Fleishman-Hillard recently conducted a webinar on Seven Social Media Trends for Engaging the Workforce. The material covered emerging trends in the use of social media for internal communications and used examples from best-in-class brands to show how social media is being used behind the firewall to improve employee communication and drive business results.
TREND 1: Mobile Tools
Mobile Messaging
AT&T ExecTxt
- Short-code system sends text messages to employees’ mobile phones
- Opt-in, voluntary
- Employees subscribe to executives/lists of their choice
- Alerts employees to urgent, time-sensitive news and big announcements
- Reaches the distributed workforce
Mobile Videos and Podcasts
Glidden
- Product line and branding training for mobile sales force
- Gliddent paint reps review handheld videos with Home Depot reps
Kraft
- Kraft Casts from CEO/executives
- Keeps workfroce connected and aligned on the go
Specialized Apps
Trek Apps for Training and Sales
- Trains sales associates on latest products
- Sales floor selling tool
AT&T 2009 Officers Conference App
- App supports conference content
- Agendas, calendar, maps, videos and messaging
TREND 2: Townhalls
Interactive Town Hall
- Used to hold company-wide town halls
- Avatar-based, interactive meeting system
- Employee-generated profile pages and avatars
- Live, moderated, real-time
- Submitter’s questions and answers are converted to a computerized voice that reads them out loud
Advanced Virtual Meetings
Skype
- More companies are using Skype and other custom solutions to collaborate across offices
- File-sharing and instant messaging optimizes collaboration
Telepresence
- Advanced telepresence technologies simulate in-person meetings with high interactivity and richness
TREND 3: Social Learning
Digital Self-Development
The Starbucks Partner Café
- Unites more than 136,000 partners to training resources ad each other
- Encourages easy exchange of knowledge and collaboration
- Dialogue is tied to business unit objectives
- Offers a more private, yet collaborative, solution for teams to knowledge-share
Social, Collaborative Training Platforms
Best Buy’s Learning Lounge
- Rank/rate training modules and can recommend to others
- Supports multiple learning-styles
- Employees submit content for training
- Quick adoption – 100 employees submitted ideas for training in first 60 days
- Creates a “results-only learning environment”
TREND 4: Social Portals
Internal Social Networking
AT&T Social Collaboration Portal
- Serves 300K employees
- More than 120,000 unique users hit the site daily
- Social media elements: page customization, commenting, ranking, polls
- Newest features: tReader, RSS and Twitter news feed
Booz Allen Hamilton’s Hello.bah.com
- Allows employees to self-manage their employee directory information in a LinkedIn-like environment
- Creates more robust employee data – interests, experience
- Strengthens “weak” connections to aid networking and collaboration
IBM’s beehive
- Internal, secure, customized community looks and feels like Facebook
- Allows employees to connect, track each others’ activities, share lists, post photos and schedule events
- Gives communicators constant pulse on what employees are talking about
- High employee adoption rate: 35K+ registered users, 280K+ employee connections
External Communities (via Ning)
Coca-Cola’s Employee Community
- Community managers verify membership
- Customizable platform for building your own employee social network
- Provides chat, blogging, forums, groups and photo/video sharing
- Ning has over 1.2 million unique social networks and 27 million users
TREND 5: Digitizing the Frontline
Crew Communities for Employees in the Field
McDonald’s StationM
- Connects geographically dispersed franchise crew employees
- Integrates video/photo sharing with Flickr, YouTube
- Features blogs by nominated employees
- Builds employee connections and shared cultural understanding
- Multilingual, serving over 1 million crew members in the U.S. and Canada
Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation Remixed
- 2.0 version of its touted Blue Shirt Nation
- Blends social community and micro-blogging functionality
- Employees interact and share business-related content
- Accessible via SMS, Web or e-mail
- Allows senior management to “mix” with retail employees
TREND 6: Crowdsourced Innovation
Innovation and Idea Generation
3M InnovationLive
- Live, virtual sessions solicit ideas, comments and ratings
- Fosters global product and service collaboration
- Post-session review necessary to identify viable ideas
Dell EmployeeStorm
- 10,000 ideas submitted
- 45,000 site users
- 48,000 votes in first 60 days
- 200 ideas implemented
My Starbucks Idea / Ideas in Action Blog
- 70,000 ideas submitted
- 160,000 site users
- 658,000 votes
- 25 ideas implemented
Collaborative Games and Simulations
Boehringer Ingelheim’s “BI Collaboratory”
- Month-long virtual, team-based collaboration
- 144 teams developed a concept to bring value to BI’s customers and patients in new ways
- Teams post presentations of their concepts to the site for peer voting
- Winning ideas earn reward and recognition
- 98 percent participation
TREND 7: Employees as Digital Ambassadors
Employee Word of Mouth Blogs
- AT&T’s Calm, cool & Connected Parent Blog
Employee-Generated Videos
Deloitte Employee Film Festival: What’s Your Deloitte?
- 2,000 employees participated
- 400 submissions received
- Posted internally for peer voting
- Winning videos shared on YouTube
Best Buy’s Twelpforce
- Employees respond to customer questions and offer tech advice
Elizabeth, thanks for blogging about our webinar presentation. I’m thrilled you found the content interesting. I co-presented an updated version of this content last week at IABC’s Social Media Conference in NYC. Wanted to share the link with you – we added a section on developing a listening plan and the importance of trust in the success of social media communications strategies. bit.ly/2BA8g6
Becky — thank you so much! The information from the webinar was absolutely fantastic! Best to you!
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