Get cozy with IT for social media success

You may think your new high-tech tool is plug-and-play, but before you begin 2.0 communications start talking to your IT team

You’ve got a bang-up idea sure to make your company a thought leader—a communications platform that transmits employees’ ideas straight from their cerebrums to the company intranet. You’ve bought the requisite components—titanium mind-reading helmets, thought-encryption software, an emotional firewall—and now there’s just one hurtle ahead of you: IT.

Someone’s got to install the software and connect the right cables. And let’s not forget about testing the new system. That’s their job, right? Despite a few anticipated bumps, you expect your trusted information technology gurus—those cola-fueled braniacs sequestered away in rooms littered with colored wires and old motherboards—to have your techlepathic new intranet to be up and running in no time.

Not so fast, says Jody Rosner, communications officer for the Legislative Counsel of California. Slow down, says internal communications consultant Nova Newcomer. The pundits agree. When it comes to harvesting relations with your company’s resident techies, the Golden Rule of Communications still applies: You must actually communicate.