More Australian Organisations Using Social Media Internally

It is no surprise that now with over 900 million users on Facebook, 175 million on LinkedIn and 500 million on Twitter, organisations are becoming strategically more social.  In the last few years we have seen a rise in the number of organisations using these apps for recruitment, customer service and promotion activities. The benefits in cost savings are obvious, but why the recent drive by organisations to invest in internal social media apps?

Analysts predict the social enterprise software market will hit $4.5 billion in 2016 with a growth rate of 43%.[1] Yammer, Social Text, IBM Connections, Microsoft SharePoint and Saleforce.com’s Chatter are some of the players offering a variety of apps such as community forums, collaborative team work groups, wikis, networking and news streams. Newer players in the social media market are HR technology vendors (e.g. SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft) who are adapting their Talent Management software to include social media apps. Many of these software vendors claim use of internal social media apps enhances collaboration, engagement, productivity, communication and information sharing throughout the organisation. While there appears to be little research evidence to support these claims, we know from experience that there are organisations reaping the benefits of using social media internally.

At our latest HR Technology Forum, Cape Group asked a group of Australian HR professionals to share their insights into common challenges and successes experienced when implementing internal social media apps. It appeared that many of our forum participants are introducing internal social media apps into current business processes experimentally and often face a number of challenges including:

• there is a lack of involvement or support by management
• leaders are sceptical the impact on staff productivity
• staff do not use the apps
• staff attitudes are that they spend enough time on other external apps like Facebook
• staff often lack the knowledge of how to use the apps
• staff are often unaware the apps usefulness.

So how are organisations overcoming these challenges? We discussed a number of critical success factors in designing an internal social media strategy. These include:

• a clear set of objectives
• gaining buy in from executive leaders
• activities to foster a strong culture promoting sharing and collaboration among employees
• ensuring the culture and strategy is driven by its leaders
• offering social media training to staff
• establishing a clear set of policies and framework outlining acceptable terms of use
• business analytics to assess effectiveness

While these processes are believed to be key to success, for many organisations there is still difficulty in achieving ongoing staff user engagement. Deloitte is one organisation that has found success in getting their employees to actively post on Yammer which they attribute to having strong leadership support.  Discussion on Yammer initially was driven by the Innovation department and started out experimentally as part of a marketing strategy for Deloitte’s ‘green dot’. They asked their employees how the green dot may be marketing in their logo and nominated champions to lead and keep up the discussions on Yammer.  This creative topic grabbed the interest of staff and take up of Yammer was very rapid. Discussions are still ongoing today with the CEO posting a comment almost every day.

Key take home message… If you are planning on introducing internal social media apps into your organisation, ensure that your strategy is closely aligned to the culture and driven by your executive leaders.