Social Media Use to Enhance Internal Communication

Social Media and Internal Business Communication

Organizations are awakening to the value of social media to enhance internal communications.Kaplan and Haenlein (2010)defined social media as “group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (p. 61). We support their definition because it emphasizes that any user of social media can be a content creator and can distribute to a network of users, which we believe is the key feature of social media that is bringing about the profound changes in the nature of business communication. (The termWeb 2.0does not refer to a specific technological upgrade but a series of changes to the Web that allows any user to be a creator and distribute through a network.) Email is generally not considered to be a form of social media because it allows for mass communication rather than mass collaboration (Bradley, 2010). While email does provide a vehicle for any user to distribute to a wide audience, audience members are not connected to one another within a network, preventing mass collaboration.

According toMcKinsey (2013), the most frequently used tool was videoconferencing (60%), followed by social networking (53%), collaborative document editing (42%), blogs (43%), video sharing (41%), RSS (29%), Wikis (26%), microblogging (25%), and podcasts (25%). While some companies are using publically available social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, to enhance internal communication, larger companies with the capital are turning to Social Enterprise Systems or social media platforms specifically designed for organizational internal communication. Unless specified otherwise, the termsocial mediais used herein to refer to publically available social media platforms and social enterprise systems. Social Enterprise Systems provide many of the features offered by publically available social media channels; however, features are integrated onto a singular platform that is owned by the organization, which ensures privacy of proprietary company documents.

There are many factors that make social media more superior communication channels for organizations than previous channel options. First, social media facilitates communication among a large group of individuals dispersed across vast distances. While social media cannot replace face-to-face communication, often it is not feasible to meet in person in our growingly international business environment (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). The increased ease and speed of image and video sharing means that any member of the group can distribute messages with high media richness to a large audience, making social media the “next best thing” when face-to-face meeting is not possible (Lewandowski, Rosenberg, Parks, & Siegel, 2011). Second, social media provides flexibility for synchronous or asynchronous communication depending on the need (e.g., video conferencing or video messaging,Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Third, most social media platforms offer features that allow users to store and retrieve information with greater ease than email or traditional written documents (Qualman, 2013). Fourth, virtual groups can be easily assembled and disassembled depending on the organizational needs. For example, virtual groups can be constructed to include an entire organization and stakeholders, intra- and interorganizational communities with common interests but loosely tied relationships (e.g., supply chain), or smaller work teams with a clear purpose and established set of goals (Muller et al., 2012).

For large organizations, the ability to create virtual groups can have profound implications on communication speed and message reach. For example, top-down communication is enhanced as a CEO has the means of directly communicating with each employee. While ideally CEO-to-employee communication would be face to face, this is not feasible in large organizations. Video streaming of live town halls with the CEO fielding questions with a Twitter-like streaming of employee questions provides a more personalized and meaningful exchange than the CEO distributing a form letter to the entire workforce. It may be difficult for a CEO to respond to messages from every employee, but social media platforms can include “comment posting and voting” features such as those provided by Reddit. With these features, any employee can post a suggestion or comment on topics such as unrecognized cost savings measures or customers’ reactions to a new product or service launch. Other employees “vote” as to whether they agree with the comment, allowing the most widely held ideas throughout an organization to rise to the top. Leadership can then focus on the most highly voted comments.

Cross-lateral communication can be enhanced with these virtual communities, particularly in large organizations (Bradley & McDonald, 2011). Often employees’ knowledge, experience, and talent are underutilized because they are lost when a workforce is dispersed over functional areas, departments, and the globe. Many of the challenges faced at a departmental level, where corporate objectives are executed, could be solved with information or talent held by employees who reside in a different area of the company. While top management does serve as a conduit among corporate divisions, they would soon become overloaded if they were expected to serve as knowledge brokers among divisions. Thus, valuable information lies dormant at the lower levels of the hierarchy. Virtual communities comprised of employees who hold common interests, but are separated from each other because of distance or departmental silos, can form virtual communities that facilitate the sharing of information and ideas.

