Internal social media

Social media is here to stay. You don’t have to embrace it now, but if your future is in the business world you might as well.

Executives acknowledge the importance of incorporating social media into the strategic plan for companies externally, and it’s going to be equally important as an internal communication and collaboration tool. Tomorrow’s business leaders, as well as tomorrow’s customers are already logged in, posting and sharing information.

"It's not really a choice of if [corporations] want to take advantage of it [social media] or not," said Anders Gronstedt, president of Gronstedt Group Inc., a firm that has specialized in corporate learning for the last 14 years. "It's here - and the choice is whether they want to unleash it or whether they want to try and stop the inevitable."

According to an Associated Press story on Sunday, August 28, 2011, “the Pew Internet & Life Project found that, of U.S. adults who use the Internet, nearly two-thirds use social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.” Even baby boomers, like me, are up 12 percentage points from just one year ago! That’s a huge jump. Remember five years ago when nobody even heard of Twitter (200 million active users), and Facebook (600 million active users) was something for the kids to do? How about that iPhone you can’t live without? Yeah, it’s barely more than four years old – it was born on June 29, 2007.

Some of us remember when email was introduced into the workplace, and the response then was similar to the resistance some folks are having toward social networks. The telephone was also similarly “embraced.” The hard truth is that social networks are going to be an integral part of communication – they already are for some!

A cool advantage with internal social media is that you can get used to it at your own pace. And it doesn’t have to happen in front of the “www.” So our mistakes, while probably still embarrassing, don’t have to be out there for the world to see.

If your company is implementing an internal social network, get on board early, embrace the opportunity to connect with your coworkers, and learn how to use it.

You can do it now or you can do it later, but you are going to have to do it eventually.