Moving beyond the organic benefits of open employee access to social networks

As more than half of the companies in the U.S. continue to block employee access to social media sites, the organizations that maintain open channels are positioned to innovate and compete at levels that could crush their competition.

Being poised to extract value from a workforce that is networked 24/7 isn’t the same as taking the steps required to get there.

I intend to continue the campaign to end the conterproductive practice of blocking employees from their online communities. But the time has come to shift the focus from those companies that can’t see the opportunities inherent in a workforce that is connected to thousands of other people. Let them flounder and fail as their competitors tease new business opportunities from these networks, identify and recruit top talent, spot problems and address them before they become crises, and build a larger, more loyal customer base.

In fact, the best way to convince organizations that blocking works against their self-interest is to have them watch their more enlightened competitors kick their asses in the marketplace.

Some would argue that all a company needs to unleash this power is connected employees freed to connect to their networks. Business, though, is all about achieving established goals. The processes companies establish to produce the best results from employees’ organic networking activities will determine who really wins.

I see three types of processes organizations can model:

• Employees share information of value, such as complaints, product improvement ideas, ideas for new products and services, and competitive intelligence
• Departments initiate systems that integrate resources employees contribute from their networks into existing processes (for example, recruiters tapping into employees’ professional networks to identify the next key hire)
• Companies activate employees for focused efforts from product launches to political actdion to customer service (like Best Buy’s Twelpforce effort on Twitter)

Organic networking is just the first step

To realize these kinds of benefits, organizations can’t rely solely on employees’ organic social networking activities. Yes, some value can certainly be derived from the communities with which employees already engage. But consider the difference between a bunch of prospectors with pans in the river versus a mining company armed with geologic data and the best minds inside and outside the company working together. Which approach will produce the most gold?

Sustainability is just one reason to be more systematic about business use of social media. One recruiter who is smart enough to ask employees to tap their networks to identify the best candidate for a job may produce some great results, but what happens when she leaves the company? When social media is left only at the organic state, most efforts aren’t sustainable.

(I know of one company that had a fanstastic internal podcast that died when the producer took a new job with another company. That never happened with employee publications, which the company viewed as integral communication, as part of the management process. Strategic processes don’t simply fade away just because the champion left the company or changed jobs.)

In a recent post, Brian Solis argued that the brand management role is now every employees’ responsibility:

When we listen to the activity that populates the statusphere and the blogosphere, we find that in addition to the overall brand, conversations map specifically to the individual departments that define the business foundation, which ultimately supports brand stature and resonance. In turn, these activities inspire immediate and long-term responses either directly through focused interaction or indirectly through product refinement, adaptation and overall messaging, targeting, and positioning.

Brian’s right, and in his post he outlines a process for evaluating conversations based on keyword discovery (collected at a central source) with relevant information parsed to the right departments so they can incorporate this intelligence into their operations.

Turning noise into business results

But this still doesn’t address those thousands of networks to which the frontline employees belong. And without processes, all those conversations that could lead to improved sales, the next great product or the next key hire is all just a lot of unrefined data. It’s just noise. Processes filter out the crap and turn the remaining data into information, and from information into actionable knowledge.

Employees in your company are listening to their networks. Some are even talking to their colleagues about what they’re hearing Few companies, however, are positioned to activate those employees or the data they’re accumulating:

• The cultures don’t support it.
• The processes necessary to inspire those responses don’t exist.
• Internal communication doesn’t provide employees with the intelligence they need to interact with their communities beneficially.
• Training efforts don’t let employees know what to do with the information they obtain or how to react to it.
• Business and product literacy among employees is shockingly low.

 

In other words, companies don’t have the foundation to support connecting networked employees with business goals.

As companies begin to recognize the competitve advantage currently dormant in employees’ networks, many will make mistakes by implementing programs that smack of astroturfing, asking employees to convey common messages to their networks. Others will install layers of bureacracy that ultimately hinder rather than encourage employees bringing the power of their networks to bear on the company’s business.

Identifying existing business processes and models already working in companies—and developing new ones—are top priorities for me. In fact, it’s the subject of the pre-conference session I’m conducting at the NewComm Forum next month. (“Becoming a Networked Organization” will take place on Tuesday, April 20 beginning at 1:30 p.m. at the conference venue in San Mateo, California.) It’s also the subject of the next book I hope to write.

It is time to move beyond this notion that large, complex organizations can accure the greatest benefit from social media by sitting back while employees join in conversations—someone from sales chatting with this person, someone from finance joining that community—without resources to inform their contributions to the dialogue, without the means by which they can share what they learn, and without mechanisms to filter the data and turn it into action.

Let the companies that block employees keep blocking. But if you want your organization to reap the rewards of open access, you need to start thinking—now, today—about how best to leverage it.