Four Innovative Ways to Leverage Social Media Features in a Corporate Setting

By Posted in - Social Media on September 25th, 2014 0 Comments

I recently wrote a blog segment about how to leverage social media features in candidate talent communities, Re-Thinking the Candidate Talent Community Concept. In this segment, I would like to comment on how to leverage social media features for existing employees. Although there are numerous ways to take advantage of these features, I would like to focus on four key areas.

Mentorship

Mentoring relationships can be easily established in a social environment as a special kind of contact. The basic functionality would include the following:

  • Talent community members should be able to identify themselves as mentors or search and find mentors in different specialty areas
  • Mentors would be able to manage their involvement by accepting and rejecting invitations or changing their availability status
  • All interactions would be private exchanges
  • Mentors would be rated based on usefulness and participation

A talent community that supports mentoring relationships would go a long way toward fostering a culture of mentorship where everyone has the potential to become or find a mentor. However, the most obvious application of this functionality in a corporate setting would be to support high potential programs. High potentials could be afforded multiple mentors in key areas for development. They could also become mentors themselves to further develop their coaching skills and demonstrate their ability to develop talent.

Knowledge Capture

With the massive departure of baby boomers from corporate environments, there is considerable concern about c critical knowledge walking out the door with them. Social media features could be used to both capture and access critical organizational knowledge. The basic functionality would include the following:

  • Ability to create specific knowledge areas within the talent community site
  • Ability for members to contribute various forms of content to these areas such as articles, blogs, videos, wiki’s, etc.
  • Ability to browse and access knowledge content by content type
  • Ability to rate the value of each contribution

Custom knowledge areas created in the community may reflect critical skill needed for future success, key strategic initiatives, or core skills for the organization. New employees would be able to quickly digest critical knowledge by accessing the custom knowledge areas and viewing the highest rated contributions. Knowledge would be continually updated and increased through ongoing contributions of community members.

Ideation and Problem-Solving

The creation and shaping of innovative ideas and the solving of major problems facing the organization lend themselves very nicely to social media features. The basic functionality would include the following:

  • Open forums where members could post new ideas and topics
  • Segmented discussion threads by topic
  • Ability to rate the perceived value of ideas or solutions offered

Social media makes it easy to harness the power of the community to spawn innovative thinking and problem-solving. Community forums would allow community members to showcase their creativity and contribute directly to the future success of the organization.

Training Optimization

Most LMS platforms lack a social component which is an important component for maximizing learning. Social media features would allow trainees to exchange insights, ask and answer questions, and share applications with each other. It would also be easy to provide access to members for a variety of other free and fee based learning platforms (including MOOC’s) to expand the online learning content available to them.

Organizations are likely to increasingly use private employee talent communities to improve collaboration and communication as well optimize self-directed learning. OMNIview plans to be a leading provider of such solutions. Contact us to learn more about how we plan to improve the quality and value of employee talent communities.

Patrick Hauenstein, Ph.D.

About Patrick Hauenstein, Ph.D.

Patrick Hauenstein is the President and Chief Science Officer for OMNIview. During his free time Pat likes to cook. He is particularly fond of traditional southern cuisine. Pat is also an animal lover ...
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