Another theme that emerged at Communitelligence’s Employee Engagement Conference last week in Chicago was social networking technologies and how they are transforming organizations. Here are some highlights:
- Ethan McCarty, Editor-in-Chief of IBM’s Global Intranet and Manager of Alumni Relations, spoke about about Beehive, IBM’s social networking site. Beehive allows employee to create a robust “self branding” personal profile that shows their interests and passions. Ethan explained that Beehive facilitates connections through shared content and social interaction through buzz. Beehive strengthens weak ties among employees who are geographically dispersed across the world yet collaborate on projects that require trust and cooperation for them to be highly effective. Ethan said any IBMer can blog and today IBM blogs have 50,000 users, 13,000 blogs with 26,000 tags. That’s an extraordinary about of knowledge IBM has captured in a searchable platform! IBM’s blogging guidelines were developed by bloggers and were approved without any additional editing by IBM’s senior management and lawyers. (Here’s an article on the topic from Ragan.com.) Ethan also noted that IBM’s social networking platform is, for the most part, self-policing so that little intervention is required. He noted that IBMers can create internal podcasts and can participate in “The Greater IBM Connection” in Second Life.
- Al Comeaux, SVP of Corporate Communications at Sabre Holdings, presented an overview of its social networking site branded “Sabretown.” Sabre Holdings has “lost the hallway,” as Al explained, from its extensive offshoring activities. He explained that Sabretown has helped reconnect employees who lacked a sense of connection. Sabretown was created internally. It’s visually appealing and includes features that allow employees to post personal photos and collect “Karma” for actively contributing to the community through blog posts and comments on others blogs(higher Karma allows you to add more pictures). It allows users to mark posts and comments as “shady” if they feel they are questionable in some way. Sabretown allows users to identity former employees of competitors if they are seeking competitive information. Two-thirds of Sabre employees adopted Sabretown within three months of its launch. Sixty percent of questions are answered within an hour of posting and 90 percent within the first 24 hours. Sabre is selling the Sabretown platform to other organizations under the brand name Cubeless.”
- Kristina Patrick, Senior Project Manager for Outreach and Business Development Group at H&R Block, described the evolution of the “BlockCentral.” This intranet platform transformed internal communications at the company by moving it from top-down to community-based communications. BlockCentral includes blogs and podcasts. It has a simple, uncluttered, sophisticated visual design. Kristina described H&R Blocks reporting efforts from special events and conferences. I was impressed with how Kristina and her colleagues captured knowledge from an event or conference in one location, packaged it in an easy-to-read, visually appealing format and broadcast it through BlockCentral to the entire organization. It was also impressive that so much was developed from a $100,000 investment. H&R Block received a very big bang for its buck.
- Kevin Olp, Director of Organizational Communications at Northwestern Mutual Life, described “The Quiet Company[‘s]” internal blogging activities. NM has 250 bloggers and some blogs have become extremely popular including one called “Glass Walls” that describes unwritten rules at NM. The company added blogging capability to capture tacit knowledge of its employees, some of whom are baby boomers who will be retiring in the years and decades ahead. NM launched its blogging initiative by selecting a dozen “seed bloggers” and coaching them. Kevin told a wonderful story about an employee at the home office of NM who complained in a blog post that tickets for a special event were available to employees in the field but not made available to home office employees. NM management were able to harvest an idea (an opt-in drawing) to ensure tickets went to those who really wanted to attend. As a result, the people who wanted to go received tickets this year. Kevin pointed out that in the past, this employee’s concern may have gone unnoticed but her blog raised awareness of an issue so that NM management could do something about it. This is yet another example of how social networking tools are improving communication in organizations and, as a result, helping decision-makers make optimal decisions.
Social networking platforms are having a profoundly positive impact on organizations. They improve the “Knowledge Flow” that I spoke about in a recent interview with Chief Learning Officer magazine. What do you think? What is your company doing to increase Knowledge Flow? Post any comments or email me at mstallard@epluribuspartners.com
