This week I moderated another webinar in the Social Media Today Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Social Organization: What Are Best Practices for Internal Collaboration? The webinar included a superb panel: Sabrina Stoffregen, who is Intel's Director of Ambassadors and Corporate Initiative Marketing team; Dion Hinchcliffe, who is Dachis Group's Chief Strategy Officer; and Jeffrey Ward, who is Deloitte's Senior Manager of Digital Marketing.
Dion Hinchcliffe, from Dachis Group, started off the webinar with some stats on internal collaboration. One stat that really caught my attention and was also re-tweeted quite a bit was what Dion called "the 50-foot collaboration rule," which states that workers are not likely to collaborate very often if they are more than 50 feet apart, even with traditional electronic aids such as telephone, e-mail, and remote video. He went on to talk about "fully networked" companies and how they outperform their non-networked competitors - making a strong case for socially enabled collaborative teams.
Sabrina Stoffregen, from Intel, then gave us some examples of how internal collaboration works for Intel and what tools they have launched to help engage and network their employee base. She cited the National Business Research Institute with a quote: "Engaged employees produce two times as much work product in the time as unengaged employees." She went on to talk about how that works with Intel's Ambassador program. Intel Ambassadors are "the voices of our unified brand story that reveals to the world what we stand for and why they should care."
Jeffrey Ward, from Deloitte, then gave us his example of how Deloitte engages their 200,000 professionals globally with the Yammer platform. Launched back in 2011, they now have 93,000 members signed up globally and host regular "yam-jams" to support awareness and further the adoption of the platform. One key takeaway from Jeff was to get your leadership involved and modeling the behavior you want your employees to display -- meaning get them running some yam-jams!
After the presentations were over we had a lively discussion and took questions directly from the audience. If you have ever attended a Social Media Today webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics such as how to get started building an internal collaboration network within your organization, how to build adoption, how to choose the right tools, and more.
If that piqued your interest and you want to hear the replay of this webinar, please check out this link. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another Social Media Today webinar! You can view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.