Corporate Social Media in Action:How Companies use social Media to Motivate their Employees

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How many corporates have an online local community for their internal employees to connect, share and interact with their fellow co workers.?

Be yourself.” It’s one of the rules of social media. If you’re blogging, tweeting or Facebooking for business, be real—or you won’t be followed.

Yet, how do you pull off “authentic” while maintaining the company brand message as well as letting your employees share their views,news with their fellow colleagues .

While a lot of corporates view social networks as an irritant that leads to loss of productivity ,some corporates view social media as an social cohesive glue which leads to fostering camaraderie,interactivity and creating a platform to engage their internal stakeholders to network with the hope that happier employees leads to happy customers

We don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation.

“We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”

IBM does have social media guidelines.The employee-created guidelines basically state that IBMers are individually responsible for what they create and prohibit releasing proprietary information.But the document lacks any mention of brand messages or values,nor does IBM corporate regulate employee social media activity.

“We don’t police. The community’s largely self-regulating, and so there hasn’t really been a need to have someone go about and circuit these boards and blogs,” Christensen said. “Employees sort of do that themselves… And that’s worked wonderfully well.

SocialBlue, formally code-named IBM Beehive, is an internal social networking site that gives IBMers a "rich connection to the people they work with" on both a personal and a professional level. SocialBlue helps employees make new connections, track current friends and coworkers, and renew contacts with people they have worked with in the past.

IBM has Dogear, a community-tagging system based on Del.icio.us, Blue Twit, and a rendition of the microblogging sensation, Twitter. It also has a Web page called Many Eyes that permits anyone (including outsiders, at many-eyes.com) to upload any kind of data, visualize it, and then launch discussions about it on blogs and social networks.

According to Socialmediaexaminer IBM's social media statistics reads something like this

• There is No IBM corporate blog or Twitter account
• 7,000 internal blogs
• 100,000 employees using internal blogs
• 53,000 members on SocialBlue (like Facebook for employees)
• A few thousand “IBMers” on Twitter
• Thousands of external bloggers,
• Almost 200,000 on LinkedIn
• As many as 500,000 participants in company crowd-sourcing “jams”
• 50,000 in alum networks on Facebook and LinkedIn

So, what are some of the take- aways organizations can learn from the Big Blue

• Lesson no 1 : Decentralize social media
  

• lesson no 2 : Social Media need not be an irritant , if used the right way.. Which way is the right way .. needs to be debated.. A blanket ban on social media harms companies more.. as you shut off even the positive conversations on your brand

• Lesson no 3 : Do not police.. instead self regulate : Have SM guidelines, but don’t police your employees , instead empower them ,as they tend to self-regulate.

• Lesson no 4:.Involve and Engage: Involve your employees the tools and platform t get involved in social media

• Lesson now 5:Use Crowdsourcing Tools :If you dont have the internal tools , use crowd sourcing media tools to employees to use them to do their jobs better.

Social Media ideally should bring together employees, clients, partners and friends for powerful idea-sharing.According to socialmediaexaminer.com ,Crowd-sourcing was identified among the 10 best incubator businesses, which IBM funded with $100 million

Already, social scientists are studying the benefits IBMers are getting from the network. They see that it strengthens what are called "weak ties." These are the people employees might know only casually, some in a different division or down a distant corridor. Getting to know these people, even if it starts out with a Top Five list, widens employees' range of contacts and knowledge within the company.

Social networks will inevitably break down barriers between rank, hierarchy, designation, business unit or geography and contries. Social networks have accomplished in days and weeks what the training team-building trust activities have attempted for years.Today for employees who are a part of a global team , internal social media will be the most effective means of communication among their peers.

While Cisco has had established pages and groups on Facebook for a couple years now, most of these pages are focused on one technology or business. In addition, there are Cisco Facebook group and fan pages that aren’t created by Cisco employees.