Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When it comes to engaging employees on the journey to enterprise social, getting 75,000 employees or 50% of your staff to actively use one network is about as ambitious as it gets.

Veyronique Vallieres, Internal Communications and Community Manager at ABB, worked a long time on adoption as part of the company's vision to break down internal silos and enable greater collaboration across 100 countries.

"We are one of the global leaders in power and automation technologies providing literally thousands of products and solutions to reduce environmental impact around the world. Being aligned internally as an organisation is not only crucial, it is essential."...

Electronics retailer Best Buy prides itself on its low prices and customer service. Unfortunately, that care didn’t extend to its employees with the closure of 15 stores and 900 employee layoffs in Canada.

 

Like many consumers, I wasn’t surprised to see Best Buy and Future Shop store closures.

 

Analysts expect Best Buy to close another 200 to 250 of its 1,056 US stores in 2013....

Often companies “roll out the new re-branding” to employees. and the marketing team then quickly puts a check mark in the done box and they’re on to the next. Often brand managers focus only on the communications deliverables and not the holistic reality of creating passionate brand ambassadors from within the company.

 

B2B, midsized companies, and especially tech companies are notorious for this painful disconnect. Not many companies are deeper tech than Xilinx. They design and supply programmable electronic systems. For simplicity just think semiconductors. Yet, they are a well branded company, which is unusual for their industry....

When Shane Atchison took the job of CEO at Possible Worldwide in April, he needed a way to get in sync with 1,100 people across 32 offices.

 

...How do you build a sense of community when you’ve got people from Poland and Budapest and Moscow connecting with people in Cincinnati or Seattle? “You can’t fly everyone around and say, let’s be friends," says Atchison....

The corporate intranet was okay for sharing templates and forms but terrible for sharing knowledge. Atchison figured he could kill both problems with a social network. Not Facebook, not LinkedIn, not Tumblr or National Field, but a brand new one, built specifically for them....

 

CoLab's Four Main Features

The three main parts--library, people directory, and social--wound up becoming four, with the “social” component comprising two separate features. Now, the four main features of CoLab look like this:

Pulse (a curated home page featuring internal posts and status updates)Perspectives (a full social feed of posts and status updates)People (a company directory complete with social profiles)Library (a knowledge sharing network)...