Internal Communications: What Is Social Computing's Role?

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The top 5 tools currently used for internal company communications (as of October 2009) are as follows:

EMAIL: 92.4%
FACE-TO-FACE MEETINGS: 89.4%
INTRANET: 81.2%
NEWSLETTER: 65.9%
POSTERS: 62.4%

This data comes from an interesting report on social media use in internal company communications titled "Social Media and You..." and produced by theblueballroom (just an aside, but, really guys? The blue ball room? You're going with that as a company name? OK, ok, I'll go along since you're research is interesting...)

The data above provides, I think, a dose of realism for social computing enthusiasts like me who dream of seeing email eliminated as an internal company communications tool to be replaced with more emergent tools and practices like social networking and microblogging.

Now 32.7% of the companies studied for this report are using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter (or custom internal versions of these tools) primarily for sharing knowledge (78.3%) and building communities (69.6%). But when posters outrank social computing as an internal communication tool, it becomes obvious that social computing still has a lot of ground to make up. I think part of that ground includes a better understanding among the people doing the internal communications about why, where and how to apply social computing tools.

It's not my purpose in this post to answer those questions, or even to pursue at length the argument that social computing is a viable alternative (and improvement) to the communication tools currently holding sway. I believe it is a way to better achieve some of the strategic goals of internal company communications, but I want to engage the reality that it isn't yet displacing legacy approaches in significant numbers by articulating the realistic questions that proponents of social computing should be asking themselves in light of these findings:

1. What is it about the current leading tools that makes them the leading tools? Is it just that companies have grown accustomed to them or are they really more useful than they're given credit for in the current climate of excitement over the next new thing?

2. What is the proper role of social computing in a company's internal communication strategy? Is it to replace previous tools and do better the same things those tools were trying to accomplish, or were there internal communication needs that previously went unmet that now could be addressed using the new tools of social computing -- not as replacements, but to augment legacy tools like email, face-to-face and posters?
It's interesting to note that the five leading tools above fall into what appear to me to be two distinct categories: targeted and broadcast:

TARGETED:
Email
Face-to-face

BROADCAST:
Intranet
Newsletter
Posters

People like to use email because they feel they can reach exactly the person they have in mind and I think they like the "attachment" functionality that gives them the peace of mind of knowing they've handed off their document to exactly the person who should have it. But email's effectiveness breaks down quickly, in my experience, when you don't know precisely who you should be talking to. Why posters are so popular in 2009 is a mystery to me. Maybe people like posters because there are times when you have something the organization should hear, but you may not know precisely the audience for that content -- so you post it where all can see it and the people who need it, you hope, will find it. Although, of course, you really have no assurance that actually happens.

But it's also interesting to note that, with the exception of face-to-face, all of these are push communication styles: I push email to you; I push information out onto the intranet; I push a poster or a newsletter for you to consume. To me, the necessity and opportunity of social computing as a corporate communication tool is revealed by the strong showing of face-to-face. People want to have productive back-and-forth exchanges with precisely the right people who can help them and a face-to-face conversation does that. But what about when you are not in the same physical location and yet you need to collaboratively exchange expertise with someone else, or a group? That's when social computing tools can fit the bill because they are web-based approximations of the face-to-face dynamic.

Finally, it's interesting to me that there's an implication in the reliance on push communication technologies that I think is worth addressing. When these tools are used to communicate corporate messages to the employee population, they imply a finality to the thinking contained in the messaging -- they do not invite debate, collaboration, response or input. There are times when, in fact, corporate is not inviting input or debate and so a one-way, push approach can be appropriate. But what about times when that's not the implication you want to communicate, times when you do want input from the organization? Such cases are ones in which social computing tools might be the appropriate choice because they tend to invite people in rather than just push information out and because they seem, in my mind, to occupy a space between pure targeted and pure broadcast communication.

More to come as I make my way further through this study. But what is your experience? Does your company use social computing tools for company communication purposes? Where does it work? Where does it not? What's the right balance between push and social?

(photo above by Eve Fraser Hulsey)