Red Sky Vision’s Robin Block says employees should be encouraged to communicate with each other using social media, not email

Social media has permeated our personal lives in ways that has taken many of us by surprise. But are our working lives being revolutionised by the technology to the same extent?

As “Generation Y“, sometimes called the “MTV Generation”, enters the workplace, firms are rethinking the way in which they embrace social media and new technology. To keep ahead of the race, businesses rushed to bring onboard email, followed by instant messaging, in order to offer standard communication tools that their employees had grown up with.

While firms have seized the social networking nettle to broadcast their messages as an external public relations tool, comparatively few have thought about how they can let employees already familiar with the technology start to use it internally for the firm's benefit.

Allow me to elaborate – according to recent figures from internal communication research firm Melcrum, there are a significant number (52 per cent) of internal communicators who suggest that their businesses have failed to implement a social media strategy. Puzzling in many respects, given the familiarity with which most employees demonstrate for technologies such as Twitter, internet forums, and of course Facebook.

What firms should therefore be thinking about is how to implement such technologies onto their internal intranets to encourage staff to network inside the business, share ideas and feedback on company policies – all things that, ultimately, have a tangible benefit to the bottom line.

Internal communicators should be driving this change, encouraging senior level executives to think about the opportunities that social media presents, and selling the idea to the business.

It seems that selling the idea internally is more often than not the stumbling block to incorporating social media into modern business, with 7 per cent of business users admitting that they are unable to find a way to implement social media into their overall marketing strategy.

What this means in practice is that a whole generation of employees are side-stepping the organisation to communicate with clients, colleagues, contractors and their peers.

And while businesses are traditionally quite risk averse when it comes to incorporating technologies, which in the worst-case scenario may represent a reputational issue, today's employees are increasingly seeking more information, and that demand has to be fed. By cutting out social content from the work place, businesses risk demotivating employees and presenting a utilitarian working environment.

In the final analysis, by lobbying their executives to think about the benefits of social media, internal communicators can really look to become new hubs, finding new ways of disseminating innovative content and encouraging businesses to focus on value, not on risk.