7 Social Media skills for Internal Communications Specialist

Some­thing is chang­ing in Inter­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The 2.0 envi­ron­ment is mod­i­fy­ing the inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions spe­cial­ist pro­file who is mov­ing from the “jour­nal­ist-inside-the-orga­ni­za­tion” role to be a “360-degrees-con­ver­sa­tion” cre­ator. An inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gist should demon­strate that the engage­ment gen­er­at­ed by this new way of doing com­mu­ni­ca­tion in busi­ness could be a strate­gic pil­lar for the com­pa­ny. The new era of the Inter­nal Social Media Strate­gist (ISMS) is arriv­ing. His DNA should com­bine the most unex­pect­ed qualities.

1. Influ­ence capa­bil­i­ty: About 30% of CEOs are in social net­works. It means that this expert is fac­ing an impor­tant chal­lenge of evan­ge­liza­tion in order to con­vince the Gen­er­al Direc­tion about the ben­e­fits of Social Media use in Inter­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. In adit­tion, the influ­ence capa­bil­i­ty will be impor­tant to cre­ate an alliance with IT Team. They would become the 2.0 tech­nol­o­gy solver.

2. Know-it-all: The ISMS should know every last detail of the com­pa­ny and its employ­ees. What is the goal? To be able to iden­ti­fy where is the tal­ent, who are the opin­ion lead­ers, ear­ly adopters and non col­lab­o­ra­tive people.

3. Walk the talk: This pro­fes­sion­al should be an exam­ple of how to live the com­pa­ny val­ues and should be able to trans­mit them to the rest of the team. The use of social media plat­forms allows employ­ees to embrace these prin­ci­ples. If the teams area asks about their def­i­n­i­tion of val­ues, social net­works like Pin­ter­est or Insta­gram can help us with the aim that employ­ees upload pho­tos about their way of liv­ing com­pa­ny values.

4. Mul­ti­me­dia speak­er: To be adept at oral and writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion is an essen­tial skill that the ISMS should have. More­over, he needs to devel­op a mul­ti-for­mat and a mul­ti-chan­nel pro­file that allows him to move eas­i­ly from hyper­me­dia to sto­ry­telling or visu­al thinking.

5. Ana­lyt­i­cal pro­file and Big Data expert: Cur­rent­ly this pro­fes­sion­al has access to a large vol­ume of infor­ma­tion. He should be able to fil­ter, sort and ana­lyze all the Data in order to inter­pret and draw con­clu­sions. This will allow him to devel­op suc­cess­ful­ly a project in the orga­ni­za­tion or to assess the impact of a social tool that has been already implemented.

6. A lit­tle bit geek: To be updat­ed about all tech­nol­o­gy news is essen­tial. He has to be the first one to test any new device, to become an ear­ly adopter both inside and out­side the orga­ni­za­tion in order to be ahead of oth­er users.

7. Cheer­leader soul: It is not enough with the imple­men­ta­tion of col­lab­o­ra­tive tools in the com­pa­ny, the ISMS will have to squeeze them to ensure their con­sol­i­da­tion. He should con­stant­ly encour­age employ­ees to par­tic­i­pate. One way to strength­en the engage­ment could be the cre­ation of a cor­po­rate group on LinkedIn, encour­ag­ing employ­ees to join it and to pro­pose top­ics. That will be impor­tant to rein­force excel­lent behav­iors high­light­ing the best contributions.

The meta­mor­pho­sis that the inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sion­al is liv­ing is a fact. Cre­ator of con­ver­sa­tions, rela­tion­ship builder, com­mu­ni­ty man­ag­er. There are dif­fer­ent ways to denom­i­nate this new pro­fes­sion­al pro­file. But it is clear that the ISMS should be able to cre­ate a net­work of con­trib­u­tors among opin­ion lead­ers, to con­nect inter­nal and exter­nal knowl­edge and, espe­cial­ly, to trans­late the cor­po­rate speech in a 360 degrees con­ver­sa­tion where the employ­ees are key players.

Do you want to con­nect us?