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Connecting with your employees through Social Media

Written by: Brian Beehler

Article Overview: Today was an awesome day! It started off with my VP greeting me at the door and showing his appreciation for my efforts in 2008. Next, it was my Director pointing out the main successes that were achieved and finally I had the opportunity to show my gratitude to my staff. What a great way to connect with your employees and build sincere relationships by recognizing them for their contribution to the overall success of the corporation. Thanks to the organizing committee for pulling off a great “Employee Appreciation” day.

Connecting with your employees through Social Media

Today was an awesome day! It started off with my VP greeting me at the door and showing his appreciation for my efforts in 2008. Next, it was my Director pointing out the main successes that were achieved and finally I had the opportunity to show my gratitude to my staff. What a great way to connect with your employees and build sincere relationships by recognizing them for their contribution to the overall success of the corporation. Thanks to the organizing committee for pulling off a great “Employee Appreciation” day.

For me the day is much appreciated but why does it only have to be a day. Well, it doesn’t, it could be an ongoing process through the use of Social Media tools within the workplace. Today’s knowledge workers are so much more than the title on their business cards. They are skilled, experienced and well versed in many of the tools available to them in their personal lives. When employees work together they have the talent and abilities to drive innovation within the workplace. The challenge now is to find ways to capture that collective knowledge and turn it into a powerful tool for building value and continuous improvement. As a business community we need to think past simple job functions and give our employees an easy, engaging way to connect, share and innovate.

Over the last 8 months have been working on such a tool that will connect our employees with each other. The tool will enable the corporation to exploit the collective potential in all our employees to drive our success. It will engage and empower them to grow, develop and contribute. Our scheduled deployment of the new tool will be September 2009 and over the next few months I would like to bring you through my journey of redefining how a corporate intranet should interact with its employees.

Here is a sneak peak at some of the features and benefits…

We are allowing every employee to have individual blogs — We are anticipating this will cause innovation by making it easy to share ideas and opinions among all levels in the organization.

Employees will be able to create work groups — This will provide them with an efficient way to collaborate as well as communicate their group’s mandate with others.

Employees will be able to play by creating Social groups — This will help employees find colleagues with similar interests, lifestyles, etc., and increase employee engagement and retention.

Individuals will be able to tag — Profiles will be built on a true picture of the knowledge, skills and expertise inside the organization.
Personal pages — This will put a human face on the old school “employee directory” model by encouraging people to search out others and talk to each other.

Whiteboard — Employees will share ideas on colleagues’ whiteboards, fostering innovation, collaboration, and social bonds.

Similar to Facebook, news feeds will be virally transmitted —- We are hoping this will reduce the “I didn’t know” factor by showing important news, activities or events.

There are several other features that I haven’t mentioned because we are currently determining if they are technically possible. Please return frequently to learn more of my experiences through this culture changing initiative.

Together we can build a workforce that truly works together…

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Article Tags: business cards, business community, collective knowledge, continuous improvement, corporate intranet, deployment, employee appreciation day, gratitude, innovation, job, journey, knowledge workers, media tools, organizing committee, personal lives, relationships, share ideas, sneak peak, successes, vp



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Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff
Re: Kevin needs "social glue" ideas - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":gvtxsu7g]Hi, I like the idea of "10 items that could act as "social glue" because I am an internet marketer. But I agree with the rest that the 10 recent post is nice. Maybe we should open up a new section in the forums on Social Media...or Social Media Marketing. I will tell you that the world is about 1 1/2 behind when it comes to understanding social media. Building a section now will put EvanCarmichael.com is a great position a year down the road when people realize Social Media can produce more traffic than SEO. Jeff[/quote:gvtxsu7g] Hi Jeff, Thanks for the suggestion. Why don't you start a new post (with a poll) to see if there's enough interest in your idea for a social media section?
Re: UPDATES: New Campaign! New Layout! New Ideas! - GT - thanks for the FYI - I'm not sure if we'll put a link back. Something to consider though! Trent - the new category is "Social Network and Media" which was put in to compliment the Online Businesses category that currently exists. Overall the new categories are: - Looking For, Networking and Events - Review My... - Social Network and Media - Brags and Rants These came as a result of Ringo doing research on other forums and thinking about what could be improved on ours to give a better experience for everyone. I hope you enjoy them! David, I'm looking forward to reading your Brag / Rant!
Re: Marketing 2.0 - What Are Your Thoughts - Hi Shri, Thanks for posting this. I also read it and I believe Social Media is here to stay, until the next best thing comes up. Social media proved to be useful for me many times and I think everyone should use it for their business.
Re: Social Media Marketing Ignorance - [quote="vbn411":7qciluxl]Social Media is space that you have to be in to succeed in our current climate. People are going to be discussing your brand / product whether you like it or not, so you might as well join the conversation and add value. [/quote:7qciluxl] I think that's probably one of the most realistic way to think about it. There's no real textbook way of understanding Social Media, it's the networks of people and their interactions that will exist with or without your input. As for Jennifer, You can always have 2 Facebook pages. Many people do. There is also LinkedIn, which is like a professional networking version of Facebook. The only way to know is to try it.


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