F500 Adopting UC

Social media is no longer just a service for people with personal accounts; it is becoming increasingly popular with enterprises. Businesses are using social networks to increase their marketing capacity and extend their brand presence. Social media has also become a valid online platform for communications between businesses and their customers.

Some companies however, prefer to create their own social networks for internal communications. Fortune 500 companies are among these. They prefer to utilize internal social media for security reasons – using commercialized social networking sites could put secure information at risk. Internal networking also enables them to run communication within the company more efficiently.

To prevent employees from sharing company data outside of the business, some major companies have rigid protocols in place. General Electric employees, for example, must connect through a portal called “GE Collab” short for General Electric Collaboration. The network in similar to Facebook and allows all employees to interact, comment, share business data and create threads.

IBM has a similar internal networking system called Beehive. This system is a little more social than GE Collab. As well as posting work-related data, Beehive also permits employees to share personal favorites like movies, books and music and allows colleagues to make comments. IBM has also created Blue Pages, which lets employees view each other’s profile and professional credentials. Blue Pages also includes information about company shares and events. The internal social networks aim to build a strong sense of community between employees and to help unify the workforce.

As well as pulling the workforce together, internal social networking can also help companies increase their revenue, simply by collecting employee data. A 2012 report on this by McKinsey stated that Fortune 500 companies may win $31.5 billion a year just by collecting information from employees. Internal unified communications may also cut down the time of tracking information and sending emails by up to 25 percent. The adoption of an internal unified communication tool can also increase work productivity.

Fortune 500 companies are leading the way forward for a major shift in the way enterprises use social media to engage employees within the company and help to retain them. Small to medium sized businesses could also learn by these strategies which encourage employees to keep their personal and work profiles separate while adding extra value to company culture and communications related to business. (CU) Link