Welcome to the Melcrum Social Media Newsletter.

As Philippe Borremans, IBM's new media lead in Europe, said in a recent interview “social media isn’t for every company or every employee.”

But if you’re one of the 60% of communications practitioners working on, for example, a corporate blogging program, what sort of participation can you expect from the workforce? Here are some figures from initiatives including those featured in our recent research:

• At IBM, 15,000 employees are registered on Facebook (4% of the workforce).
• At the World Bank during a recent leadership crisis, some 4,000 unique visitors visited the internal blogs (40% of the workforce), leaving 300 comments in 10 days.
• At IBM’s “World Jam” online multimedia brainstorming session in 2001, 50,000 employees participated (14% of the workforce).

What about different social media tools, wikis for example?
ING Group, a financial organization with 113,000 employees, has an organizationwide wiki – to develop and enhance global internal collaboration and knowledge sharing.

The ING wiki was officially launched in October 2006. By March 2007 it had 2,200 registered users (2% of the workforce) and over 900 articles. The initial strategic goals of achieving at least 25 unique contributions per week and 400 unique visitors per day had also been met.

So…?
With a range of percentages from 2%-40%, what constitutes a successful program? Of course, much depends on the time the program has existed. But considering the above and further, more informal research and conversations, if 10-15% of your workforce is involved in any one initiative, it could be considered to be doing very well.

Best regards,

Alex Manchester
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com

This week's Melcrum headlines:

Trouble searching your intranet?
- The Melcrum Blog - 19 July 2007

Is your BlackBerry saving your company money?
- The Hub - 4 July 2007

Favourite web usage tracking software?
- The Communicators' Network - 1 July 2007