It’s a really good idea for large companies to take advantage of social media technologies to remove some of the management overhead that just comes naturally with directing a large group the old fashioned way.
One of the most well known tools is a blog. Giving employees a blog they can use internally (or externally) is a good way to get your company out there.
But as we move forward, it’s more and more likely that you’re going to be hiring people who already have their own blog, either on their own hosting or with Wordpress.com or Typepad or one of a hundred other freely available services.
And you can’t make internal communities and blogging mandatory. Groudswell has a good explanation of why it’s a bad idea (with case studies to back it up!).
So the problem going forward is going to be: how do you integrate employees’ personal blogs into an internal network?
I think it would be interesting to see a plug-in for engines like WordPress that would let users specify, for example, a particular category of post to be fed only to a secure intranet area. This way an employee could keep their personal blog, but be able to participate in an internal blogging structure as well.
Blogging is just the tip of the social media iceberg, of course. Who wants to set up a brand new profile when they move to a new company?
I’m interested to see how businesses approach this problem.
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