Again, from a draft of my article:
According to Forrester, between twenty-five and thirty percent of companies with 500 or more employees are seeing investments towards Web 2.0 communications and the kinds of online collaboration tools that are cornerstones of social networking. When asked why they are adopting the trend, seventy-four say that it improves the efficiency of business, sixty-four percent feel to the need to keep up with the competition, fifty-three percent claim it solves a particular business challenge, and forty-five percent cite employee demand. The move towards this company networking, however, is often driven through marketing or IT groups, without coordinated human resources efforts.
In a recent Business Week article,11 head of technology for British Telecom J.P. Rangaswami articulated the huge value to corporations in leveraging social networks. There is an increasingly vast arsenal of online communications tools to connect with employees he pointed out. He told Business Week, “We've spent years talking about the value of the water-cooler conversations. [Through social networks] we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision-making migrate. We see how people really work…” He points out that it’s the younger generation who are forcing the change; “the new people come infected with the new world… A new class of super-communicators has emerged…” He should know! More than 16,000 of British Telcom’s employees collaborate with online social media tools, 10,000 are on Facebook, and the company has recently launched its own internal corporate social network, built as an extension to its existing intranet, that links employees with similar skills and interests and allows visibility into employees’ contributions to the company’s collective body of knowledge.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer began a journey into social networking in 2006 to increase inter-team communications and facilitate collaboration. Pfizer launched an online community specifically for Web 2.0 strategy evaluation, and created a lab for testing social technologies. The company will soon launch a corporate social network solution for R&D employees worldwide, and a full-blown corporate Social Network for all employees possibly to be named “Pfacebook,”. Simon Revell, Pfizer’s manager of enterprise 2.0 technology, hopes the network tool will offer greater visibility into the skill sets of Pfizer’s world wide talent base and offer a way for employees to reach out to one another. “We have to put the user at the center of this, and we have to understand it from their perspective.”12 Among other uses, the network will provide content feeds based on job function, interest or expertise. The solution will allow visibility into what colleagues are reading and how they react to the information, thereby pulling subscribers into collaboration.
Financial services powerhouse Morgan Stanley is also looking at on line social solutions to improve work collaboration. The goal is to “transform how the company connects to its people, ideas and capital,” according to Adam Carson, a company associate who is taking the Web 2.0 charge. Carson believes the move towards corporate social networking is imperative: “It is not an ‘if’ anymore—it is a ‘when’ and ‘how’.” Half of the company’s 55,000 employees are under 35 years old and adeptly experienced with social networks. Morgan Stanley already uses corporate networking to facilitate collaboration at work. The firm uses online social networks to communicate internally and with clients; the company’s 10,000-person IT team is kept closely in the loop to ensure that security and permission are built into all company tools, in order to comply with strict regulations13. According to Carson, “If you can tap into the power of your
company better than your competitors… that is a competitive advantage.”
Many other firms have agreed. Citrix Systems, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, recently launched an employee knowledge network connecting its workforce through community-based blog solutions that include the ability for an employee to receive content feeds relating to job functions and interests. 14 Japan’s leading retailer UNIQLO, also implemented a blog content management networking solution with mobile access to connect a 700-store workforce to corporate headquarters, including connecting floor personnel with limited computer access. The solution enables real-time information collaboration and process development15.
According to IDC, Telephone customer service and call-center company Alpine Access provides connectivity and facilitates conversation and information collaboration and a “virtual water cooler effect” through a more sophisticated internal social networking and community platform16, and Serena Software, a 27 year old organization, is “redesigning its business for the new century”17. With an aggressively innovative approach to organizational structure, Serena is using social networking to enable functional internal communication, while also using it to create and provide a new online marketplace to promote new products and services. Serena used a company mandate to use Facebook on “Facebook Fridays” as tool to educate and encourage employees of all generations to embrace a proven shift in online and interpersonal communications. Since then, the company has shifted towards an increased use of a private company social network that replaces inefficiencies in existing processes and technologies, freeing Serena from the bourdon, cost and cumbersome nature of enterprise. The Serena community has layers of visibility for the public, Serena customers and partners, and internal employees. Its branding is sophisticated and edgy, in keeping with Serena’s company website and brand. The Serena Community bridges internal and external communications, creating
efficiencies and new business opportunities for the organization.
