Week 14: Employee/Internal Communications
Companies are integrating blogging as a way to strengthen weak ties and network internally. Employees are becoming more connected and involved than ever before thanks to all type of social media tools. An interesting trend of corporate blogging has swept over many large corporations including, but not limited to Dell, Zappos, and Coca-Cola. Although corporate blogging can be used as a tool to outreach to others publics rather than just employees, that does not take away their impact on employee networking. On the shoe website Zappos they have 13 corporate blogs that talk about what’s going within the walls of the company and provide silly videos for employee entertainment. Pictures from employee events and news about partenerships are posted to keep everyone informed and intrigued. This type of communication overall increases employee loyalty and collaboration efforts.
Dell also uses blogging as a tool. They have 9 official internal blogs just for employee networking and to send out internal updates. They also have hundreds more team blogs created outside of the official nine. Another type of blogging they actively use for internal communications is microblogging. They have a twitter account called “TeamDell” that was created specifically to follow employees on the Dell Team and unite them in social media interaction. Employees have created counts with their name inserted in @____atdell to distinguish their identity. Dell is not the first company to hop on this trend and they will definitely not be the last. Employees can now be connected personally and porfessionally through social media.