Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

When Shane Atchison took the job of CEO at Possible Worldwide in April, he needed a way to get in sync with 1,100 people across 32 offices.

 

...How do you build a sense of community when you’ve got people from Poland and Budapest and Moscow connecting with people in Cincinnati or Seattle? “You can’t fly everyone around and say, let’s be friends," says Atchison....

The corporate intranet was okay for sharing templates and forms but terrible for sharing knowledge. Atchison figured he could kill both problems with a social network. Not Facebook, not LinkedIn, not Tumblr or National Field, but a brand new one, built specifically for them....

 

CoLab's Four Main Features

The three main parts--library, people directory, and social--wound up becoming four, with the “social” component comprising two separate features. Now, the four main features of CoLab look like this:

Pulse (a curated home page featuring internal posts and status updates)Perspectives (a full social feed of posts and status updates)People (a company directory complete with social profiles)Library (a knowledge sharing network)...

In my book, Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, PR Practice #2 is the Internal Collaboration Generator.

 

This practice focuses on the communications professional who appreciates how social media collaboration starts on the inside of the organization. Because social media moves across the organization, it’s imperative for you work more closely with your own department, as well as with other departments including Advertising, Marketing, Web, IT, HR, Legal, Sales, etc. The Internal Collaboration Generator knows it’s time to break down the silos for greater internal sharing and effective communication, which begins on the inside of the company and then goes outward to the public....