Social media has rapidly become an integral part of business culture. For many companies, social media has gone from a marketing tool to a fundamental tool for communicating and collaborating.
Companies are now using internal social media tools as a way to stay connected with employees, both in-office and remote, and to improve teamwork.
The days of sending emails back and forth or setting up a long phone call just to get some feedback on a project are long gone. Now, internal social media tools offer the ability to communicate effectively and efficiently so that your team can get their work done faster than ever before.
Internal Social Media Tools
One of the greatest benefits of social media is that it has the capacity to make us smarter and more productive. The more we’re exposed to content from various sources, the more we learn, and the more resourceful we become – and it should go without saying, that harnessing this power for your business can produce some brilliant results, both for your business and staff.
Internal content sharing has existed for a long time. Magazines and newspapers would be circulated around the office until the pages were tattered, and readers would discuss the issues of the day at the water cooler. With the domination of email, anyone who saw an interesting piece online could share it with their internal network with a few clicks.
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That route is simple enough, but not without its drawbacks. The only people being exposed to this knowledge are those in the email chain, but both the original content and the derived discussion could be beneficial to other employees also. Additionally, when the content being passed around is only limited to one person’s imagination, it becomes less of “Hey look at this interesting work-related discovery” and more, “Haha, this guy fell off his bike doing 120 on the freeway”.
Smart businesses are harnessing these capabilities and turning this informal sharing into powerful owned media that can benefit all employees.
To help you get started on this within your own organization, here are some which can help detect and disseminate relevant articles and insights, and boost your broader knowledge base.
1. Smarp
If you’re looking for a dedicated tool made specifically for internal content sharing, you’ll find it in Smarp. The app keeps employees up-to-date with the latest company news and shared content, and helps them share their knowledge with their own networks. This not only creates a well-informed workforce internally, but it can also help your staff to promote themselves as thought leaders outside of the workplace too.
For companies that want greater control of content, and in-depth analytical tools to assess performance, Smarp also comes in handy. By providing a web and mobile application, it also enables companies to reach employees when and where they feel most comfortable.
Smarp’s primary focus, however, is tailoring the experience for employees using the platform. By incorporating grouping, the app ensures each person gets information that’s relevant to them. And the wide range of social media and communication platforms available for sharing, means everyone can share the content they like, wherever they feel most comfortable.
2. Bitrix24
Bitrix24’s entire platform is set up like one big social intranet for your office. The main Activity Stream is like your own business Twitter feed, personalized for each employee, and based on their personal settings. Once content is shared, it will show up in a user’s Activity Stream and they can engage with it, just as they would on any other platform. It also allows those who prefer email to create posts from emails and add email recipients to your posts, which is a unique feature that comes in handy for larger organizations.
Of course, like any social network, the risk of overwhelm exists – if too much activity is taking place, employees will become highly selective on what they focus on, or simply avoid the whole thing.
3. Slack
Slack is one of the most popular employee communication tools. And while it’s not made specifically for internal content sharing, like the previously-mentioned tools on this list, it is widely used for just this purpose.
The beauty of Slack is its ability to maintain an informal chat environment, which can make users feel more comfortable, and even enthusiastic about using it to share and engage with content. If you’re less inclined to create formal structure for content sharing and amplification, and just want to get more interaction and engagement amongst staff, Slack might be the best option for you.
However, an informal tool like Slack doesn’t come without risks. While a perfect option for real-time, in-the-moment conversations and quick sharing, it doesn’t work well for deeper conversations or historical review. So if you’re looking for something that has a bit of longevity when it comes to reviewing past content, Slack may not be the best option for you.
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4. GaggleAMP
GaggleAMP is another tool made specifically for sharing content and engaging employees internally. However, unlike Smarp’s employee focus, GaggleAMP’s platform is centered around amplifying the company’s marketing efforts and boosting business.
GaggleAMP provides the perfect way to inform employees about your company’s news and marketing efforts, and gives them an easy way to share such information with the outside world. This level of employee advocacy translates into better campaign results, greater engagement – and best of all more business. If your organization has mostly sales staff, this is a perfect way to help them reach new prospects, engage audiences, and strengthen business relationships without much additional effort.