In an era of shrinking talent pools and ever more transient workforce, social networking provides a new an innovative way to address a number of talent challenges including employee engagement, connection to the corporate culture, continued connectivity of transitioning workers, such as corporate alumni and retirees, and collaboration across geographies. Dow Chemical and others are using social networking to leverage talent internally and externally. Dow has had great success with its recently launched corporate social network called “My Dow Network” which serves retirees, former employees, women and current employees. Senior management, business leaders, HR, and PR are all involved in the strategy of the corporate online community. At Dow, more than forty percent of Dow’s current workforce will be retirement eligible in the coming five years, making talent considerations and career transitions essential to core business strategy. The social network solution seems to be bridging generational gaps, and has even led to an increase in rehires. In the first three months, more than 4,400 employees including 800 retirees signed up on “My Dow Network” and started connecting, resulting in 130,000 first and second-degree community connections (a first step towards network adoption and activity). Simply by creating a community for retirees, Dow maintains the knowledge base to ensure productivity, while retirees gain a broad personal and professional network with the ability to stay connected or even to re-enter the workforce and have access to critical retiree benefit information they need. The results indicate an unconditional success; in the first few months alone, Dow received 24 full-time and 40 contract job applications through the network as well as Employer of Choice award designations by Workforce Management, ComputerWorld and BusinessWeek. 18 An excellent competitive advantage for leveraging talent, and an easy place to start with corporate social networking, is connecting to corporate alumni in order to facilitate new business referrals, applications from alumni to potentially rejoin the company, and brand ambassadorship. Alumni rehires tend to stay on the job longer and cost significantly less to hire. One company’s early alumni network evaluation metrics showed ten percent of hires in one region coming through the social network indicating a cost-savings of more than 1.4 million dollars in third party recruiting fees. 19 Furthermore, research indicates that rehires make for markedly better performers (being as much as three times as productive according to the Recruiting Roundtable). It makes good sense to include alumni as well as current employees in a talent-focused corporate social networking
solution.
Efficiencies in social effectiveness, learning and on-boarding of new hires are also important to assess. Several leading finance organizations are evaluating corporate social networking for on-boarding of new-hire classes, to allow them to learn from one-another as well as participating mentors and knowledge leaders through a collaborative social networking environment online, not only at work behind the corporate firewall, but socially, online, for constant learning & team-building through a networked affiliation with their new employer. Companies are also evaluating the benefits of surrounding online learning resources with community applications to generate a knowledge network, discussion and insights surrounding existing company documents, resources and learning materials.
Corporate social networks are commonly used to connect large workforces to one another. After years of mergers and growth, many companies have enormous populations in the tens of thousands spread across many locations. One of the most successful and widely publicized successes in connecting disparate employees through corporate social networking is Best Buy. In 2006, the international electronics retailer launched “Blue Shirt Nation.” The corporate sponsored network connects employees from myriad retail outlets to share information and ask questions of peers in the community. The community is outside of the Best Buy firewall, moderated by its users, and has more than 20,000 active members, 85% of which are sales associates. Started by two marketing managers as a weekend project, the community provides a forum for authentic and un-moderated communication including discussions around operational issues, and suggested policy changes. Leveraging this tool, Best Buy was able to spread the word about new benefits resulting in 40,000 employees signing up for a new 401K program. But beyond just information and communication, since the advent of this online social network the turnover rate at Best Buy dropped from 60% to only 8.5% in the networked group. 20
To address the inevitable disconnect between employees, IBM has set up its own employee social network, successfully connecting more than 30,000 employees. The network, which allows activities such as event planning, photo-sharing and discussion groups, is intended to help employees build relationships across a large, geographically distributed enterprise. Like IBM, another computer giant, EMC, launched a corporate social network with the vision of connecting their 37,000 employees with customers, partners, influencers, new hires, and other industry constituencies in a vast knowledge and productivity network- a total enterprise community of as many as 370,000. Viewing the opportunity to address business challenges created by having several silos of information within the company, the EMC project was funded by the Marketing eBusiness Group, the same group that provides web solutions and portals, along with a corporate executive sponsor, the VP and Global Marketing CTO. The solution required help from IT and HR as well as a dedicated team to ensure platform continuity and as well as user-enablement community development. Goals include conversational collaboration, identification and building upon communities of interest, as well as collaboration for content, documents, projects and teams.
The network as it exists today is for EMC employees only, is behind the firewall, and was introduced via word of mouth (vs. corporate mandate). Within the first six months it attracted 3,500 active users including 80 or so employee-generated communities. Chuck Hollis, the executive sponsor for the community believes the solution facilitates important collaboration and conversation. In his own blog, he has written that the EMC online community "has significant business value, even for the casual observer." He also points out other unexpected benefits: "email traffic is down, …a new "external quality" blogger [emerges] every 3-4 weeks [creating] lively, business oriented discussions on dozens of topics." Chuck now believes that there is high business value derived from these internal communications and that the online social network has increased employee satisfaction, enriched the work experience and positively impacted corporate culture. Says Chuck; "I am now a believer in the transformational power of E 2.0 [enterprise social software]… at a personal level and at a corporate level." 21
There is no question that online social networking tools have vast potential and are already changing the way companies and employees do business. The question for corporations is not if they should launch an online social network, but what kind of solutions, for which business purposes, and how.
