Social Networking Behind the Firewall at Microsoft, Best Buy, IBM, and More

Here’s a good write-up from Computer World last week (thanks Mike Gotta) about successful in-house social networks set up at some major companies like Best Buy and Deloitte. Each seems to be home-grown and show parallels to Facebook and to MySpace. These are pretty tech-heavy organizations, so you can’t necessarily expect the same level of uptake in a more conservative industry.  The good news is that Deloitte is making it work with D Street and they are much closer to a traditional business than Best Buy.

Take a look at D Street and see how you can make it work for your company.  Don’t forget that the software powering Facebook is open source.  That means your enterprise IT department could download it and set one up internally today.  This internal Facebook would be free of the usual HR/legal concerns about privileged interaction with people outside of the company.

How can I make social networking happen at my company?
Wired workplace collaboration is a culture shift, not a web app. The corporate intranet is the obvious delivery vector for a tech-heavy company that wants to beef up their internal culture of sharing but don’t get caught up in the latest buzzwords. Your approach has to be multifaceted in order to hook different segments of your workforce.

General Electric has the best success story that I know of in the in-house social network space. Their SupportCentral app has been grown in-house for a decade now and it seems to do a great job of engaging the workforce at multiple levels with opportunities to share and communicate. They’ve got blogs, wikis, and piles of employee-built virtual communities. I’d love a chance to look at this one from the inside.

Great reads on getting organizations involved in knowledge sharing
John Tropea’s “Library Clips” blog (as featured in the blogroll at right) has a solid writeup called “Community Lessons” that covers how he pulled local champions in to help run the collaboration initiative from the inside and how he uses multiple media (blogs, forums, wikis, etc.) to bring in as many contributors as possible. Don’t leave anything on the table when it comes to employee engagement!

Robert Buckman’s excellent 2004 book “Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization” shows how his CEO-driven culture of collaboration kept his company afloat, and you can track the tech changes in 10+ years of progress. It’s never about any one tool.

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