Using Social Networking To Increase Internal Website Traffic

I have recently been tasked with a very important project at work, ok several, but I’ll stick to this one, at least for now :). I have been asked to find ways to increase employee participation on our company’s internal website. After a bit of research (because that is where I always start), I think I may have found something!

It is a well-known fact that most employees, in any organization, are on some form of social networking platform whether it is Facebook, Twitter, My Space, etc. So, why not use the social networking platform to increase website traffic from our employees?

Using a social networking type of platform, such as Communifire or Ning*, will help to engage employees in several ways:

1. Draw  in employee participation in individual blog forums, friends lists, discussion forums, status updates, etc. (which is what they are already using on other social networking sites).
2. Allow for individual user profiles, commenting, and posting of photos and videos
3. Allow  for document and file sharing
4. Allow  for employees to take polls

This particular social networking platform also allows for management of information, such as:

1. Third  party integration capabilities
2. Multiple  deployment options
3. Multi-level  content moderation
4. Logging  and user tracking

They also offer public forums where customers can communicate with employees, thus possibly reducing dealer call-ins to the call center. The amount of features you would want / use would help determine what package we would want to have. Unless, of courses your IT department could create something like this instead of using a third party vendor.

*Please note that I am not personally endorsing these company’s; they are simply the companies that I found through my research.

Have you found other ways to increase employee usage of your company’s internal website? Please do share!