As ‘evangelists’ of social networks for internal communication, it gets really difficult to convince leaders of successful organizations that through social media tools their companies can achieve levels of participation and ‘flow’ that companies rarely achieve.

Let’s see it this way: IT efforts of understanding basic human behaviors have been generally poor; and traditional internal communication teams haven’t move from the position in which they act as their job is to be messengers from the center of the organization to the workers around it. Ok! Companies have to move along from this conceptions towards the understanding of the benefits of social media tools and the uses of social networking between employees. As traditional internal communication isn’t good enough to really ‘connect’ people inside a corporation: there’s a new approach from a networked perspective in which the conversation within the organization is stimulated but not fully controlled.

Tim O’Reilly talks about “applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them”; we can find ‘collective intelligence’ hidden somewhere between his words. Enterprises can develop this applications as social networks full of social media tools and get involved with their people knowledge. One of the biggest challenges is to get people engaged to this new ways of working, but it’s happening. Once the network’s flow is big enough collaboration will grow exponentially, at that point you will start seeing a rich array of information, ideas, practices and data generated by the workforce of the company, the ones with the knowledge. The main goal is to reach some of the network effects and participation you can easilly see on the public sites inside enterprises and organizations networks.

But, what can we reach with this developments? Not only the share of knowledge between teams, groups and even employees that doesn’t know each others; but also an increase on the communication between coworkers which can help the productivity of the enterprise. Also brainstorming and project research will occur faster, the company will take part on everyday conversations, there will be real-time mass collaboration, the innovation processes will be open, the ‘official messages’ will exist as two-way conversations, the dependency on email and meetings will reduce significantly, and the risk of duplication of efforts will reduce by knowing what’s happening around each others. Some of this improvements will result on talents attraction and retention, a more engaged and committed workforce, and a new brand culture, among other benefits.

As you can see, there are potential cost savings through using smart resources in everyday’s work. Yet more important is the potential increase on the company’s productivity by using social media tools.

Lucila.Campos@condiminds.com