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Giving internal visibility to social media

Written by James Robertson, published September 22, 2009

Categorised under: Enterprise 2.0, Intranets

Last night I met up in Geneva with Ernst Decsey, the intranet leader at UNHCR. Some years back we did a fairly big IA project as part of their global intranet redevelopment, and it was great to see how far things have come since then.

I found one part of their new intranet to be very interesting…

UNHCR has a big presence on social media platforms, such as Facebook. This has sparked some early exploration of how similar platforms could be established within the organisation.

More immediately, a “Communities” page has been created on the intranet, that desbribes all the official UNHCR presences on sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Very simple, but it sends a clear message internally that these spaces are valuable and useful.

I think many organisation should have an intranet page like this. What do you think?

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2 Comments:

  1. Andrew Wright commented on September 23rd, 2009

    Hi James – Yes I agree. I think the intranet can act as a gateway to these types of applications, providing a meaningful context around what they are and when, why and how they should be used within a business context. Imagine if all of your staff are talking about your goods and/or services on Twitter using a well planned and co-ordinated approach…

    In fact I believe the intranet can act as a gateway to not only social media type web sites, but a multitude of other web sites and applications as well that can be very useful to the business.

    I often wonder why organisations spend time and money reinventing the wheel for ‘internal use only’ when there are already applications out there that do pretty much the same thing. For example, a popular internal application on an intranet is a trading board when employees can buy and sell things to other employees… why not simply provide a link to ebay instead?

  2. Carolyn Douglas commented on September 24th, 2009

    Hi James. I love the idea of Communities on the intranet and that UNHCR is using it to communicate their social media initiatives to employees. Community pages are a great way to start motivating employees into thinking in terms of community and collaboration on the intranet. We have several clients who have used our department page tool to created multiple “sub sites” for community pages, customer pages, product pages. They have added blogs, forums, web links, documents, and training tools to these pages and have had a lot of success with it.

    Thanks for the opportunity to respond!

    Carolyn Douglas
    @carolyndouglas