I have just got back from the Simply Communicate summit on internal communications where the theme was using social media for employee engagement. There were some wonderful case histories of how to apply social media to your intranet  from the likes of Euan Semple, Richard Dennison from BT and Neil Atkinson from Unilever. One of the most interesting but, in some ways counterintuitive, messages common to them all was “don’t over-engineer your first social media applications. Give the users something simple to get them started and then develop and adjust what you are doing on the basis of their feedback and what they find most useful.”  I don’t know about you, but I find this advice from some of the leading practitioners very encouraging. We are developing our new intranet at Ashgate at the moment so I’ll feed this suggestion into the development team. (Euan Semple is one of the author contributors to the Gower Handbook of Internal Communication).

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