ANTenna Blog -- Networking & Communications

Social media is about a lot of things: It's wikis, blogs, forums, and lots more that can transform your smaller business, help you connect with your customers, and foster internal collaboration. But whether you decide to leap on the social media bandwagon or take some small steps in its direction, don't forget who you need to take with you on this journey: Your employees.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference that is currently underway in Boston, there is a lot of breathless talk about all the latest technologies that will enhance social media in the enterprise. There are collaboration tools, mashups, and lots of stuff going on in the cloud. But at a session I attended the emphasis – unintentionally – turned to one aspect of social media that is frequently neglected: socializing employees to all these new tools.

An audience member at one of the sessions entitled "Social Media and the Enterprise" asked the panel of Chris Brogan, the vice president of strategy and technology at CrossTechMedia; Katie Delahaye Paine, founder and CEO of KDPaine & Partners, LLC; Maggie Fox, the CEO of Social Media Group; and, Rob Howard the CEO of Telligent, this (paraphrased) question: We have all these new social media toys. How do we get our employees to use them?

In other words, what good are these tools if the employees don't use them?

Fox emphasized that (obviously) businesses need to figure out what the tools will do for the employees and if they choose those tools wisely, hopefully, the employees, once they use them, will see the value in the tools. But she emphasized that businesses need a "socialization plan," an internal marketing plan if they really want the tools to be used. Not to besmirch IT here but she did note that "IT [people] are not the best communicators. You need internal marketing."

The panel provided some "tricks" -- Paine recommended having a "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" game at the next staff meeting with the answers found in the company's wiki and Howard recommended putting project training tips in the corporate blog -- but it all comes down to recognizing what Brogan noted: It's a process of retraining users and it takes time.

And if smaller businesses keep these words of Brogan in mind when choosing what social media tools to deploy them – while respecting the deployment process -- they should be fine: "Technology doesn't drive decisions as much as human need," he said.