Communication problems are common, especially in the enterprise. They can also be detrimental to the success of an endeavor. Thanks to some social media technologies, we have more options to improve corporate communication, reduce needless meetings, save time and ultimately improve the bottom line.
I recently calculated the ROI of improving employee efficiency (by streamlining communications via their intranet site) for a large pharmaceutical client that I work with. The numbers speak for themselves; saving employees a moderate amount of time each week can save millions of dollars.
The ROI of Efficiency
Improved Communication Through Social Media
Using some basic social media technologies—RSS, tagging, blogging and microblogging—I have created an example of how companies can limit the meetings and increase efficiency while improving corporate communication. This case study uses open, reliable and free services to demonstrate how agencies may share knowledge with clients. This is meant to be a demonstration, and to provide ideas. If you deal with confidential and proprietary material, there are other tools available with additional security and privacy features to meet your needs.
Sharing Information
A Project Blog can provide an excellent means of collecting and sharing important project information. When meetings are necessary, rather than dumping meeting notes into yet another Word document that no one will read, post the notes into the project blog. Allow people to comment on the blog posts to add feedback, ask questions and get clarification. Project blogs don’t just have to be relegated to meeting notes. Post ideas, ask questions, embed a video of the most recent presentation, post images and mp3s, upload wireframes and process flows. If done correctly, the blog will become the official (interactive) record of the project.
Microblogging & Tagging is another way to provide teams and clients with quick, up-to-the-minute updates on project status. Services like Twitter, Identi.ca, Yammer and Present.ly allow users to post brief status messages. These services play well with handheld devices, text messaging and many have desktop applications to eliminate the need for users to open a web browser.
Manually tagging these status messages by adding, #name-of-tag to a post can create custom RSS feeds that can be subscribed to through any RSS feed reader.
Social Bookmarking is another way to share content and ideas with team members and clients. Nearly every day, I come across interesting websites, articles, blog posts and applications while perusing the web. I often save and share bookmarked content with my network on delicious. Since sharing requires a delicious account and admission into my network, an easier way to share content is through tagging and RSS.
Choose a unique tag to add to items that you would like to share with clients (for example, share-clientname). Clients can then subscribe to the RSS feed of that specific tag through delicious and receive an updated list of websites that you’d like to share through their RSS reader.
Aggregating Content - The Project Dashboard
My homepage and RSS aggregator of choice is the iGoogle homepage. It can also be used as a project dashboard capable of pulling in the RSS feeds of the three applications I described above. I quickly threw together an example that aggregates the RSS feeds of the project blog, the tagged Twitter feed and tagged delicious bookmarks. Feel free to add this tab to your iGoogle and customize it to meet your needs.
Imagine how quickly an internal team member or client can look at this dynamic page and get up-to-speed on the latest information for any initiative. I guarantee that using a few social media applications and technologies, your organization can have one less meeting and begin working more efficiently.
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