How a strong Internal Communications platform would enhance Social Media for your company

Recently I have come across a very insightful article on Social Media for Human Resource or for that matter Social media for any other industry called  "Internal Communications and Talent Acquisition/Recruitment Should be Better Friends"

 An Excerpt from that article says,

"Companies that will have the greatest success leveraging social media for recruiting will be ones that start inside, where the leadership actively encourages/guides their current employees to connect internally and externally using social media (… or at the very least avert their eyes and don’t block social networks). Employees should be the most qualified, the most credible, and the best source of information about your company culture, the employment experience and why someone would want to work for you."

Before a company gets into social media it is very important for the company to have an internal communications platform to socialize, interact and be informed about what’s happening in the company. Especially if we look at a medium sized company and upwards, an internal socializing tool will be very useful for a company to know about what kind of social media activity is happening in the company.

If this is not done and the company gets into social media, the presence of the company on social media could be in bits and pieces but not as one voice of the company (which is very important in social media) and in the case of a Human Resource company, it is even more important because once HR companies do social recruiting on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter it is very important that employees are constantly updated internally on what kind of social media activity is happening pertaining to the company. So that they would have a better idea of which employee is doing what activity and approaching whom. This will be something like a social media aggregator and also a platform where employees can share their views on this social media activity.

This also helps companies in monitoring  the social media activity of the employees of the company  and  if needed based on this a social media policy can also be developed which is becoming increasingly important.

Certain tools like Yammer are being  used by a few companies in social media for internal communication purposes but the problem with yammer is all the information shared on such platforms go to their servers which again might be risky for any company though there is a strong privacy policy.May be an open source micro blogging platform will do which I am trying to figure out.

What are your thoughts?

Do you have any idea of an internal communications platform like this?

Let me know