Facebook seems to have two distinct uses: giving people of all ages a forum for sharing the minutest details of their lives, and giving brands an opportunity to connect with customers. But are businesses and other enterprises missing a bet by limiting their use of Facebook to customer outreach? If Facebook is one of today’s ultimate communications tools, why not use it to bypass conventional communications? It seems only appropriate as Facebook recently launched its IPO that we look at ways in which this platform can be creatively used to achieve non-sales-and-marketing-related goals. Over the past year I've used Facebook in unconventional ways and have achieved a measure of success in three distinct areas: education, change management, and internal communications. What I discovered was that in each case I could involve people in ways that email simply can’t accomplish.
Education
In my role as a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, I found my students and I suffered from email overload. Emails offered no real way to get immediate feedback on classes, articles, and guest lectures. I visited the campus rarely, and so did my part-time MBA students. I didn’t feel I was getting to know students well enough.
So I went “social.” I set up a Facebook “secret group”—a vastly underutilised feature —and invited my students to join. In a class of about 35, all but three immediately jumped in and the rest followed in a week. Out went the longstanding email mode, and except for some large file sharing, we didn’t miss it.
Facebook blended easily with the entire business of pedagogy. If we wanted to communicate with someone individually, we used Facebook messages. And we found as a group that responses were fast and transparent. We shared interesting articles. I could easily announce guest lectures and assignments, and have the assignments returned to me.
The distance I once felt between the students and me slipped away through this forum. And since the forum is now ‘permanent’ in a manner of speaking, we are still in touch collectively now that the term has ended. It was a first. The students enjoyed it, and except for the fact that searching for relevant threads was an occasional problem, the very high traffic on the site showed the experiment paid off.
Change Management
Could Facebook be used as a communications tool for a large-scale IT consulting engagement? As a partner in a large management consulting firm, that’s what I wondered when we took on a project in Saudi Arabia.
Typically, a change management consultant will use conventional methods to communicate and get project buy-in - with posters, workshops, questionnaires and the like. But in the course of a long project, sustaining interest and energy is difficult, and people invariably lapse into indifference or cynicism if results aren't visible.
With the enthusiastic support of the CEO, we set up an invitation-only platform on Facebook to facilitate easy communication, help draw out opinions among stakeholders, and ensure there was across-the-board buy-in for the plan. After some initial surprise and hesitation, everyone joined in. We posted articles of general interest, celebrated personal and professional milestones, and announced project progress in an informal way.
The result? Our experiment may well be one of the biggest reasons this IT consulting project is succeeding—apart from the technical aspects, of course. From surprise to apprehension to active participation, the innovative use of Facebook for change management gave all concerned a voice in the project and led to better-than-expected results for senior staff.
Internal Communications
People hate the deluge of business email that floods their inboxes. As for the senders, well, how effective do we know those emails are? How can we know people are reading what we send or just hitting the delete key? What do we do about ensuring that people are engaged?
In large global organisations, a dispersed team can become weak in the absence of frequent positive communication. How do you create cohesion among a team of people based in China, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, India, and South Africa? Email just doesn’t do a good enough job, and clearly group meetings aren’t practical.
This is something I had been thinking about in the context of the consulting firm where I'm a practice head. Once again, I set up a secret group on Facebook for internal communications and asked my team of consultants to join in. After some initial surprise, everyone did.
I was particularly confident about this because I had used this technique successfully once before to engage university recruits in the period between their acceptances of an offer to actually joining the firm. But as with any business network, you have to take precautions to make it work. There’s no sharing of confidential information, for example; and the page has to be kept private.
Today, the board hums with posts about articles of interest, individual celebrations, inquiries about housing or weekend excursions, visa questions, and more. Every now and then I do send email notifications to the group, but I’ve come to realize that most people now prefer Facebook, especially for news of sales wins, marriages, birth announcements, training feedback, and more.
Of course, it’s important to understand that a manager can’t delegate administration of this platform downwards. His or her personal visibility in these efforts is important—and that person has to establish and maintain the tone of the interactions so that conversations remain civil and collegial.
I don’t claim that that Facebook is the solution for all communications. Some people will hold out, and there can be concerns about confidentiality and other issues. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, and you may discover that communications problems that have long hounded you in your organisation can dissipate once people feel that have a communal voice in discussing what’s important to them.
Unless you try, you'll never know. But there’s one thing for sure—we now have ways to look at communications challenges that we wouldn’t have dreamed of before.
What’s next? That's up to you.
(The author is Senior Practice Partner, Functional Consulting, for Wipro Consulting Services.)