Social intranet features at Wells Fargo
by Guy van Leemput
January 9, 2012
Tags: intranet, social business
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Organizations are increasingly deploying a variety of social tools and features on their enterprise intranet. Advocates claim that a social intranet will stimulate internal collaboration, increase employee engagement and ultimately contribute to the bottom line.
In practice, many of you are probably still struggling to clearly define some of the industry buzzwords and translate them into measurable objectives that are meaningful for your organization. Many companies are also trying to get a grip on the rapidly changing space of social software vendors, unsure whether or not to invest in some shiny, brand new social business platform.
The typical questions that arise in this context are:
- How do I measure collaboration or engagement in a meaningful way?
- How do I build a business case for introducing social features? What are the hidden costs, and what are the unexpected benefits?
- Which social features should I prioritize? Should I launch discussion forums first, or introduce commenting and rating of corporate news articles, or maybe implement a microblogging solution?
Social functionality: the experience at Wells Fargo
Many of these questions will be discussed on the intranet conference track on Thursday May 10th, where a number of senior practitioners will share their projects and insights. Nathan Bricklin, SVP and Head of Social Strategy at Wells Fargo, is one of the key speakers on the track, with a compelling case about adding social features to the internal communications mix. He will give some concrete examples of the type of social functionality that his team introduced, how this led to very different levels of user participation, and what the end results were.
Nathan has been with Wells Fargo for over 20 years. He currently leads Social Strategy for its wholesale division, where he is responsible for developing strategies to use social business processes and social media tools. His objectives are to
- Advance internal collaboration
- Reduce operating costs
- Accelerate innovation
Nathan (@socialbrick) is also very active on Twitter, where he often shares great stories related to social networks and enterprise 2.0 topics.