How To: Use Social Media For Internal Communications

By thomascrampton ⋅ February 25, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment

Watson Wyatt, a human resources consultancy, does a large-scale annual survey looking at return on investment for communication strategies.

One section of this year’s report focused on Social Media as used by 328 organizations that collectively represent 5 million employees in various regions around the world. (Full demographics of those surveyed at the bottom)

First a summary chart of how Watson Wyatt concludes Social Media is best used in a company’s internal communications mix:

Watson Wyatt’s findings:

Highly effective communicators are making greater use of social media than their less- effective peers.

On average, however, usage is fast outpacing effectiveness. While the use of social media has expanded over the last 12 months for all, highly effective communicators are more than twice as likely as the least-effec- tive group of companies to have expanded their use of social media (Figure 14).

The most prevalent reasons for not increasing the use of social media stem from a lack of resources and knowledge, rather than legal restrictions (Figure 15).

Companies that are using social media to engage employees are using these tools to address a variety of topics (Figure 16). The most prevalent topics are collaboration and team building, adapting to change, and promoting health and wellness. The difference between high-and low-effectiveness communicators was not significant in this area. It ranged from a 17 percent difference in providing a line of sight to the business to a 9 percent difference in promoting risk taking; however, less than half of participants are using social media to reach their workforce.

Highly effective communicators are using social media tools 2-3 times more than the low-effectiveness group of companies to reach employees (Figure 17). Most participants (65 percent) expect to use social media more next year.

To get a better return on their investments in social media, however, companies will need to build on their knowledge base and undertake these basic steps:

- Document their social media policy
- Develop tools to measure the success of social media at their company
- Build executive support
Companies are making greater use of electronic and face- to-face communication than before, while the use of print continues to decline (Figure 18).

Demographics of those surveyed:

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How Much Asia Communicates (Or Not)

By thomascrampton ⋅ July 19, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

TeleGeography’s map of intra-Asia Telecommunications Traffic Flows shows a few interesting things about how Asians communicate (or not).

The measure is millions of minutes of telecommunications traffic over one year on the public telephone network. (Total combined volume for Asia is more than 100 million minutes).

Squint hard and you can see arrows that show strong imbalances of traffic in one direction (more than 60 percent).

- Australians make significantly more outgoing calls than they receive from the Philippines (81%), China (76%), Japan (61%) and India (84%).

- India is the exact opposite, with inbound imbalance running high from UAE (91%), Saudi Arabia (74%), Singapore (61%) and Australia (84%). Someone must be running a highly profitable callback service from UAE!

Based on these figures alone, it is not difficult to see who has the more deregulated telecom market for international calls.

Since this data is from 2004, I would be interested to see how much impact the Internet, VOIP, Skype and MSN have on traffic flows.

Another point of - sad - interest is the effect of government-level conflicts: There seems to be no communication directly between India and Pakistan. The traffic between China and Taiwan, on the other hand, is huge with a 63% imbalance of calls from Taiwan into China.

Sadly, North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Laos, Camobia and Vietnam apparently did not have enough traffic to even make it on the map.

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10 Levels of Intimacy in Today's Communication

The digital age has changed the ways in which we share our most important opinions and innermost secrets. The latter are usually reserved for our closest of acquaintances, but we don’t necessarily use the most personal approach to broach these delicate details. The combination of technology and weight of information has given us new rules for just how to break the news. Ji Lee’s 10 Levels of Intimacy in Today’s Communication is both an interesting and absurd display of the redefinition and possible redistribution of how we continue on with our most cherished connections.

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