With more than 7 million registered users, no doubt you and/or many of your employees have joined CNN, The New York Times, Oprah Winfrey and even President Obama among the twitterati.
As employers continue to struggle to engage employees in benefits communication, it's hard to ignore the potential for reaching that many people at once. Stay tuned for upcoming reports in EBN July about using Twitter specifically for benefits communication, and EBN August on one global company's success in communicating via tweet.
Meanwhile, though, I thought I'd do my best to make the business case for Twitter, which allows users to post online updates that are 140 characters or less. I know that any tool with "social" in the title doesn't exactly scream out "valuable, viable corporate communications medium."
In my own efforts to leverage Twitter and other social networking tools, I've come against coworkers who have called the new media silly, narcissistic (a hit on Twitter's "What are you doing?" query), boring, a time suck, a fad and, as one particularly skeptical colleague put it, "the mortgage-backed securities of communication."
However, new research from the Aon Consulting reveals that despite employers' belief that Web 2.0 media may detract from productivity, workers — both millennials (born between 1980 and 2000) and nonmillennials — are leveraging the technology to perform their jobs.
For example, 65% of nonmillennials and 72% of millennials report using their company's intranet for their job duties, while 25% of nonmillennials and 38% of millennials utilize text messaging for work purposes.
In addition, 46% of nonmillennials and 48% of millennials used instant messaging as part of their job assignments, while 13% of non-millennials and 20% of millennials belong to job-related social networks. About 8% of non-millennials and 13% of millennials used blogs in a work-related context.
Further, research from fellow consultantcy Watson Wyatt reports that leveraging Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, podcasts, wikis and shared teamsites is key to managing today's information overload and engaging employees. The generation currently entering the workforce has learned to communicate and collaborate using these tools and expects the same "consumer-grade" experience at work.
This can be achieved with corporate tools similar to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube available internally, significantly improving connectivity and employees' experience of the company intranet.
"HR can take a page from the Internet playbook and benefit from the same tools that have driven the unexpected explosion in online productivity and innovation globally," says Michael Rudnick, Watson Wyatt's global intranet and portal leader.
One company that's doing just that is Sydney, Australia-based Janssen-Cilag, which last year implemented an internal version of Twitter, dubbed Jitter.
According to a blog post from Nathan Wallace, the company's associate director of technology, 17% of Janssen-Cilag's employees have posted companywide updates to Jitter. He says the tool "settled into a pattern as our informal news channel. It's used for public congratulations, for sharing links and for short news flashes."
For its efforts, Janssen-Cilag was awarded the "Highly Commended" distinction in the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards.
When implementing a Twitter-esque communication strategy, Wallace offered the following tips to employers:
"People have no idea what Twitter is. People have no idea what microblogging is. Most people don't know what wikis, blogs or social networks are, either. When explaining Jitter, one user was even worried that this meant all the SMS text messages they sent to anyone would now be published on the intranet. These technologies are natural and well-known to people [with technical expertise], but for the vast majority of people in the world they are new, confusing and weird. Remember to design your solutions and train people as though your mum is the key user."
Is your company using Twitter or other social networking tools in benefits communication? If so, what tips would you offer? Would you consider adding such strategies to your overall communications efforts? I look forward to hearing your feedback on this topic and our upcoming articles.
Send letters, queries and story ideas to Editor-in-Chief Kelley Butler at kelley.butler@sourcemedia.com.
