Social Media Globetrotter

As a company, large or small, before you begin using social media to engage with your customers or clients you need to first make sure that your team understands social media internally.  So what can you do internally to help your co-workers get involved with social media?  Well aside from the usual presentations, meetings, and training sessions, you can do a few clever things to help get your team involved.

1. Have employees create a work twitter account where they can post their accomplishments, make sure that the employees are following each other and use twitter as a type of tracking solution.
2. If employees want to find out what direction the company is headed have them follow your blog or twitter account, don’t give away the information unless people read it on your site/twitter.
3. Have your employees create a Squidoo lens for the top 5 best things about their job
4. Post company event photos on flickr and tell of the employees about it
5. Host special internal contests or incentives to get involved with social media, i.e. you can announce prize or contest winners on your twitter account and the only way employees can win is if they are following your updates
6. Each week have your employees submit 1 new company idea for a product or service (via twitter or a blog comment)
7. If your company uses a type of newsletter or announcement system try creating a separate blog specifically for this and tell your employees about it
8. Create an internal wiki page so that employees can share resources with each other
9. Sign your employees up for an online collaboration tool such as Teamworkpm
10. Tell them if they don’t all learn how to use social media in a week they are fired! (kidding)

You can’t actually force people to get excited about social media so you have to show them how it can make their life easier.  Try to think of createive and clever ways to get your team involved.  Once people dip their toe in the watter it becomes a lot easier to get them hooked.

What other tips would you recommend to help companies adopt social media internally?

Thanks for reading