using social media for employee engagement Webjam’s Enterprise 2.0 Social Media solution Webjam is a social publishing and engagement solutions provider enabling you to connect with your customers and employees. Our offering is based on three elements: The social publishing platform to host your enterprise social media environment, the managed services to stay in control of your social media deployment and the creative services to translate your requirements into a unique, engaging and visually attractive social media solution.
Our enterprise social media solution is a perfect steppingstone to your external social media presence. It allows you to create and extend communities by allowing members to create their own micro sites within your network, offering them a home and a “destination” for engagement. It also allows you to create a fully branded social media environment serving as the hub for your social media presence on the web. Providing you with the interfaces to all common social media tools from your own branded social media website to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Enterprise Social Media and ROI Cost Savings There are many cost savings to be gained when implementing enterprise social media:
Webjam’s social media publishing and engagement platform enables you to create and manage a fully branded and customisable enterprise social media environment. We bundle community features with an easy drag-and-drop publishing interface, a rich catalogue of modules & styles and the option to replicate sites, content and applications. It allows you to create your own internal social media environment in which content is created and shared easily, employees connect naturally and social media applications integrate seemlessly. With our solution you can: • Build your own branded community network channel dedicated to your employees •
Create micro-sites for departments/regions/groups within your network
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Provide templates to your employees that can be easily replicated and customised
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Allow the employee community to grow, doing what it does best - publishing, discussing and sharing
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Generate buzz, receive invaluable feedback and encourage & moderate discussion
Additionally, we offer a full range of creative services and engagement/moderation planning tools to help you make your internal communities come to live. If you haven’t got sufficient resources, you can outsource the engagement and moderation to Webjam.
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Using social media for internal communications makes the organisation more interesting to work for, increasing the number of potential job applicants (and retaining existing employees).
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A well-deployed social media platform enables inexpensive delivery of information, alerts, and special events, which is much more cost-effective than relying on continued upkeep of legacy platforms.
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Reduce email volumes. People can use social bookmarking and auto-news updates to stay informed, and workflows can move through “activity streaming” as opposed to back and forth emails.
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Lower travel budgets. Social networking through appropriate channels and media is a very good substitute for face-to-face meetings.
Webjam and Social Media Webjam is your ideal partner to help you build your enterprise social media environment. We help companies to connect with their customers and employees by providing them with an easy, affordable platform for social publishing and engagement. We are based in London and we have an international and very experienced development team. Our roster of corporate clients is growing and includes clients like Random House (Publishing) and JWT (Advertising Agency). Our Social Publishing and En- gagement platform is built on .NET as a Software as a Service (SaaS) and went live in January 2008. For more information: Webjam Business Development: Denise Turner, +44 07850 301102, denise@webjam-ltd.com www.webjam.com