In a recent Business Week article,11 head of technology for British Telecom J.P. Rangaswami articulated the huge value to corporations in leveraging social networks. There is an increasingly vast arsenal of online communications tools to connect with employees he pointed out. He told Business Week, “We've spent years talking about the value of the water-cooler conversations. [Through social networks] we have the ability to actually understand what these relationships are, how information and decision-making migrate. We see how people really work…” He points out that it’s the younger generation who are forcing the change; “the new people come infected with the new world… A new class of super-communicators has emerged…” He should know! More than 16,000 of British Telcom’s employees collaborate with online social media tools, 10,000 are on Facebook, and the company has recently launched its own internal corporate social network, built as an extension to its existing intranet, that links employees with similar skills and interests and allows visibility into employees’ contributions to the company’s collective body of knowledge.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer began a journey into social networking in 2006 to increase inter-team communications and facilitate collaboration. Pfizer launched an online community specifically for Web 2.0 strategy evaluation, and created a lab for testing social technologies. The company will soon launch a corporate social network solution for R&D employees worldwide, and a full-blown corporate Social Network for all employees possibly to be named “Pfacebook,”. Simon Revell, Pfizer’s manager of enterprise 2.0 technology, hopes the network tool will offer greater visibility into the skill sets of Pfizer’s world wide talent base and offer a way for employees to reach out to one another. “We have to put the user at the center of this, and we have to understand it from their perspective.”12 Among other uses, the network will provide content feeds based on job function, interest or expertise. The solution will allow visibility into what colleagues are reading and how they react to the information, thereby pulling subscribers into collaboration.
Financial services powerhouse Morgan Stanley is also looking at on line social solutions to improve work collaboration. The goal is to “transform how the company connects to its people, ideas and capital,” according to Adam Carson, a company associate who is taking the Web 2.0 charge. Carson believes the move towards corporate social networking is imperative: “It is not an ‘if’ anymore—it is a ‘when’ and ‘how’.” Half of the company’s 55,000 employees are under 35 years old and adeptly experienced with social networks. Morgan Stanley already uses corporate networking to facilitate collaboration at work. The firm uses online social networks to communicate internally and with clients; the company’s 10,000-person IT team is kept closely in the loop to ensure that security and permission are built into all company tools, in order to comply with strict regulations13. According to Carson, “If you can tap into the power of your
company better than your competitors… that is a competitive advantage.”
Many other firms have agreed. Citrix Systems, the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, recently launched an employee knowledge network connecting its workforce through community-based blog solutions that include the ability for an employee to receive content feeds relating to job functions and interests. 14 Japan’s leading retailer UNIQLO, also implemented a blog content management networking solution with mobile access to connect a 700-store workforce to corporate headquarters, including connecting floor personnel with limited computer access. The solution enables real-time information collaboration and process development15.
According to IDC, Telephone customer service and call-center company Alpine Access provides connectivity and facilitates conversation and information collaboration and a “virtual water cooler effect” through a more sophisticated internal social networking and community platform16, and Serena Software, a 27 year old organization, is “redesigning its business for the new century”17. With an aggressively innovative approach to organizational structure, Serena is using social networking to enable functional internal communication, while also using it to create and provide a new online marketplace to promote new products and services. Serena used a company mandate to use Facebook on “Facebook Fridays” as tool to educate and encourage employees of all generations to embrace a proven shift in online and interpersonal communications. Since then, the company has shifted towards an increased use of a private company social network that replaces inefficiencies in existing processes and technologies, freeing Serena from the bourdon, cost and cumbersome nature of enterprise. The Serena community has layers of visibility for the public, Serena customers and partners, and internal employees. Its branding is sophisticated and edgy, in keeping with Serena’s company website and brand. The Serena Community bridges internal and external communications, creating
efficiencies and new business opportunities for the organization.
