NZ PR Blog: Social media for internal communications
Report from day one (workshops) of Melcrum’s Internal Communications and Social Media conference.
Companies spend huge amounts of time and money managing their reputation. However, they often overlook two key areas – online communication and using their staff to drive messages and information about their organisation.
At Ideas Shop we do internal communications well. And we do social media well – we just usually talk to external audiences so this conference is a chance for me to look at how social media can be used best for internal communications to develop even more ways of serving our clients.
Social media (regardless of internal or external communication) is, to quote Euan Semple, about creating a knowledge ecology. It’s not a case of ‘if you build it they will come’, but more like gardening. Starting small, tending your network and allowing it space to grow and change as it needs to, not as you want it to.
Trust is a huge word in internal communications: it really is everything. Trust in leadership, trust in the organisation you work for, trust in the workforce. Trust is significant in social media too but for different reasons… trust that your staff are smart people (you hired them after all), trust that they want to do the right thing for your organisation and trust that once the community grows, it will help moderate itself (which means that as communicators we sometimes need to take a deep breath, wait longer than is comfortable and trust that out workforce will do the right thing and correct itself).
Here’s a few of the top tips and thinking points I took from today:
Social media is about long-term engagement; creating things that people want to use and growing spaces online that encourage people to work communally.
We’re all a copy and paste away from inside to outside so there’s no reason to categorise social media as a risk to your organisation or check every post, status update or tweet happening if you’re not also checking emails or USB sticks that carry files in and out of your workplace.
If you’re struggling to sell social media to managers, take the time to have one on one conversations with them. Show them how things work, show them interesting things online and demonstrate the technology to get them engaged. Once they’re on board they can help sell it to others and become champions of the cause.
As well all know, social media is about trial and error – experimenting with the tools until you get it right. Check out www.livestream.com – it’s something new I learnt about today and an area I’ll be exploring more once I get home.
Posted by Emma McCleary on Wednesday 30th Jun 2010