Feature Articles

One study finds trolling social networking sites is good for employee productivity.

The next finds that it’s a time waster.

The jury is out on whether public social networks add value for your company while they’re adding entertainment for your employees. Outside of blocking their use at work (through the Internet) what can you do? (After all they still have mobile-enabled phones, right?)

The answer is not as far off as the problem. Employees accessing their own profiles on public sites like Facebook and MySpace add little value to you as a company. Distraction possibilities are certainly there as well as complications of how employees should handle manager friend requests and other intra-office social media netiquette.

Suppose there was a solution that provided all of the same interactive features and networking capabilities, but was housed in a secure environment free from spam and privacy-disrupting apps? This network could also allow your employees to connect in ways that would help them both socially and professionally featuring such things as a career center and file libraries. Maybe you could even allow them to reach out to your customers and help them with service issues and/or increase brand loyalty. Until now maybe you’ve only dreamed of a network that you could “own” without paying the $50,000 price tag to design an in-house system.

Although not as talked about as its public cousin, in-house or private social networking software offers you many thing the public sites do not. Private sites provide:

• A site designed around you, with your branding, recognizable to everyone as yours.

• A secure place for employee interaction and engagement.

• A secure location for housing company knowledge, research and information that you want accessible to employees but not available to the masses.

• A place to network professionally, search internal job postings and host professional development groups.

• Tools with which to manage events, seminars, data and e-Commerce; and so much more.

Private social networks can be purchased alone or as part of a content management system. When selecting vendors make sure you are comparing similar systems/software. Some companies even offer connections between your internal networking site and your employees’ external profiles, allowing them to update their status and post to their walls from your secure site. Take a look at what’s out there. You might be surprised just how reasonable and interesting the offerings are.