Plaid Summer Tour: Are you using social media to reach your employees?

Monday, July 27, 2009

Are you using social media to reach your employees?

Think that social media is just for your customers? One of the many things that we learned while visiting the Sprint World Headquarters in Kansas City was how they're using social media to communicate with their employees.

If you've got thousands and thousands of employees spread across the world, chances are you're going to need something better than an employee newsletter. Sprint has found that some of the same tools they use to communicate with their customers have also been super effective at spreading the word with their employees.

Sprint employees have internal blogs, communities and other tools to learn about what's happening, what's working, what's popping and what people are chatting about. Social tools happen to be an effective way to get these messages out quickly.

Sprint's setting the example for large employers and social media. Rather than blocking access to all of the latest social tools, they treat their employees like adults. They understand that employees have a purpose and trust that they'll do their jobs - even with Facebook and Twitter at their fingertips. (When you sell products that utilize these tools, it makes sense to let your employees use them too.)

Internal communications are clearly the next wave in social media for big business. We met with Jason and Jennifer at Sprint and chatted about this and other social media goodness. See it all in the Kansas City wrapup video at PlaidNation.

Labels: kansas city, sprint