This a two in one blog post. The example I am about to share shows both the importance of allowing your employees access to social networking sites and it shows how social networks can be used for internal employee communications.

I have been a long term listener to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson's For Immediate Release podcast and a reoccurring theme on their podcast for years now is how social networks like Facebook could eventually replace/supplement corporate intranets.

While some smaller companies are able to experiment with this, I personally never foresee a time where large enterprises will scrap their intranets. However, I do see the need for enterprises to use social networks as a supplement to their employee communication.

HP has a program called HP Demo Days. The basic gist of the program is that twice a year (After Thanksgiving and Back to School) employees are encouraged to signup and go to local retail locations where they answer customer questions about HP products.

I think this is a great program for a few reasons:

A) It helps HP sell more product during key shopping seasons
B) More importantly it helps HP employees connect with real customers, not filtered through layers of research.

Don't close yourself off to innovation

Jill Weeks is responsible for getting the word out about the program and getting people signed up.  Fortunately HP is not one of those companies that restrict Internet usage at work or blocks social networking sites.  After spending some time on Facebook Jill noticed how targeted the ads were that she was seeing.

It was these targeted ads that got Jill wondering just how specific you could get.  She contacted Facebook and found out that you could indeed get as specific as targeting people by their place of employment.

Internal communications from the outside in

One of the things that interested Jill in using Facebook is the rise in teleworkers. 

"With so many people working remotely from home we're seeing that employees are already using social networks to communicate with fellow employees."

Facebook hadn't tried this anything like this before and expressed some concern to Jill that they couldn't guarantee who saw the ad.  Basically anyone in the US who puts down that they are currently an HP employee will see the ad.  This was of little concern to Jill since the information being shared isn't privileged and the landing page to the ad is a secured signup page.

Building on the campaign, building a community

When I first saw the ad, I contacted Jill about the program (honestly I kind of geeked out about it). I think it's a great use case.  The only recommendation I had for Jill was to build a group page on Facebook and encourage employees to sign up and invite their fellow employees to join.

The results have been modest so far but so has the expense.  Facebook ads are cheep and are pay-per-click. The Facebook group was free and takes minimal time to set up.  The important thing to remember about social media is that the best results are usually realized after the first year.  It usually takes 6-12 months to gain traction and prove that this isn't just a fly by night campaign.

It will be interesting to see the effects of these efforts with each new Demo Days. I'm willing to bet that each year gets progressively better, assuming that HP continues to invest the minimal time and budget into this.