Social Networking Inhouse: Getting Your Intranet Working for You

Many corporations, by their very nature, inhibit idea generation across intercompany borders. IT dreams up innovations in IT, R&D moves forward with the next BIG IDEA behind their own closed doors, the list goes on. But study after study has found that the best ideas come from breaking out of the confines of the “silo approach” and taking active steps to cross-pollinate, letting the ideas bloom.

From the Harvard Business Review:

Social networks, of course, form and evolve organically in organizations. They can foster the serendipitous mixing of talent and ideas that fuels innovation. But after surveying 30 years’ worth of organizational network literature and conducting extensive research at a large IT services firm on how networks influence innovation, we concluded that when left unmanaged, informal networks tend to inhibit innovation more often than they enable it. The very aspects that are beneficial at the exploration phase of innovation may hinder progress at the implementation phase, and vice versa. Thus company executives shouldn’t expect informal, interdivisional networks to spontaneously produce innovations; they must consciously manage the structure of these networks to promote innovation at all its various stages.

What’s interesting about this article is that it talks about social networks when they don’t work. We hear this again and again from clients: we have a company intranet — as though that is a proxy for fantastic intracompany communication. Good communication always takes management and an internal communication is no different.

What do we mean by management? Well it could mean highlighting successes in different departments on a daily basis. It could mean having employee interview each other from different divsions in a monthly podcast. It could mean having a customer success stories from sales, marketing, and R&D. The point is that this is managed communication that someone has to plan out and make happen.

Read the full article here: Link