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Monday, April 21, 2008

Who should own internal social media?

I got a call from a Ragan reporter today. She’s writing about the debate evidently going on over at MyRagan, the communicator’s social network, over who should own internal social media.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? There’s still debate raging over who should own the intranet. (This is another topic of discussion I found at MyRagan, just to prove that it hasn’t been resolved yet.)

Specifically, this writer told me, there were three departments vying for control: Communications, Human Resources and IT.

My answer: The employees who use it own it.

That’s not the same answer that I give for intranet ownership, where a cross-functional governance model almost always produces the best results. For enterprise web 2.0, though, we’re not talking about a tool that will be used as a channel for traditional communications. We’re talking about employee social networks, employee blogs, wikis and other tools that allow employees to network among themselves.

Certainly, IT has a major role to play. HR needs to be involved from a policy standpoint, while communicators may have a good handle on how information moves through the organization, insight that would be helpful in putting together an effective suite of tools. All three departments had a hand in the introduction of social media to the intranet at Northwestern Mutual Insurance, with the communicator identifying the need. IT helped determine that an external hosting solution would be the best course, while HR ironed out issues with labor contracts and the like.

But once an enterprise web 2.0 solution is in place, it’s ideally the employees using it who will determine its evolution.

If you have social media behind the firewall at your company, who owns it?

Incidentally, I got a press release today touting a new Forrester study that claims spending on enterprise web 2.0 will grow 43% per year over the next several years, reaching $4.6 billion by 2013. The survey says 56 percent of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority this year.

Posted by Shel on 04/21 at 03:26 PM
Internal • Social Media • (5) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
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