Who gets to have a workplace social media profile?

Outside of the workplace on social media we follow and interact with brands, government plus organisations. If you have question about going overseas you could tweet @FCOTravel . Have a problem with your Iphone tweet Apple Support.

What do you do inside the workplace running on enterprise social media? From my experience using workplace social media you are following and interacting with individuals not brands. Wait a minute, the workplace does not have brands? Your workplace is the brand.

Inside the workplace you may not have brands but you have staff associations that promote issues that are important. BAME networks, staff LGBT groups and on the service side you have your IT Helpdesk.

These groups using the tools that enterprise social media provide can create a community that is open or closed.

If the workplace interest group can have a community can it as well have it’s own profile on the companies social media newsfeed that is akin to Twitter and Facebook?

In the workplace profiles are set up for individuals. When you join a company your profile is set up as an individual. You get a company email address. This identity goes on to create your internal social media profile. If you could create an email address for your IT Helpdesk which many have then would it be better to create an internal social media profile? The benefits of this are:

Rather than one or two brave IT helpdesk staff braving the companies social media newsfeed answering questions, keeping colleagues updated they could instead work as a team behind a newly created internal social media brand. Collectively the IT Team working behind this brand with a roster in place can respond quickly to work colleagues IT issues.

For users on internal social media they would follow and know that their help desk is on internal social media providing internal customer care. So rather than turn to John or June for help they can turn to this branded internal social media profile instead.

If the case can be made for IT Helpdesk having an internal social media profile what then of staff groups representing the different interest groups in the workplace?

When the Staff Wellbeing group in work has its own internal social media profile the question of attribution arises. If I posted on my company social media newsfeed something unpleasant that offended it is obviously me but if I done the same as the person posting for the Staff Wellbeing Group would we able to find who posted it? Equally posting on internal social media behind a profile created for a staff interest group may embolden that group to be more strident in its internal social media posts. Is this bad in its self? as long as the post does not offend.

On internal workplace social media we use it to interact, listen and learn from our colleagues. How would we feel interacting with a Wellbeing groups internal social media profile? They can work collectively to reply to you behind a profile created for them on internal social media but you as a staff member are effectively on your own. Add to that everything you say is easily attributed to you but in the case of a workplace internal social media profile can we easily attribute? Should a debate get overheated on internal social media with Human Resources having to step in; attribution about who said what and when is important.

We could however using our internal social media contact the IT Helpdesk to ask “can you search through the IT logs and tell me who was logged into the Wellbeing’s internal social media profile on Wednesday between 2.30–3.30 pm ?

Does your workplace allow internal workplace interest groups to have an internal social media profile? What are good use cases; workplace interest groups or the IT Helpdesk?