Peter Wilkinson | Social media consultant | International speaker
Given that most professional people already use external social media to align themselves with jobs and people they feel would enhance and progress their career, it seems only natural that the HR department of a successful company would do the same thing internally. An international social media consultant will recommend that you harness the power of existing sites like LinkedIn to add more flexibility and accuracy to your internal marketing mix.
Because let’s not forget that recruitment is effectively marketing – for candidates rather than customers of course, but it is still marketing. An international social media marketing consultant sees no difference between enthusing employees internally and creating passionate brand evangelists amongst your clients and customers.
So how do you use internal social media to enthuse your workers?
One of the key reasons why social media is used by people in the business world is that they want to feel in command of their own destiny.
The international social media consultant points out that the majority of jobs are historically fallen into – that is, people happen to be in one place at one time and so they end up being recommended for an internal promotion, which they may never have considered nor even want. That’s how it used to happen anyway. With internal social media used properly, the employee starts to feel he or she can map a career through the business – which means less chance of attrition to rival companies too.
An international social media marketing consultant would recommend that you give your employees the chance to join internal social media networks for all the departments and teams in your organisation. An employee should not have to belong to that department or team in order to join its network.
By aligning himself or herself with various internal social networks, an employee is able to do two very important things. First he or she can flag up his or her potential interest in a career move within the company. And second he or she is able to share information with others – both in terms or receiving training and preparing for a move, and in terms of giving training and interviewing potential candidates from other departments.
The international social media consultant would also point out that having employees move around within a company is not necessarily a bad thing. First response to this kind of idea is often that the department being left behind suffers a skill loss. But that employee was going to move anyway – if not internally then externally. The existence of external social business networks confirms that.
So using social media internally allows you to keep the employee rather than lose him or her completely. The skill attrition involved in losing an employee to another company is much worse than the skill attrition suffered in an interdepartmental move. The international social media marketing consultant’s advice: get involved with internal social media and open up your business.
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