Social Media in the Enterprise: Best Practices
Peggy Dau, Contributing Analyst
July 10, 2009
Knowledge companies are always focused on ways that they can connect their employees, enable them to collaborate effectively and allow them to innovate products, processes or services more effectively. These are the companies that are eagerly assessing and implementing social media solutions. These companies understand that they have geographically dispersed employees. They know that these employees struggle to find the relevant resources, within the organization, who can bring value to their projects. These companies want to provide solutions that allow these employees to share, brainstorm, collaborate, track and monitor progress and success.
However, before they can define the solution, they need to consider what it is they want to accomplish and consider following these best practices for building and deploying social media within the enterprise:
- Define a few simple goals for using social media before implementing any solutions. The success of your implementation is in understanding the challenges you are trying to overcome. Your goals could be as easy as connecting geographically dispersed teams or as complex as tearing down corporate silos.
- Involve legal early in the process. Their goal is to mitigate corporate risk. It is important to understand any of the risks associated with sharing content. Rather than fearing that legal will tell you not pursue the use of social media, consider implementing processes that will address legal concerns.
- Think small. Stay focused on immediate needs. The last thing your company wants is a project that will drain financial and human resources. Your solution can grow based on the needs of your constituency. These needs could be as basic as enabling a diverse and dispersed work team collaborates more effectively. Remember social media is fluid and can grow based on emerging needs.
- Gain executive support. This does not necessarily mean you want your CEO to force constituents to use social media, but it is important for your executive leadership to support the project. Most social media projects start at the grass roots level, however your c-level execs are interested in understanding the benefits. Align your request for support with their key interests.
- Pull content from existing sources or databases. It is not necessary to rebuild. It is necessary to leverage information or content already available. Your company already captures a lot of employee data in its HR systems and project content in different centralized, yet siloed, file systems. The goal in social media is to expose content to anyone who can benefit from it (unless there are security or confidentially reasons prohibiting this).
- Involve corporate IT. They know what tools are already being utilized. Perhaps you can use them too. They can also help assess the solution’s impact on the corporate network (i.e., bandwidth, security) and existing IT systems and resources.
- Listen. Pay attention to your user community. Address issues, comments and concerns. Think about your company culture and how it communicates. Remember, this is social media. The community is what makes it better and what makes it successful.
These recommendations are based on the experiences shared by early adopters such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte LLP, Lockheed Martin and others at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in June 2009. These companies recognize the value of sharing knowledge across key organizations as they are knowledge-based businesses. They also have seen that social media is not limited to new employees in their 20’s. Experienced workers are eager to share their insights. Thus social media not only is attractive to new, young employees who are very familiar with the interpersonal benefits of social media, but it is attractive to veteran employees who seek alternate outlets for discussion and debate.
Think about your company’s goals. Consider its culture. Is there a high volume of knowledge sharing that is inhibited by corporate silos? Is it important for your company to marry the experience of years with the eagerness of youth to drive successful customer engagement or product innovation? If so, start small and use the best practices noted to define the beginnings of a social media model for your organization.
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