Have you considered using social media for employee communications, but you're not sure which tool will get the most traction?
Try giving employees what they prefer. Use surveys or polls to determine the most popular social media outlet among colleagues, then adopt a similar tool.
Here's a list of ways employees use social media during their personal time, which tools you can use for the workplace, and how to get started:
| If your employees do this at home... | ...then try using this tool at the office. | Here's how |
| Social networking | Internal colleague network | Build a social network on your intranet where employees can input profile information, "friend" colleagues and post comments on each others' profile pages. Imagine the networking possibilities! |
| Posting quick, short status updates | Yammer |
Use this microblogging software to update colleagues on daily workloads, seek out or offer help on projects, post links to inspirational articles or spread the word about cookies in the kitchen. |
| Collecting content | Widgets for rating or tagging content | Add buttons to your intranet that let employees rate articles, blogs and columns on a five-star scale. Or allow users to tag pages with keywords and help improve your intranet's search capabilities. |
| Watching videos for entertainment | YouTube channels | Reach out to employees by creating a YouTube channel for leader videos, training sessions and news briefs. To boost interaction, let employees post their own videos and respond to each others' videos. |
