How to make employees fall in love with your internal social network

It’s well and good to have internal social tools to exchange knowledge and dig out ideas from those smart-but-shy types.

But an enterprise social network won’t do you much good if it’s populated by digital wallflowers. So how do you engage employees? And where do they like to hang out on your platform?

Maybe employees aren’t so different from executives: They want to see the value in a network before they will carve out time to participate.

While it helps to beat the drum about the benefits of social communication, successful organizations also search for engagement points through the popular elements of their internal social networks.

Deloitte—which provides auditing, consulting and risk management services—takes both a top-down and bottom-up approach to engaging employees on its network, whose members number 79,000 worldwide. Profiles, groups and chats are proving popular.

“Over the past year, there have been efforts large and small to generate interest and awareness,” says Jeffrey Ward, Deloitte’s senior manager in brand, communications and corporate citizenship.