hollywood entertainment: The Role of Social Media in Corporate Communications

: Social Media Power - BigW

As the world grows more and more social, companies started integrating social media into their corporate communication strategies.

The possibility to broadcast a message to the entire world in the wink of an eye is indeed powerful. This is what Social Media does and thus, it has turned to be one of the major factors that decide the rise and fall of businesses across the globe. There is a dire need for today?s organizations to have corporate communications experts in place to help address social media related issues that are likely to negatively affect the company?s reputation.

Gone are the days when companies issued top-down print publications to let employees and the outside world know what is going on within the organization. In today?s corporate world, town-hall meetings and corporate podcasts are also becoming obsolete. Companies have started rolling out social media strategies, as part of their internal and external communications. Renowned organizations like SAS, Nokia, Philips, and IBM have been doing it for a while now.

Social Media Strategy within Organizations

Kelly Kass, Editor, simply-communicate.com published a series of posts that elaborates on top companies? social media based internal communication strategies, based on her interviews with the respective corporate communications managers.

Being at the top of the list of FORTUNE?s 100 Best Companies to Work for 2010 & 2011, SAS employs social media as the bandwagon to drive corporate communications. The company boasts blogs, wikis, share point discussion boards and a Facebook like platform called HUB, which is a big hit among employees.

?Internal blogging is very popular. I?d like to tell you it was a corporate communications effort but it was not. Employees started it without us. We wanted to get behind the movement and support it; therefore, any employee can blog at SAS. We?d rather have some control over it than no control,? explains Graebe, the company?s Internal Communications Manager in an interview with Kelly Kass. Graebe adds, ?Whenever we can, we encourage people to use social media inside or outside the company.?

Following the innovative Roving Reporter program, Philips entertains a social-powered community as part of their internal communications strategy. Despite a formal business communications tool, the website acts more social focusing the human side of corporate communications.

?I was really struggling with how we were going to support a community of 90,000 online users. How were they going to adopt this social media tool? Use your employees to help you and to help each other and find ways to do that. For example, ask people to send photographs and videos and embed those into your formal channels of communication. That?s instant help, that?s instant engagement, and it?s free? Kelly Kass quoted Philips Senior Global Internal Communications Officer Cameron Batten, as saying.

Nokia, the pioneer of cellular technology has been successfully running its social media campaigns within the organization. The three internal social media tools that are more popular among employees include BlogHub, VideoHub and Infopedia. In contrast to the traditional flow of internal communication from top management to the bottom level, BlogHub ensures that every employee has a voice to be heard. As the name implies, VideoHub allows posting of video clips by employees, on a daily basis. Infopedia is a wiki that enables collaboration and knowledge sharing within the organization.

IBM has an internal social network called BeeHive that serves three purposes ? connect with colleagues that one meets on interdepartmental or inter-divisional projects, showcase a project to wider audience within the organization and gather inputs to complete the project in the best way possible, connect with the top-level management that is not accessible by other traditional means. BeeHive is an excellent social model that facilitates communication and collaboration within a giant organization.

Social Media: The Instant Brand Killer

In a corporate environment of today, employees and customers expect transparency, fairness and authenticity. If not provided, they dare to drive the company to gutters with the so called instant brand killer, the social media. As the world grows more social, power and authority are distributed across all verticals. This growing power of ?social? is for the society?s good, say experts. ?Newly armed customer and employee activists can become the source of creativity, innovation and new ideas to take your company forward,? writes David Kirkpatrick in his article ?Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution.?

?Trust is built by sharing vulnerability,? Kirkpatrick quotes John Hagel, a long time author and consultant who co-chairs Deloitte?s Center for the Edge as saying. ?The more you expose and share your problems, the more successful you become. It?s not about the top executive dictating what needs to be done and when, it?s about providing individuals with the power to connect.?

No matter companies like social media or not, it is the need of the hour to integrate it with corporate communications. As Dominic Jones writes in her article Social media investor relations reaches a tipping point, "SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOW MAINSTREAM, and companies that haven?t yet started using social media in their IR programs are in danger of finding themselves talking to increasingly smaller audiences.?

Sources

Manu Priya -

An electronics engineer by education, technical communicator by profession and blogger by hobby.