One of the best features about this tool for businesses is the way it tracks engagement and sharing metrics – not only does GaggleAMP track a simple share from the tool itself, but it continuously watches shared content on the respective platforms to see how your employee’s broader audiences are engaging with the content they share. This enables companies to create better content that resonates with a wider audience, not just those that follow the brand directly.
5. Paper.li
Paper.li is unlike any of the other tools on this list. While it is a content sharing tool, it wasn’t created specifically for business use, which, in some ways, makes it a much simpler option.
Paper.li pulls in content from your social networks, whether shared by you or accounts you follow. Then, using natural language processing, machine learning and social signals, it analyzes and extracts the most relevant and engaging stories, and compiles them into a “digital newspaper” format, which can be automatically shared to your social media feed, on your website, or via email distribution.
internal social network examples
Installing private social media applications were simplified by the availability of popular, and free, open source wiki and social software such as TWiki, Foswiki, Tiki Wiki, and StatusNet. In recent years, however, many vendors have entered the enterprise social software market with proprietary solutions that can be either installed on company servers or hosted in the cloud. Such enterprise social software tools now typically integrate the full variety of social media functionality, including blogs, wikis, status updates and microblogs, social analytics, and other collaboration tools (e.g. uploading and sharing files and other digital resources), as well as social network features such as profiles and the ability to connect with or follow someone. Examples of such integrated enterprise social software services include Salesforce’s Chatter, Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Yammer, IBM’s Connections, Jive from Jive Software, Oracle’s Social Network, Cisco’s Webex Social, BlueKiwi from Atos, Cynapse’s Cyn.in, Tibbr, Telligent, MangoApps, Socialtext, Socialcast, and Ingage Networks. Client companies for these systems include many of the largest and most successful organizations in the world, including Proctor and Gamble, Dow, SAP, SteelCase, Deloitte, American Express, and hundreds of others.
In-House Developed Proprietary Solutions
The literature on ESM documents a number of examples of proprietary, custom-built systems, usually developed by computer (both hardware and software) and information technology companies that have vested interests in understanding how organizations might employ such new computer-based applications. These types of companies not only stand to benefit from the potential for increased productivity of their own knowledge workers, but also have an obvious interest in the potential that ESM can have for their product mix. Their prototypes have been used to support research that informs internal production systems and future commercial products, or otherwise supports client needs. Two custom ESM examples that have been the subject of several papers are the Beehive system developed at IBM (DiMicco et al., 2008; Steinfield et al., 2009) and the Watercooler system developed at HP (Brzozowski, 2009).
The Beehive system, launched in mid 2007, garnered over 30,000 users before the end of the year (DiMicco et al., 2008). It encompassed many of the features found on public sites like Facebook, but was restricted to IBM employees. Employees reported connecting with both close colleagues and “weak ties,” but reported greater content sharing with their more distant connections, leading DiMicco and colleagues to conclude that the site had helped to form new ties and strengthen weak tie relationships within the company. A later study of Beehive use by Steinfield et al. (2009) similarly found that usage of the site was associated with a number of social capital benefits such as increased access to new people and expertise, as well as perceptions of belonging to a larger community. At HP, the WaterCooler system essentially was developed to bring together the feeds from the many separate social media systems that were proliferating in the company (Brzozowski, 2009). The system indexed these feeds by novelty, popularity, author, and topic, and enabled users to filter posts. Based on a survey, as well as a network study of commenting behavior that compared internal blog reading by WaterCooler users versus nonusers, the author concludes that the system enhanced employees’ access to new people and expertise outside their local units. WaterCooler readers were more likely to access blogs from outside their local unit than other readers.
These research prototypes often have a limited lifespan, and the lessons learned from such prototypes are used to inform other internal systems and commercial products. For example, Beehive, which at its height had over 65,000 members, was discontinued in 2011 but had many of its features incorporated into a new internal site called SocialBlue. Today IBM offers a product called Connections that incorporates features from these earlier prototypes. Microsoft also benefited from its early experiences with various forms of social media, ultimately incorporating many social media features into its commercial Sharepoint offering.
Conclusion
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