If you’ve been pondering whether, or how, to get your business involved in social media, a good way to evaluate the concept is to use social media for internal information exchanges and get used to some of the tools and applications. The familiar ones used externally, such as Twitter, have internal counterparts. Yammer is Twitter-like, but only works for members within your internet domain (i.e., only users who have email accounts in your business). Like Twitter, Yammer allows for short messages of 140 characters or less.
You can create internal networks similar to Facebook (i.e., Jive, Community Server), and use them to share information on market trends and the competition or to collaborate on cross-functional projects such as product development or product launches.
Internal blogs can be used to submit concepts for peer review. Unlike Blogger, Wordpress or Typepad which are available and readable by anyone that finds the URL (including search engines!), Ning readership and feedback can be limited to the fixed community within your organization.
Get in and get your feet wet, and see if using these social media tools doesn’t suggest ideas to you about how you can use them or their counterparts outside of your organization to share information with customers and prospects!
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Tags: Blogs, Communities, social networks