This morning Justin Fong, Vice President of Internal Communications for Teach For America, kicked off Day 2 of Ragan Communications' Social Media for PR and Corporate Communication Conference at Disney World speaking about creating an enterprise social network for internal communication.
For Justin, it's hard to imagine how Teach For America (TFA) would function without it's internal network. It doesn't solve all of TFA's internal communications problems, but it is the best way to connect the organization's more than 2,000 staff members across nearly 50 regions. Most important, it gives everyone a voice, an essential ingredient of a great value.
For companies that do not have a robust social internal network, Just answered many of the hard questions as well as gave a timeline on what to expect of implementation .
Robust internal communication in a social environment can stregthen the culture among your employees by offering transparancy and access among leadership, employees, and teams; as well as creating a fun and collaborative community across the enterprise.
How do you get there?
It is our jobs as communicators to create change by creating a revolution! Understand how the adoption process will work among your workplace and be persistent so it will succeed.
To be successful start by having that conversation with leadership to get their buy-in. After that start a soft launch pilot among your group and reach out to others you feel may be interested.
Be that lonley dancer! It might just be you and a small group at first, but keep dancing and be persistant. Invest in your small group as super users, educating them and helping them to understand how to use the tool and grow the user base.
As your network grows, educate peopl. Show people what it is and how it is being used. Also offer them training on how they can use it to benefit them and the way their teams work.
Timeline of Progression with Internal Social Media
In the Beginning
Start with fun stuff like annoucements and the daily on-goings of the company and it's people. As you add value the culture will grow.
But what about governance? Who has time for governance when you're busy dancing?! Be watchful but allow the group to grow organically and make the network their own.
In the beginning at TFA, groups around topics like new mothers, cooking, and fittness were popular among employees. This helped employees networking on a different level and create a more engrained community.
The biggest challenge in the beginning will always be user education. A lot of people will be signing up but will be wondering why they are signing up. As a communicator and super user, you will need to help them to see the vision behidn it.
The Dark Middle Passage
After you get things off the ground your internal network will hit a lull. Things start to slow down.
Try to break through and prove value to the users and to your employees who have still yet to join. Use your culture to drive content, but also strive for productivity.
You early adapters will be challened by the fact that their entire teams don't use the network, which makes team collaboration on the network difficult.
There are a ton of groups with little activity. These groups have vision but no action. "Let's start a group about Ohio for all the people from Ohio!" But there isn't much to post about that.
But good news, the super users are still dancing! And these users have increased user expertise so start leveraging them to be advocates in their areas.
At this point there are still no formal community management (different from governance). There is no one on the network fill this position and there may not be anyone who has an idea on how to be content managers.
You biggest challenge will continue to be providing real value in the environment. Giving people a reason to go there, not to see it as a time suck.
You will also be challenged with the fact that not everyone is social. The 90:9:1 rule of social media applies to internal as well. That means only 1% of users are original creators of original content, 9% are contributors, and then 90% of users are just lurkers and don't offer anything constructive to the network.
In social media, only the top 10% of contributors generate 55% of the content.
Once Your Over the Dark Ages
Now that you're gaining momentum you'll be able to have dedicated community management users that will promotes best content practices and keeping everything organized and orderly.
You user base is continually growing and they find a lot of value in what is being posted and taking place on the network.
Along with this comes smarter users who understand the tools and how to use them properly.
The groups that people have been creating since day one are more productivity-minded and are more focused on on a vision with regular content and activity.
The biggest challenge at this point in time will be to incorporate more pockets of users (regional teams). As you continue to grow and branch out to your company's other locations, it will be difficult to span geographically and cultural divides.
Time Commitment
The community managers should spend about 10% of their time, with equates to roughly five to six hours a week. Not too much time when you're considering how much value is coming out of it.
NOTE: This was written live during the #RaganDisney conference. Please stop by later for a more robust edition.
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