“My employees are spending hours on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. I thought social media was supposed to help my business, but I just see lost productivity. I need some strong medication to clear this up!”
Cyri: Looks like you have a dangerous condition: social media hypetitus. This can suck the living profits right out of your organization if you don’t nip it in the bud!
Ivan: Don’t panic. There is a healthy aspect to this condition that you don’t want to kill.
Cyri: Your best approach is to take a BuddyPress pill. This internal social networking tool, originally developed by Vancouver’s Andy Peatling – now with AutomatticInc. – will allow your organization to leverage the power of social networking for your benefit rather than just sending people away to third-party external sites where you have little control. It’s a plug-in and theme framework for WordPress that allows you to create your own “Facebook-style” network for your stakeholders.
Organizations like the British Columbia Institute of Technology are using it to help build communities of practice and online project collaboration (www.bcitcommons.ca) and it’s being used by companies large and small including the U.K.’s Telegraph.
It helps leverage the knowledge and skills of your human resources, and you have complete control over it. New BuddyPress plug-ins with additional features are being added every day.
Ivan: BuddyPress may be a longer-term solution, but make sure you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What you need to do right away before the condition worsens is have a clear mission for your organization, communicate that to your employees and ask them how their use of social media contributes. Help them get back on track.
Cyri: A recent Gartner study said that 20% of employees will use applications such as Twitter as their primary business communications hub by 2014. You don’t want to cut your employees’ access to this powerful communications approach, and an internal social network is a good foundation for external apps. Younger workers especially will be predisposed to community via social networks.
Mobile devices are enabling workers to connect with cloud-based applications so they can more easily collaborate on projects, even outside the company’s firewall. In many cases, these apps are faster and more efficient than the internal ones the organization’s IT folks can offer.
Ivan: I have to agree with this one. Email, instant messaging, SMS are all converging.
Cyri: You’re going to like the price tag on this one. It’s open source and free! Just go to www.buddypress.org and download the software. Medicine works best if you have an IT person willing to volunteer a decent chunk of time to help you set up.
Ivan: Better bring the doughnuts!
Cyri: It goes by a few different generic names: social intranet, internal social network, social commons site, etc.
There are a lot of alternatives to choose from such as Ning, Drupal, PBWorks, XWiki. Some are hosted internally, others are hosted in the “cloud.”
If you want complete control over privacy, you should manage and host your own network.
Cyri: BuddyPress still takes some tinkering. Its stated “five-minute install” can be more like a five-month install by the time you get it customized to meet your organization’s needs. They say open source is as free as “free puppy,” and this puppy will need some tender love and care. It can be tricky to get all the plug-ins to play nicely together.
Ivan: I’m not quite as sold on this. I still think you need to be where your customers are and today that is still the external social networks like Facebook.
But I do agree that having an internal social network should be part of your future. You need this one in your strategic plan.
Ivan:CCC
Cyri:CCCCC
Cyri Jones teaches entrepreneurship, project management and information technology at BCIT and Capilano University and is the co-founder of ZedPress.com, a lifelong learning publishing platform and social network. He blogs at 24posts.com. Ivan Surjanovic is in Capilano University’s marketing faculty and CEO of iPower Lab. He blogs at whereispuck.com and at bizpharmacy.com.