The business value of enhanced communication afforded by social media is considerable and far-reaching across business functional areas (Bradley & McDonald, 2011). Increased efficiency and a decrease in redundancy can be achieved with the bridging of silos (Leistner, 2012). Social media used internally has led to improved innovation through new product ideas and faster time to market (Kenly & Poston, 2011). Team collaboration and project management activities are enhanced with social media as team members are able to provide status updates in a Twitter-like manner or with news feeds (Remidez & Jones, 2012). Social media can facilitate communication, collaboration, and cooperation across supply chains through the distribution of information regarding shipment updates or potential distribution disruptions (O’Leary, 2012).

It is also important to note that, currently, most social media initiatives, particularly those that are not strategically cultivated, fail to produce a return on investment (Bradley & McDonald, 2011). Low adaption of social media among employees or poor return on investment has not been due to technological challenges (Bradley & McDonald, 2011). Instead, challenges tend to be “people problems” that IT departments are ill equipped to address. As noted by Curtis Conley, the Community Architect for Kellogg, the line “build it and they will come” from the 1989 movieField of Dreamsunfortunately does not hold true for social media (Social Media & Business Communication Class Presentation, October 29, 2013).

The human elements that impede organizations from realizing the benefits of social media occur at the individual, community, and broader organizational level. In terms of individual employees, there can be a wide range of digital literacy among a workforce, or at least a reluctance of employees to try new communication channels. Thus, some employees may not know how to use social media platforms, or may be reluctant to try new forms of technology.

At a community level, it takes active cultivation to build a virtual community. Having a “critical mass” of employees routinely using a social media platform is essential for its success. The value of social media is derived from the collective contributions of individual users (Bradley & McDonald, 2011); however, potential new users are reluctant to join without seeing the value beforehand. Creating a critical mass of users of a virtual community requires cultivation by social media specialists, whose primary responsibility is the development and oversight of social media use within the organization. Social media specialists may be well versed in the technological inner workings of the social media platforms, but their real expertise is in understanding how to create virtual social movements.

On an organizational level, there needs to be support by leadership to ensure that there is adequate funding and resources to support infrastructure and personnel (Bradley & McDonald, 2011). Leadership involvement is also required to facilitate the bridging of silos based on regional or department divisions. Moreover, leadership is instrumental in creating a collaborative organizational culture that encourages proactive involvement on the part of employees; a high level of engagement is a necessary component of successful social media endeavors as value is generated through collective sharing from individual users.

As noted byGreenwald (2010),Meredith (2012), and other business communication scholars, the opportunity for our discipline to provide groundbreaking theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical contributions is tremendous. Social media has dramatically changed communication patterns among the population at large, and such transformations are beginning to take place within organizations. The study of business information technology has advanced our understanding of how social networking platforms can dramatically change the flow of information in the organizational context. However, there is now a tremendous need for communication scholars to apply our understanding of communicative processes to help organizations address the human element that currently impedes their ability to leverage this new tool.

Pedagogical Objectives

We designed the course at the Ross School of Business based on the notion that change is the new constant in the world of social media. Innovation in digital technology has been occurring at a rapid pace as new devices, social media platforms, and phone apps enter, rise, and disappear from the market. Thus, the following learning objectives guided the course:

It is imperative that we train students not only on the current use of social media in organizations, but just as importantly, that we prepare them to recognize and respond to changes they will face in 2, 5, or 10 years from now. They are unlikely to enter the workforce with a detailed “how-to” manual on internal social media use because such a manual has yet to be written. In fact, such a manual would become outdated before it could be written, published, and distributed. Indeed, we have found as educators that many of our junior and senior undergraduate students have already had internships where they wereresponsiblefor designing and overseeing the content of the organization’s presence on a social media site, such as Twitter or Facebook. Many students have shared with us experiences where they were unsure how to handle a business communication challenge, or worse, learned of their errors after being reprimanded. Indeed, hearing of such experiences among our students was one of the main motivating factors behind the creation of this course; it was clear that today’s students need a better understanding of how to use social media as a business communication tool.

