How to Get Company Staff Using Social Media

Like Us on Facebook or Google Thanks

Do you work for a company where social media is used frequently by colleagues to organize, advertise, and enhance the work at hand in a positive manner? Or has a system been installed that just sort of flopped and never took off either because people didn’t like the idea of change or the novelty just wore off before its potential was realized?

Many people are of the opinion that if a business installs social media tools (Web / Intranet) that staff will naturally start using it. However, these people fail to see that getting people to use social media tools requires a significant change in management effort. In fact, installing the tools in the easy part — getting people to use them is the challenge. Without a change management plan, there is a very good chance that any social media initiative will never get far off the ground.

So what does the change management plan need to include?

Executive-level sponsorship: Make sure any executives are on-board with the initiative and promoting the tools through conversation and active participation.

Communication plan: Getting employees to buy-in to Web 2.0 requires a significant amount of communication. Utilize any mediums available to promote the tools and the benefits they bring to an organization.

Engaging content: Conversations should be relevant to employees and should draw them into the online community.

Governance model: Social media tools require some sort of governance model both at the strategic and operation levels.

Policy: Employees need to know the rules for using the social media tools. A social media policy should explicitly define what employees can and cannot do within the environment.

Getting your company’s staff to start using social media likely isn’t something that will happen overnight. Don’t let a slow takeoff completely derail your efforts — keep it a positive experience and reward those who take initiative to use the system, and it will catch on. Have patience!

Tags: publicity

Do you know how your brand is being used on social networking sites

Like Us on Facebook or Google Thanks

Image via CrunchBase

KnowEm was developed to assist everyone – from individuals to Fortune 500 companies – in discovering where their names, brands, or trademarked terms are available (or stolen) on Social Media networks. KnowEm will not only help you secure your name across the vast social media landscape but we can also show you how to contact each site in order to have the name released and returned to you.
To date the KnowEm team has helped to reserve over 100,000 profiles and reported back to some of our clients over 20,000 issues of squatting and misrepresentation of a brand, username or trademarked term. This is all done with local employees in New Jersey; we are proud to be a company fully staffed in the United States with absolutely no dependance on outsourcing.
Since April of 2009 KnowEm has been tracking and monitoring hundreds of social media networks populated mostly with user-generated content. Our database of these sites is updated daily as new sites are released and our staff reviews them for quality. We track multiple metrics on these sites to determine which networks are gaining (or losing) traction in the social media landscape. By using and storing these metrics we watch for patterns and spikes in traffic and popularity.
KnowEm also constantly updates and adds new sites to our vast database of social sites. The next Facebook, Twitter or MySpace is already out there or could be coming soon – do you know which one it will be? KnowEm offers a subscription service (Brand Protection Program) to ensure that you and your brand will not have to worry about it. As new sites emerge we will make sure that your flag is already planted and you will not have to worry about dealing with a squatter or someone who is misrepresenting your social media identity.