Last week we attended the webinar ‘Using AI and Internal Social Media for Dialogue’, hosted by the Internal Communication Research Hub (ICRH). Hosted by Kevin Ruck, the panel featured Vibeke Thøis Madsen, author of Employees and Internal Social Media, and Jonas Bladt Hansen, Co-founder & Facilitator of Next Level IC. With two experts and lots of attendees firing off questions in the chat it was a lively session.
Strategic organisational listening
Internal social media is a key arena for intimate listening –a core theme of the webinar. To strategically listen, you need a forum where barriers are low, and people can communicate freely with each other. This gives invaluable insight into your organisation; what’s working, what’s not and what people need.
The case study put to us was from Jyske Bank. They had a feed called ‘The word is free’ right on their intranet that functioned similarly to Reddit. Immediately available on the homepage, it invites everyone to interact, making communication and co-workers visible.
Threads continue to exist historically, so people can scroll through, look up questions, and see old answers – creating a hive-mind of company information. Of course, its important to remind people that info may be outdated and direct them to official sources for policy, HR, etc.
Other examples from attendees included closed Facebook groups (safety concerns noted!) and Viva Engage for free conversations.
Internal social media – how it can be of benefit
The speakers highlighted that internal social media isn’t just for organisations to listen to employees (vertical listening), it’s also where employees can listen to employees (horizontal listening).
ICRH’s research identified four key listening types between employees:
- Confirmatory listening – employees agreeing with each other over
- Responsive listening – employees helping out each other with advice, resources or support.
- Challenging listening – employees disagreeing and debating
- No listening – as it says on the tin just no interaction at all.
Where AI joins the fray
AI’s use here? Making companies reactive. By using AI to measure and inform strategic listening, you get real-time insight into what your people are feeling, thinking and doing.
It can also reveal shortfalls. For example, resources people struggle to find (if questions keep recurring in comments), problems with sites or processes, or deeper issues like confusion around strategy or company identity.
You can use AI for sentiment analysis, and logging, tracking and analysing trends in the content to inform your comms. This helps stop problems before they become systemically ingrained or nip them in the bud before they start to undermine the business.
The governance question
Most attendees were keen to launch internal social media but shared one concern. Governance. How do you control what people say? How can you even begin to moderate this? And what if usage spirals?
The panellists’ answer was that you’d be surprised by how well these channels self-govern. People self-censor on organisational channels, and in their experience, this works an overwhelming percentage of the time – so the social media may not need as much attention as you suspect.
The takeaway was, in sum, don’t let fear stop you from implementing a great tool.
