Groundswell: The Final Chapter (It's All About Relationships)

Having reached the conclusion of Li and Bernoff's Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies, I reflect on my newly acquired knowledge regarding Social Media techniques and strategies and their implementation.

We've learned what the groundswell is, how it is changing the direction of marketing in this digital age, and how opportunities (and/or threats) for brands and businesses can come about due to greater groundswell participation. We've also discussed the strategies for tapping into the groundswell--listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing--and how the implementation of these principles are important for any business to achieve success within the groundswell.
 
These last chapters focus on the importance of providing a space for employees to connect. From making connections and forming relationships to collaborating and problem solving, an internal social networking space can be an invaluable tool for any business, not matter how large or how small.

When I think about employee communications, engagement, and relationships many quotes from successful businessmen come to mind, including:

• "The customer comes second: put your people first and watch 'em kick butt." Hal Rosenbluth (Rosenbluth Industries)
• "Start with good people, lay out the rules, communicate with your employees, motivate them and reward them. If you do all those things effectively, you can't miss." Lee Iaccoca (Chrysler Corporation)
• "Research indicates that workers have three prime needs: Interesting work, recognition for doing a good job, and being let in on things that are going on in the company." Zig Ziglar (speaker, author, salesman)

Each of these men realized the importance of a corporation's need to recognize, communicate, and connect with it's employees.

In Groundswell, Li and Bernoff provide several great examples of  businesses incorporating these principles in order to encourage engagement within the internal groundswell.

One of these examples is the case of Best Buy. Here Li and Bernoff show how an internal community site, Blue Shirt Nation, can make employees "feel empowered, connected, and more committed," ultimately providing them with a better understanding of the company, it's goals, it's successes and even it's failures. Whether it's intranets, wikis, or other internal social networking areas, employees are contributing to idea exchanges and the corporations using these applications are able to tap the power of the groundswell of ideas among the people who know best how your business runs, your employees! (p216).

For Best Buy, Blue Shirt Nation was created to listen to what employees had to say. What they ultimately realized was it helped to educate management and it enabled employees to help each other. Here you can see how the principles of groundswell work within a corporation. Take a look at how Li and Bernoff explain how Best Buy's Blue Shirt Nation accomplishes all five objectives:

1. Listening: Through the use of Blue Shirt Nation participation  employees, including all levels of management, are listening and helping others to problem solve.
2. Talking: With an area to publicly post, employees from any location can interact with each other. Here they can learn more about policies, events, or even what other stores are doing.
3. Energizing: Blue Shirt Nation provides a platform to share their ideas, advice, and experiences (whether positive or negative) generating conversations among Best Buy employees.
4. Supporting: With it's commitment to promotion from within, Best Buy utilizes Blue Shirt Nation as a mentoring tool where employees can find support throughout the entire corporation.
5. Embracing: Participation on Blue Shirt Nation allows employees from across the entire organization to share, help, support, and encourage each other, while continually propelling the company forward.

An Intranet for the People, By the People

This chapter reminded me of the award-winning intranet created for Pfizer, Inc. Pfizer consolidated 410 information-based sites and 10,000 team sites onto a single platform called PfizerWorld. The new network launched in 2011 and brings 110,000 employees together, in one place, electronically. The goal for creating Pfizer's intranet included the following commitments:

• Listening to people inside the company to understand their expectations of Pfizer and how they want to interact with the Pfizer brand
• Sharing, through conversations and collaborations, to grow Pfizer’s social media expertise, share best practices, align strategies, and leverage good work and assets already in place
• Engaging in conversations with internal and stakeholders directly.

The first step in building a lasting solution 

is to understand the user. 

Pfizer employees were interviewed and asked about their daily tasks, what they liked and disliked about their existing intranet, and ways to improve it. Interview responses helped to determine main content needs, and quick links are used to drive users to that content. The interface is tabbed for easy navigation and promotes collaboration with other teams.

Next is getting people to buy in.

Using a micro-site Pfizer was able to educate it's employees about the goals of the new intranet and inform them of the project’s progress.

Using Microsoft's SharePoint platform, Pfizer successfully introduced several internal channels of communication, including corporate blogs and message boards. PfizerWorld, known as the company's 'digital town square', includes more than 40 business units, divisional, functional, regional, country and location-specific editions in multiple languages, as well as MyWorld, the personalized intranet page created to increase employee engagement, enable information sharing, and facilitate collaboration.

In it's first year, MyWorld drew more than 41,000 unique users, more than 800,000 page views and some 84,000 connections. In addition, a colleague message board, Moving Pfizer Forward, was created to encourage candid discussion about company issues and employee engagement.

Employees are already interacting with each other

through their own personal external social networks. 

It's all about relationships. Connections. Interactions. Working together. Effective and efficient communication. An intranet provides areas for all of these things to occur under a single umbrella of unity. Smart companies, like Pfizer, recognize the need to leverage an intranet to bring those conversations inside, enabling employees to access the information they need and to share ideas with colleagues no matter where they are. 

Does your company employ an internal social networking platform? In what ways has it worked (or not worked) for you in connecting and building relationships with your colleagues and co-workers?

 
(reading response #3)