Page 378 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

FIGURE 24-4:
Wikipedia,
the mother
of all wikis.

The most important way to motivate your employees is to showcase the pulse of
the intranet. Think of it as a Twitter-like pulse, which shows all the intranet-
related activities of a person’s social graph in a streaming list. This streaming list
encourages the employee to return frequently to the intranet and learn how others
are using it. But most important, it encourages the employee to respond to the
activities of others on the intranet. The streaming pulse should include docu-
ments uploaded, comments made, searches conducted, groups joined, discussions
initiated, and the like. It should also include the ability for users to publish status
updates and comment on the updates of others. Practically all the intranet soft-
ware vendors offer this functionality out of the box.

Aiming to destructure

What is often a company’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness, and that
is its organizational structure. A company’s structure enables resources of all
kinds to work harmoniously to enable the company to achieve its objectives.
However, it also means that employees have to be fragmented and divided into
teams and departments that in time have difficulty working and communicating
with each other.

The social intranet helps to break down those organizational barriers. It also
encourages people to make decisions and collaborate free of positional bias.
To encourage collaboration and the natural social influence that usually takes
place, encourage destructuring, which means limiting how your corporate
structure affects the intranet user experience, and build online communities of
employees where people are encouraged to be honest, transparent, and willing to

362 PART 5 Old Marketing Is New Again with SMM