Greetings my fellow interns! My names Cassie and I am in my final
semester of university at Curtin! I am currently studying Mass Communication’s,
majoring in Public Relations and Web Communications.
What I find most
interesting about my degree is the use of web communication technologies in
terms of change communication and employee satisfaction and training in the
workplace. I also find social media
theorem really interesting in terms of its boundaries and limitations.
Particularly how it applies to developing new ways of communication regardless
of our geographical, time and cultural constraints. I currently work at EB Games where I
have been for the last four years and my internship currently takes place in
the WA head office where I am shadowing
the National Training Manager. But enough about me! Today I am going to
share with you my first enjoyable experience in my internship: developing
best practice guidelines for the use of Facebook as an internal communication tool.
Recently
EB has started to make use of social media tools such as Facebook to better
communicate with their staff. Due to the large demographic of EB Games
employees it is important to use all
forms of communication that different age groups respond best to. And let’s
be honest, we all spend half our life on Facebook, what better way to action
immediate changes than through direct communication with employees? EB make’s
use of private Facebook groups where staff from all levels whether they are
casual or higher can communicate and share knowledge. As the pages have
developed over the last few months different examples of behaviour both good
and bad have emerged. Therefore, as with any new communication tool it has
become apparent that as a company we require some guidelines to refer to in
order to use social media appropriately.
So first
of all we (my mentor & I) set out to find out what people were actually
talking about! What were people actually using the Facebook pages for? What was
the percentage of negative posts versus positive? Was it important for staff to
have predominant control over the page in terms of its development instead of
higher-level management? What we ultimately had to nail down was, what made the Facebook pages tick. Without
going into too much company detail, generally we
found that the larger majority of posts were filled with recognition, funny posts and
positive social behaviours.
However there were key lines that needed to be drawn in terms of the negative
and that’s where we developed a list of do’s and don’ts.
However,
it was not simply enough to show our management audience how we think they
should use the pages, I mean, what make's us the authority in this area? We
needed industry practice evidence to support our theories (all those tutorials
about research and finding evidence actually did pay off ;)). So then it was back to the drawing board…! Researching industry practice was actually really
interesting because social media is still a very new tool in terms of employee
communication in
and outside the workplace and general industry guidelines are still being set.
One
of the main points I took in though was to let your staff create the social
media culture, don’t tell them what they can and cannot post. You need to let
them post funny things and vent about a frustrating day because that is truly
the best way to get the most out of your social media. I had never really
thought about this because as PR students we are taught (I think) to try and
control all situations in order to minimise any potential threats. Therefore my
first instinct was to devise guidelines about minimising negative posts but
then my mentor pointed out, employees need a place to vent and laugh otherwise they
may actually go crazy…So
after devising best industry practice guidelines we need to relate them back to
our main target audience.
At
the end of all the data gathering, research, Excel learning fun and Microsoft Word formatting fails (so many
fails…) we had finally accomplished sufficient guidelines for the best way
to use Facebook as an internal communication tool. So in short, positive
recognition goes a long way, funny pictures do speak a thousand words and the
occasional vent is good for the soul. It all leads back to our own ethical
guidelines really; be honest, have integrity, be trust worthy and above all else
“treat others the way you want to be treated”. Don’t post things you wouldn’t want to read or have
others post about you.
In conclusion, I hope all of your weeks have been
as interesting as mine! I would love to hear how even you yourselves use social
media in your internship or personal work places!
Until Next Time...
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