By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum 
Opinions on social media are constantly divided within the internal comms profession, and as communicators fall into two very distinct dinner parties.
We are either tank top wearing old schoolers, who haven’t ventured musically further than The Everly Brothers and stoically maintain that by overly focusing on Facebook, for example, we are ignoring the core values of comms. Or we fall into the new generation of 1980s retro dressed twentysomethings who, when they’re not Tweeting on their iPhones or downloading a Ricky Gervais podcast, tell their more traditional peers that they are in fact missing out on the biggest evolution in communications since Sir Tim Berners Lee decided to turn the Filofax into the World Wide Web.
I questioned our loyal audience on our Linked In Melcrum Communicators Network as to whether they thought Facebook was dead as an internal comms tool? Naturally I realise I was preaching to the converted. If you responded online then you were already in some way gripped by some form of social media and had signed up to Linked In, which is, in my opinion, as good a professional-to-professional comms tool there is online.
We as communicators, however, rather predictably and equally healthily have mixed views. It seems that most of us have considered, or even used, Facebook as a comms tool but with wildly varying degrees of success. We have never been afraid to test it out as a means of communicating with colleagues, but following a short period of experimentation perhaps realised there were either better tools already in place or that we would rather use other social media sites. Or, as some of you mentioned, even wait for the next big online buzz to hit our screens.
Haroon Bijli, an online marketing and communications professional at Tata Consultancy Services, says Facebook still remains a “useful means to keep in touch with employees who are not on the internal network, work from client or home locations, or who are always on the move.” He has a point. It is extremely tough to constantly communicate and get those key messages to remote workers. Of course, you could use Instant Messenger or Blackberry Chat, for example, but it’s difficult to argue against your workforce using a resource that has 200 million users, many of which belong to your organisation. The again, unless they are connected to the internet 24/7, you have no way of reaching them other than simply giving them a simple phone call, which defeats, or rather obliterates the purpose of communicating with someone.
Bijli and others, however, argue that FB will not replace the corporate intranet and that it serves as more of an add-on, a bonus that can complement the internal resource whenever necessary. Again this can often be true. Facebook has done wonders for social media, and opened our eyes to its possibilities. But corporate it is not. The only time it can perhaps swivel its zombie biting, strawberry throwing head towards anything resembling professionalism is when people from the same company organise events, or create common groups, be they sporting, charitable or simply after work clubs where employees can get together and constructively socialise.
Mark K Curtis, an internal communications practitioner, backs this up and explains that Facebook would never truly work as an effective internal comms tool because its main mandate is to connect people socially and that any messages from employers to employees would almost act as an intrusion of privacy. It would be a bit like the boss coming round uninvited to your birthday barbeque dressed in his favourite Bermuda shorts and string vest.
“Facebook discourages multiple accounts. Therefore a user would need to give an employer the ability to post messages to their personal Facebook page. This may not be appropriate or something people would be happy to do with a social mesh. And employees have a right to keep their personal lives private.
“They may be happy to subscribe to one-way channels though such as RSS – widely available on mobile phones and PDAs these days. This is certainly a question we shouldn't be afraid to ask,” he adds.
Karen Drury, the owner of fe3 Management Consulting says FB was never a corporate tool in the first place suggesting that it is took “lacking in control” for the majority of senior managers and was and still is time consuming to sort and search for the right information.
Michele Egan, senior communications officer at The World Bank goes so far as to say that Facebook has “never” and “never should be” been a tool for internal communications. “What would be more interesting to find out,” she says, “is whether the features that make FB such an effective social networking tool are being adopted inside the organisation in any way”.
Curtis adds that one of the main challenges of social media is not the technology or its place at the heart of internal comms, but finding management and IT personnel that have the passion to support these new and often exciting channels. “In my experience the implementation of social media – even strictly internally – can be slow and the politics heavy. This is short sighted because, not long from now, employees are going to look at the management of email as cumbersome and ineffective – which many studies already suggest that it is.”
I tend to agree. Whether Facebook is or isn’t an effective tool to use within internal comms teams, is perhaps not the question. As Curtis concludes, the tools that Facebook, Linked In and Twitter employ can be extremely effective communication methods.
“The scalability and popularity of social media suggests that internal communications professionals must recognise its potential, particularity if they intend to be effective business communicators with the employees of the future. No one likes to be left behind.”
Then again, I’ve just received an email in my inbox informing me that Dr Twitty is now ‘following me” on Twitter. Some things are better off being left behind.
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