Recognizing that it is essential for students to know how to adapt to new communication tools and challenges, we identified three primary skills 21st-century business communication students need: (a) the ability to assess organizational communication needs, (b) the ability to recognize the underlying communication utility of any social media tool (or any communication tool for that matter), and (c) the ability to identify an effective way of using the tool to solve the communication challenge. With this in mind, we chose the Multidisciplinary Action Project (MAP) pedagogical approach that has been pioneered and used at the Ross School of Business for more than 20 years in their MBA programs (Rynes & Bartunek, 2013). The objective of MAP is to connect a small working group of students with an organization facing a real business challenge. Students work on challenging business projects with the ambiguity of real organizational situations. These projects require students to use ideas learned in the classroom to better conceptualize actual business challenges and formulate feasible, actionable business solutions. We found the MAP pedagogical method ideal for our class because the approach requires students to apply their understanding of the communication utility of social media tools in an effort to solve complex communication challenges. Moreover, the social media projects require students to use core business communication principles as they consider different social media solutions. In the first half of the course students receive an overview of the key principles and the background information they need to execute the projects. During the second half, students focus exclusively on their projects. While students do need close monitoring (and possibly redirecting) throughout the progression of their projects, the true value of the exercise is for them to wrestle with the ambiguity of a project with no prescribed answers. Grading of projects is based on the students’ ability to find feasible, actionable solutions while accommodating the companies’ financial, operational, and workforce constraints.

The course can be modified to fit the intellectual and interpersonal maturity levels of either BBA or MBA students. While the concepts presented for the two courses are similar, the MBA course involves a greater level of sophistication in terms of the reading materials, class discussion, and the quality of submitted work. Initially the BBA course was designed to present case studies of internal social media challenges to students rather than actually working directly with companies. However, this approach was quickly modified at the beginning of the first semester that the course was offered because most of the BBA students had already had internships working with companies on social media projects. While the majority of these projects focused on external business communication, the BBA students’ work experiences suggested that they would be able to meet the challenges of the real projects rather than case studies. Indeed, completion of the projects during the initial year the course was offered indicated that working directly with companies on actual challenges provided a better educational tool for BBA students and provided considerable benefits to the organizations. Students learned a great deal about the broader organizational dynamics/politics and obtained quick, first-hand feedback as to why their initial solutions would fail within a complex, real-world business setting. Likewise, organizations benefitted greatly from the BBA students’ projects. These younger students appeared to have a more intuitive sense than the MBA students on the true value of a social media tool and tended to generate solutions that were more novel, innovative, and often more efficient than their older counterparts. It is quite possible that the BBA students, without a preconceived notion of standard business operational procedures and associated communicative patterns, considered a communication pattern that best maximized the utility of a social media tool and then considered the challenges of working the new approach into an existing organizational structure. Regardless, we have found to date that organizations have been very receptive to the recommendations provided by BBA students.

Course Description

The course is broken down into two sections, with the first half requiring students to master core concepts in the areas of business communication and social media channels and the second half requiring students to apply these concepts to solve a communication challenge faced by an actual organization.

Part 1: Core Concepts in Business Communication and Social Media

Following a class that introduces students to the course, we provide an overview of key business communication principles that will likely remain constant even as new social media options enter the picture. Such concepts include but are not limited to: devising an initial communication objective, establishing credibility, adapting communication to fit the audience, adapting a communication style to fit the objective, considering the cultural context (country, region, organization, ethnic groups, etc.), and writing in a direct and concise manner. While many students have been introduced to these concepts in previous business communication courses, an overview provides nonbusiness students enrolled in the course with the fundamentals of business communication while providing a review for business students. Having a solid understanding of business communication objectives, students are better able to evaluate the business utility of new social media channels. This foundation is particularly critical for undergraduate students who may be knowledgeable of the personal use of social media platforms, but less familiar with the use of these tools within a business setting.

Following the review of key business communication concepts, the course provides an overview of current social media options. Contemporary adolescents and young adults have been described as digital natives with an intuitive sense of social media technology (Prensky, 2001), yet such statements can be misleading. While there is a higher percentage of this age group using social networking sites than other age groups (Madden et al., 2013), not all students are familiar with the wealth of social media options available and the numerous ways in which they can be applied in the business setting. Our experience in the classroom suggests that a significant number of undergraduate and graduate students are unfamiliar with many social media platforms, but are particularly reluctant to disclose this information because they are expected to be knowledgeable in this area.

