Comments on: Social Media is not Internal Communications

By: russell

russell — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:05:33 +0000

I think you’re right Jeremy and a lot of this is just a semantic difference. I’ll expand on this in a new post though as I think there’s some mileage here.

By: Jeremy Schultz

Jeremy Schultz — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 06:38:20 +0000

In that case, I’d say that the organizations that use the tool–the stakeholders–own it. They should help define governance, and they will be the ones actually defining (and with hope, sharing) the best ways to do it. The beauty of these tools is no one organization can define best practice for another. But we’re probably saying the same things, and just tossing semantics back and forth…. -)

By: Martin Ross

Martin Ross — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:12:02 +0000

This is a category error. Substitute the word “print” for “social media”,and you get “what the post underscores, is that print is not internal comms”. D’uh. Of course print isn’t internal comms, and neither is social media internal comms. Internal comms *uses* print, or social media, or video, or Facebook, as does HR, L&D, Marketing and so on. Social media is just another tool. The challenge (and the opportunity) is deciding what problems are best solved with social media.

By: russell

russell — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:56:51 +0000

IT will own e-mail as a tool, but I don’t think they’re necessarily the best people to define governance or best practice. It’s that that defines ownership in my book…

By: Jeremy Schultz

Jeremy Schultz — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:49:57 +0000

What do you mean by “location” of social media? In my opinion, IT should own the tools, and they should then work with stakeholders across the company to deliver the capabilities that people need. One big stakeholder is employee communications, who should figure out how to use social tools as another channel in their arsenal. A big part of that, I think, is just to show folks how to use it and the value in it, and then get out of their way.