5 of the best Internal Communications tools for business

Here are a quick list of the 5 internal communications tools that are currently gathering momentum which you need to watch out for in the social media space.

 

Yammer – I have experience working with a number of companies on the Yammer platform. It is a very effective tool for internal communications if managed correctly. I have seen some companies that did not manage the platform and the tool underwent a hype cycle inevitably dying away. The reason for this is that by default comment made by users are posted in the common area of your companies Yammer community. In larger more diverse businesses the noise generated by conversation in this central area can become noisy and can turn off new users. It is essential to create internal groups or external networking groups and to herd conversations into these more specialist spaces. There are a number of techniques required to develop meaningful and worthwhile engagement on Yammer. Yammer recently were awarded a prize from Forrester for their activities in Deloitte Australia. Deloitte in the UK have started using the paid service also. I went to a Yammer event recently where a number of other Yammer clients were extolling the virtues of using the platform. Among these customers were Shell, ACCA, and Lexis Nexis. They all committed a lot of time and effort into generating momentum within their organisations. The Yammer team have put a lot of time into developing mobile and desktop applications to make the cloud based platform more accessible. The major disadvantage of the tool when compared to the likes of Jive and Telligent is that it is not a complete solution. It helps reduce email usage and facilitates online discussion and file sharing but it does not allow users to create blogs or provide persistent spaces for project specific information etc. It can be used in conjunction with SharePoint to be a more powerful tool but is not a complete platform. Forrester agree with this stance and as a result categorize Yammer is a different field of tools to Telligent and Jive.

 

Chatter – Salesfore tool supported by some significant industry partners such as Accenture who are recommending the platform. It is based on the same business model as Yammer i.e. employees can join the company network without any knowledge or permission from the companies management/leadership. It has a very similar look and feel to Yammer with a few slight differences. They integrate in Google documents and gadgets and allow users to set up "customer account" and "project" pages as well as standard groups. It looks like an interesting offering. I haven't worked with any company that is using this tool but I will be taking a more detailed look at this over the next couple of weeks. I'd love to hear from anybody who has had experiences building and developing a community on this platform.

 

Jive – Both Gartner and Forrester have backed Jive as the best in their space (enterprise social platforms). They are applying for IPO at the moment, which will be a first for a company in this space. The big differentiator between enterprise social platforms and Yammer/Chatter/Groupsite is that they have a full suite of capabilities and provide a lot of additional support features for activities such as onboarding and CoP group. With Chatter and Yammer there is a limited amount of integration between internal systems when compared to Jive and Telligent. The ability to quickly and easily change group pages content and look and feel within Jive is superior. Jive have acquired a company that allows Jive to integrate with your office suite of tools allowing users to view colleagues social activities on Twitter/Jive/Facebook etc. when in Outlook. This increases the quantity of communications channels for users to communicate and it provides the user with more information about the person they want to communicate with. For anybody with privacy concerns, the information displayed about you can be limited based on how you configure your privacy settings and who you allow to connect with your personal social media accounts. This is definitely worth a look for any company considering an investment in internal communications. An interesting review here from a blogger on infoworld about Jive's Clearspace 2.0 product.

 

Telligent Enterprise – Another heavy hitter in this space and analyst favourite (Forrester). Founded by the ex Microsoft.Net development guru/founder. This is a platform that integrates very well with existing enterprise platforms e.g. Sharepoint, Salesforce CRM etc. As with Jive there are some significant up front costs in terms of licensing but the functionality in terms of security, integration and customization justifies the price tag for larger corporate communities. Similarly to Jive this platform can be used to create powerful internal, external facing and completely external communities. Telligent boasts some influential clients e.g. Dell, Microsoft, Investec etc. It is worth considering once you have your requirements clear in your head. Telligent in the U.S. have a delivery team to build the space as well as provide the perpetual user/server licenses. In the UK however it will be necessary to source an external delivery team to build your Telligent community. Telligent have a number of preferred vendors here in the UK also. Please feel free to contact me with any questions regarding Telligent.

 

Groupsite – NRG have implemented this platform and there are some good testimonials on their site. Accenture have also provided their seal of approval. Seems like a very tidy solution for internal teaming and discussion. Worth a look.

 

There are several more but these would be a good flavour of available options. Let me know if you’d like to have a deeper discussion or would like me to carry out a more detailed summary of the platforms.  

 

Twitter: @HannonKieran

Email: kieran.hannon@esocialmedia.co.uk