What About Me? An Employee's Lament...

Have you ever gone to a work party not because you wanted to, but because your boss “strongly suggested” it, as a show of support for the company?  Your enthusiasm comes off as fake and it doesn’t give you any reason to participate on your own in the future.  Perhaps if you had decided on your own to attend the work event, the support for your company would be genuine and it would be an incentive to attend future events.

The inefficacy of a top-down model when trying to manage a groundswell movement within a company is an issue Li & Bernoff tackle in Chapter 11 of Groundswell.  Most of what we have read and talked about so far has been how a company can use the groundswell to actively engage with their customer and use it as a marketing tool.  But what the authors seek to do in this chapter is to impress upon their readers the importance of using the groundswell to also energize employees.

Many companies around the world are starting to adopt the idea of creating an internal social network for their employees to help with communication.  “Some of these applications came from management and others began as skunk-works projects, but what they have in common is this: they tap the power of the groundswell of ideas among the people who know best how your business runs, your employees” (Groundswell, pg. 216).  However, for these internal social networking opportunities to take root and flourish, they must evolve organically.  “You can’t force them [employees] to adopt groundswell thinking, any more than you can convince reluctant managers to deploy social technologies with your customers” (Groundswell, pg. 230-231).

To illustrate the concept of an internal social networking site at work in a large company, consider Nokia, a worldwide mobile phone producer.  According to simply-communicate.com Nokia has three main uses of social media to connect with all employees in a less “top-down model”: BlogHub, VideoHub and Infopedia.  On the site Conversations by Nokia they offer a timeline of their internal social media efforts.

In a 2011 interview for Conversations by Nokia, Tiina Jaatinen, Senior Communications Specialist, Social Media, spoke about the importance of all Nokia’s employees having a place to have a voice and quickly share with everyone else.  This is why BlogHub became of vital importance to the company.  With over 1400 active blogs and 100,000+ comments, Nokia is assured its employees, who each have an internal blog, they have a constantly evolving stream of work and ideas (Conversations by Nokia).  This is what Li & Bernoff where presenting with the case study looking at Blue Shirt Nation, the internal site for Best Buy employees.

The authors end their book urging their audience to remember social media is ever-changing and constantly evolving.  But if companies do not focus on forming relationships with their customers, they will never be able to reap the benefits social media can provide, both inside and out.