To structure course material, social media options were grouped according to functional capabilities (seeTable 1), which were loosely based on social media categories devised byKaplan and Haenlein (2010). As the use of Social Enterprise Systems has become more widespread since Kaplan and Haenlein’s article, we added them as a separate category. Students were assigned to work in groups of 4 to 6 students to research and present to the class on one of the social media categories. Presentations covered (a) description of the social media, (b) most popular platforms that offered the function and their histories, (c) organizational “best practices” in the use of the function to address internal communication, and (d) challenges and risks associated with organizational use of the technology. As a separate assignment, students worked in small groups to research and create “how-to” videos that detailed how to operate the social media platforms most commonly used within organizations. These videos were distributed among the class members to ensure that all students had at least a basic understanding on how to access and use these tools.

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Table 1.

Social Media Topics Covered in the Course.

Core concepts	Topics
Contemporary Social Media Options	Social Networks (e.g., Facebook)
	Microblogging/Blogging (e.g., Twitter)
	Video Content Communities (e.g., YouTube)
	Image Content Communities (e.g., Pinterest)
	Group Collaboration Tools (e.g., GoogleDocs)
	Social Enterprise Systems (e.g., Yammer)
Uses of Social Media by Functional Area	Increased Efficiency in Supply Chain
	Increased Knowledge Sharing in Consulting
	Increased Innovation in Research & Development
	Improved Organizational Alignment
	Improved Collaboration & Productivity Within Working Groups
	Enhanced Employee Engagement (Organization Wide)
	Facilitated Organizational Cultural Changes (Organization Wide)

We should note two challenges associated with compiling and teaching the course material on social media. Currently, technology companies are vying to become the “one-stop shop” for all digital needs, resulting in considerable overlap in functions. For example, Google, originally known for its search engine, now provides social networking, document sharing, file sharing, and video conferencing, among other tools. LinkedIn, the professional networking site, now has a news-feed feature. Thus, the distinctions among social media platforms are evaporating and very soonKaplan and Haenlein’s (2010)categories will be outdated. With these constant and rapid changes, course instructors will need to annually update content on the latest social media options and organizational applications.

Relatedly, the second challenge associated with teaching this course is the lack of available up-to-date readings from peer-reviewed sources. Until there is a significant change in the peer review process, this challenge is likely to continue. The online manuscript submission and review process has certainly sped up the process; however, manuscript preparation (on the part of the writer) and evaluation (on the part of the reviewer) takes time. Thus far, we have based class readings on online, non-peer-reviewed journals in the area of technology and business (e.g., Mashable, TechCrunch) and reports written by business consulting firms (e.g., Gartner, McKinsey). Given the issue of source credibility, it is important to discuss during class time how students can be critical readers of information obtained from non-peer-reviewed sources. To address this in our classes, we have discussed how white papers from technology companies offering Social Enterprise Systems may not blatantly lie about their products, but may not include less flattering information. For example, technology companies providing singular success cases may be failing to mention the challenges and failures of other companies using the same platforms. Indeed, students were encouraged to conduct first-hand research by contacting technology companies directly and asking them pointed questions about their Social Enterprise Systems. Some of the students’ presentations included video recordings of these first-hand interviews with tech company representatives. Follow-up class discussions focused on the distinction between the content included in white papers versus the content obtained through pointed interview questions.

Conclusion

The way in which communication occurs within organizations is changing dramatically and quickly. Advances in digital technology have afforded us a plethora of channel options that not only are changing when and how we communicate, but are also changing the nature of social relationships and power dynamics within social groups. While such changes are most evident with external business communication, they are quickly taking root with internal business communication. Organizations are beginning to see the tremendous potential of social media to improve organizational efficiency, cohesion, and collaboration. The fact that these new tools are able to help employees work faster and better—the pinnacle of any successful business endeavor—means that it is likely that these recent trends are here to stay.

It is imperative that business communication scholars and educators recognize these changes and address them within the curriculum. Currently, students are faced with business challenges involving social media that are not being addressed in the classroom. Students may be knowledgeable about the use of social media in their personal lives, but we cannot assume that they know how to use it wisely and effectively in the business setting.

The course described in this article addresses the growing demand within our field to expand our repertoire of knowledge and skills to include social media communication. It adds to previous course offerings pertaining to social media use with corporate communication, branding, and marketing. Moreover, the knowledge and experiences gained through this course can increase the marketability of students as they enter the labor force, given the overwhelming demand by businesses for recent graduates who know how to integrate social media communication with sound business communication practices.