In an era of shrinking talent pools and ever more transient workforce, social networking provides a new an innovative way to address a number of talent challenges including employee engagement, connection to the corporate culture, continued connectivity of transitioning workers, such as corporate alumni and retirees, and collaboration across geographies. Dow Chemical and others are using social networking to leverage talent internally and externally. Dow has had great success with its recently launched corporate social network called “My Dow Network” which serves retirees, former employees, women and current employees. Senior management, business leaders, HR, and PR are all involved in the strategy of the corporate online community. At Dow, more than forty percent of Dow’s current workforce will be retirement eligible in the coming five years, making talent considerations and career transitions essential to core business strategy. The social network solution seems to be bridging generational gaps, and has even led to an increase in rehires. In the first three months, more than 4,400 employees including 800 retirees signed up on “My Dow Network” and started connecting, resulting in 130,000 first and second-degree community connections (a first step towards network adoption and activity). Simply by creating a community for retirees, Dow maintains the knowledge base to ensure productivity, while retirees gain a broad personal and professional network with the ability to stay connected or even to re-enter the workforce and have access to critical retiree benefit information they need. The results indicate an unconditional success; in the first few months alone, Dow received 24 full-time and 40 contract job applications through the network as well as Employer of Choice award designations by Workforce Management, ComputerWorld and BusinessWeek. 18 An excellent competitive advantage for leveraging talent, and an easy place to start with corporate social networking, is connecting to corporate alumni in order to facilitate new business referrals, applications from alumni to potentially rejoin the company, and brand ambassadorship. Alumni rehires tend to stay on the job longer and cost significantly less to hire. One company’s early alumni network evaluation metrics showed ten percent of hires in one region coming through the social network indicating a cost-savings of more than 1.4 million dollars in third party recruiting fees. 19 Furthermore, research indicates that rehires make for markedly better performers (being as much as three times as productive according to the Recruiting Roundtable). It makes good sense to include alumni as well as current employees in a talent-focused corporate social networking
solution.
Efficiencies in social effectiveness, learning and on-boarding of new hires are also important to assess. Several leading finance organizations are evaluating corporate social networking for on-boarding of new-hire classes, to allow them to learn from one-another as well as participating mentors and knowledge leaders through a collaborative social networking environment online, not only at work behind the corporate firewall, but socially, online, for constant learning & team-building through a networked affiliation with their new employer. Companies are also evaluating the benefits of surrounding online learning resources with community applications to generate a knowledge network, discussion and insights surrounding existing company documents, resources and learning materials.
Corporate social networks are commonly used to connect large workforces to one another. After years of mergers and growth, many companies have enormous populations in the tens of thousands spread across many locations. One of the most successful and widely publicized successes in connecting disparate employees through corporate social networking is Best Buy. In 2006, the international electronics retailer launched “Blue Shirt Nation.” The corporate sponsored network connects employees from myriad retail outlets to share information and ask questions of peers in the community. The community is outside of the Best Buy firewall, moderated by its users, and has more than 20,000 active members, 85% of which are sales associates. Started by two marketing managers as a weekend project, the community provides a forum for authentic and un-moderated communication including discussions around operational issues, and suggested policy changes. Leveraging this tool, Best Buy was able to spread the word about new benefits resulting in 40,000 employees signing up for a new 401K program. But beyond just information and communication, since the advent of this online social network the turnover rate at Best Buy dropped from 60% to only 8.5% in the networked group. 20
To address the inevitable disconnect between employees, IBM has set up its own employee social network, successfully connecting more than 30,000 employees. The network, which allows activities such as event planning, photo-sharing and discussion groups, is intended to help employees build relationships across a large, geographically distributed enterprise. Like IBM, another computer giant, EMC, launched a corporate social network with the vision of connecting their 37,000 employees with customers, partners, influencers, new hires, and other industry constituencies in a vast knowledge and productivity network- a total enterprise community of as many as 370,000. Viewing the opportunity to address business challenges created by having several silos of information within the company, the EMC project was funded by the Marketing eBusiness Group, the same group that provides web solutions and portals, along with a corporate executive sponsor, the VP and Global Marketing CTO. The solution required help from IT and HR as well as a dedicated team to ensure platform continuity and as well as user-enablement community development. Goals include conversational collaboration, identification and building upon communities of interest, as well as collaboration for content, documents, projects and teams.
The network as it exists today is for EMC employees only, is behind the firewall, and was introduced via word of mouth (vs. corporate mandate). Within the first six months it attracted 3,500 active users including 80 or so employee-generated communities. Chuck Hollis, the executive sponsor for the community believes the solution facilitates important collaboration and conversation. In his own blog, he has written that the EMC online community "has significant business value, even for the casual observer." He also points out other unexpected benefits: "email traffic is down, …a new "external quality" blogger [emerges] every 3-4 weeks [creating] lively, business oriented discussions on dozens of topics." Chuck now believes that there is high business value derived from these internal communications and that the online social network has increased employee satisfaction, enriched the work experience and positively impacted corporate culture. Says Chuck; "I am now a believer in the transformational power of E 2.0 [enterprise social software]… at a personal level and at a corporate level." 21
There is no question that online social networking tools have vast potential and are already changing the way companies and employees do business. The question for corporations is not if they should launch an online social network, but what kind of solutions, for which business purposes, and how.
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