Via the Plaid Summer Tour:

“Think that social media is just for your customers? One of the many things that we learned while visiting the Sprint World Headquarters in Kansas City was how they’re using social media to communicate with their employees.

If you’ve got thousands and thousands of employees spread across the world, chances are you’re going to need something better than an employee newsletter. Sprint has found that some of the same tools they use to communicate with their customers have also been super effective at spreading the word with their employees.

Sprint employees have internal blogs, communities and other tools to learn about what’s happening, what’s working, what’s popping and what people are chatting about. Social tools happen to be an effective way to get these messages out quickly.”

I can tell you from personal experience that this works on a much smaller scale as well… my company (JoesWork) has nearly 300 employees in 19 Eastern-US cities. I found out about two years into my tenure at JoesWork that a monthly 6-page newsletter (designed properly) was taking up a full week of my time each month. So, I did what any technologically-savvy person would do- I built a blog. This allows me to publish in minutes what previously took me a week to produce (but hey, we all know the benefits of blogs). This also allows me to operate more efficiently and take on other tasks with the time I just saved myself.

Not only has JoesWork’s blog become an information center for my coworkers, it has been presented to potential financiers of our company, as well as insurance underwriters, customers, and developers who wish to engage in business with us.

• The employees get to see what’s happening in other cities via videos, pictures, and brief blog entries.
• The insurance underwriters get to read our weekly company-wide safety topic/article (and our safety-first culture shines through).
• The developers and financiers get to read about our company, the services we provide, and have a better idea of our culture than they would if the were handed a printed-out newsletter.
• Finally, the blog, our twitter account, and our website create a sense of virtual community for our customers.

The bottom line? The blog (social media) is an absolutely invaluable resource for any company in business today.