Social Media within your Company

Shel Holtz explores how social media is affecting internal communication processes within organizations and companies.

Holtz Law, which he himself coined, states that Whatever succeeds on the Internet will find its way onto intranets.

Holtz tells the communicators should lead and take the charge to get executives and employees to blog. In Lawrence Ragans Communications, Inc.’s Journal of Employee Communication Management, Holtz tells how blogs should be harnessed as a communication channel instead of a technology.

In the Journal he identified some possible examples for how blogs can be utilized:

Projects: project teams can set up a group blog to maintain an ongoing record of decisions and actions. Project leaders can also maintain a blog to announce to the rest of the company the current status of the project and what was accomplished today.
Departmental: Departments can maintain blogs to let the rest of the company know of current offerings or achievements.
News: Employees can contribute industry or company news to a group blog, or cover news they have learned in their own personal blogs.
Brainstorming: Employees in a department or on a team can brainstorm about strategy, process and other topics.
Customers: Employees can share the substance of customer visits or phone calls.
Personal blogs: Even though this sounds like a time-waster, a personal blog can prove valuable in the organization.
CEO blog: What a great way for the chief executive officer to get closer to employees.

If companies are sincere about knowledge management, blogs represent a startlingly good channel for it.

And blogging phonemenon has indeed penetrated the enterpise. Corporate executives have launched blogs to provide a more human voice for the organization or to position themselves as thought leaders. Managing a work force means treating them like people, not mindless drones who live to serve company’s ill-defined will. And if companies can utilize social media to their advantage, employees are engaged effectively resulting in improved productivity. He has called on communicators of companies he knew that have already incorporated social media within their organizations.

So far, feedbacks have been positive and it seems it will be for the next years.