SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Social Media — tracks feedback from leading marketers about social media practices and issues.
Last week’s poll question: Is your company using social media for internal communication?
No, and my company does not plan to use social media internally 49.62%
Yes — my company uses commercially available social media tools internally 18.05%
Yes — my company uses custom social media tools internally 16.54%
Not yet, but we plan to use it internally in the future 15.79%
Social media has done so much to improve the way companies communicate with their customers, so it comes as a surprise that almost half of the respondents in our poll said their business has no intention of using social media for internal communication. Whether it’s because they are pleased with traditional methods of internal communication or are reluctant to introduce social media tools into the work environment, many companies have chosen to relegate social media to the area of public communication.
Of the 34.59% of those who said they are using social media internally, slightly less than half have created their own social media tools for communication between employees, while the rest take advantage of commercially available channels.
The remaining 15.79% said they plan to eventually use social media internally, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
If you use social media internally, what tools do you use? If you don’t plan to use social media in this way, why not?
Twitter
Facebook
Linkedin
RSS
I think corporations large and small are figuring this stuff out. It's easy for a one-man-band to tweet, blog, and facebook because there are fewer decision makers. Internally, we have the system built but don't really know what we are talking about. We have our day jobs and quite frankly the idea that you are not anonymous makes for less than candid posts and therefore no one is really doing it honestly. While we KNOW we need to do social media, we are all over the place and trying to pull the various efforts into one coordinated affair. This is pretty difficult as a large corporation (85K employees).