#likeminds - How can organisations take the first steps towards integrating People-to-People?
Good questions being raised by this panel: Do we need to change how we recruit? Do we need to change people’s job descriptions? How will they answer?
**Olivier**: Every organisation has people who want to do this. Management need to understand how it’s going to benefit them in the long-run. Until you get management buy-in, you’re never really going to move forward. It’s always be at arm’s length.
**Benjamin Ellis**: Not a fan of specific social media strategies. Installed a wiki in an organisation where you said anything out of management line, you got into trouble. You need the culture to enable it. Job description: I’ve never seen one that says that you should answer e-mail or letters… We’re moving from a world where you only publish the good stuff to a world where everyone publishes.
**Steve Bridger:** On the other hand, a diktat where everyone must participate is bad. You need to go with the flow.
**Gabrielle Laine-Peters**: Most employers know hat younger people are already on these platforms. Educate before you set guidelines. Social media: they’re tools in a toolbox. It’s about integration and evolution. Find champions in each department
**Olivier**: Lots of social media people are hired because they can blog and know Facebook, but they have no operation experience. Data analysts should not be community managers – totally different skills.
**Gabrielle**: Tweeted that my Moo Cards had a problem – they biked me replacements.
**Andrew Gerrard: **Difficult for big companies to do that.
**Benjamin**: The power has moved from inside the organisation to outside it. It’s a hard time to be a big company. 48 hours to reply to a tweet, while all the boards approve it – you can’t operate like that.
**Steve**: If you try to layer this over a company that’s closed or hierarchical, it won’t work. “the line” isn’t always in the same place – even companies can change their minds on the basis of new informations.
Tools for internal communications hub? Olivier recommends [Yammer](http://www.yammer.com/) [we use that successfully]
Interesting side debate about the problems of government – and, in particular, the clash between internet time (seven times faster) and government time (seven times slower)…
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