Week9: Participatory Media
More and more large-scale company use social media applied on intranet for internal communication. Social media, such as blogs, news sharing, podcasts, vlogs, and Second Life allow employees can use these online technologies and practices that to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Employee’s voices can be heard by upper-level employers and they can also express their new ideas or decisions. Social media break hierarchy and bottom up by employees.
According to the statement from Philippe Borremans, IBM successfully uses social-media tools for internal communication as well as improves employee engagement. Compared to traditional media, which are one way channel, it is more effectively to convey message, share opinions, and share photos via social media, which has the concept of web 2.0 and user-generated content. Social media facilitate collaboration and sharing between users; moreover, social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video, so it is easier to express ideas. Also, everyone can participate for editing content, so social media built up a two-way channel for employees and employers to communicate with each other.
However, although social media are used by many company for internal communication, there are still risks existing for using social media. First, in my opinion, I think it is not suitable for every company to apply social media on internal communication. It’s not appropriate for small-scale company. Using social media build a social networking among employees and break geographic boundary. It is useful global or big company; nonetheless, using E-mails or making phone calls is more effective and efficient to internally communicate for small company. If they use social media for internal communication, they have to manage the message board or blog for example; furthermore, maybe employees don’t have opinion to share. Thus it only wastes resource. Setting up external communication channel like bogs may be more useful for small company.
Besides, if there is no a good management, the internal opinions may be revealed. Moreover, for instance, the message board may be a chatting room. Employees may use blogs to gossip. As a result, good management and education for employees are important.
Qs:
1. How to effectively manage internal communication channel?
2. Accept the risks mentioned in article, is there any disadvantages to use social media for internal communication?
I had not considered the effect of social media on a small company. It may well be that an external blog where the employees could take turns posting and the companies customers could respond may be a more effective means of using social media. And I do think that all companies do not necessarily need to partake of this kind of communications.
Perhaps most importantly, small companies often do not have the time or resources to engage in this type of communication.