I don’t know, maybe it’s just been a strange couple of weeks, but I’m starting to think that employee communications is a vast social media wasteland. At the very best, we’re nowhere near the “garden-of-Eden”-promise of these tools.
With the exception of one very interesting conversation with Rex Lee at RIM about their plans for “drinking their own champagne” and the occasional case study it seems to me we aren’t making much progress.
Shel Holtz is still making the case he’s been making forever against blocking. Not blocking is so basic that it’s pretty discouraging to think that more than half of organizations still do not allow, never mind encourage, access to social media.
And over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading about and speaking to people whose organizations are doing amazing things using social media externally. And, after a little investigating discover that there’s little institutionally-driven and supported use of social media inside these same organizations. In other words, these organizations have created a powerful b2b strategies based on Web 2.0 and social media while their employees still can’t access Facebook from their desks. And, they are still getting a flood of one way corporate and departmental communications by e-mail and or posted on their Intranet 1.0, punctuated by the occasional video conference or virtual town hall.
That doesn’t mean that person-by-person employees aren’t microblogging for work using StatusNet [full disclosure Evan’s a friend], or project-by-project managers aren’t implementing wikis and blogging, or department-by-department that teams aren’t using YouTube to post training videos. It just means that I’m not seeing or hearing about too many integrated internal and external social media strategies.
Why aren’t these smart customer-focused organizations being as smart about their employees? Has it just been a bad couple of weeks, or are you seeing what I’m seeing?
Tags: Employee communication, Engagement, Innovation, Knowledge management, Message control, Social media
