A Look Inside

Potentially monetizing social networks in the process

Much of the current business use of twitter, and social networks in general, revolves around using it to communicate openly with customers. A great example of this is Scott Monty of Ford. While you rarely get the sense that Scott gets frustrated or angry you’ll often see him on the defense, especially these days as a result of the current economic climate and the state of the automotive industry. In spite of this, what I believe that you get from Scott is an honest, no spin insight into what’s happening at, and coming out of, Ford Motor Company these days. Another great example is Loic Le Meur a serial entrepreneur and founder of seesmic. Loic spends much of his time communicating with the users of seesmic and twhirl (a desktop client for social software, most commonly twitter) to hear about how they are using his company’s products, what features they would like to see and how the tools can be made better.

While I still believe there is much ground to be gained on this front of B2B and B2C corporate communication using social networks, I also thing it’s time to start moving into the next frontier: using social networks for internal corporate communications. It’s time for CEO’s, VP’s and managers (potentially even board members) to make themselves more openly available to their employees using the social media tools that some of these very same companies are using to engage their customers. And this is where monetizing the social media sites comes in. Why not allow a company to set up [mycompany].twitter.com as an internal corporate communications site with no outside access at a reasonable rate based on the number of users. Employees at all levels of the corporation would be able to socialize product decisions, discuss corporate strategy and provide feedback on work environments or business processes.

Of course this comes with risks. Executives and management could open themselves up to extensive criticism, or employees who are too vocal could find themselves overlooked for promotions they deserve or worse. But it comes with positive opportunities as well. The corporation could give a voice to employees where they may never have had one before raising morale as a result. Legitimately good ideas or product feedback that previously would have never gone beyond cube-mates could reach the ears that could take it and make much need adjustments. Most importantly the corporation would be telling their employees that their voice matters.

It should happen, it needs to happen, it’s bound to happen. As a matter of fact it’s probably happening somewhere and the tidal wave of internal corporate communications reform is building, ready to wash out the old practices in much the same way the tidal wave of PR and advertising reform has changed the game of business-customer interaction.