Employees Staying Away From Internal Corporate Social Networks

jfruh (300774) writes As social networks proliferated in the early '10s, so did the idea of a corporate social network — a Facebook-like community on an intranet where employees could interact. Unfortunately, corporate users are staying away in droves, perceiving the systems as one more in-box they'd have to take care of and getting their social-networking fix from Facebook and the like. From what I've seen of these internal networks, another good reason is that they're not as good as the full-time social networks are, and offer access only to a small universe of particpants anyhow. They're like a central-casting "rock band" in '80s movies — they come off as conspicuously aping the real thing.

Just make it simple

[beermad]

When I worked for British Telecom, we had nice simple internal Usenet newsgroups. Some specific to particular business-related areas (like programming), others hobby-based (cycling, swimming, etc.) and some just for general chit-chat. No need for any expensive social-networking websites or anything like that, just a simple Usenet server buried in a data centre. It used to be a great way to get to know colleagues all over Britain, as well as a terrific resource when you needed help getting something working.

Re:The problem is obvious

[Bengie]

Around here, being sociable is called being a team player. The CEO and other board members repeatedly tell us how valuable the friendliness of our company is. They've also mentioned in the past that because people know each-other and communicate a lot, efficiency goes up when it comes to customer care because there are questions that the standard scripts cannot answer, and that takes knowing whom to ask. A bureaucratic process is inefficient.

Re:besides that

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The idea of social networks is to spy on you. To collect as much information about you and use it in some way, often to make money. The whole "social" thing is only relevant as a marketing term. They might as well call them spying networks. Did you sleep the last 10 years?

Waste of time

[CaptainOfSpray]

...(1) the only contributors are employees with time on their hands, who tend to be the drones. Those employees who actually know someting useful to you are too busy to waste time with crap like this
(2) the only employees who will tell you anything at all are ones you have actually met face to face - otherwise you are not a real person, and they don't trust you, no matter what you say.

Been there, done this with a multinational corp.