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Indosat Ooredoo

Converting Like And Comment Into Engagement Communication In The Company

How long have you spent in a day to scroll down your social media online? 5-10 minutes? Or 30 minutes max? Then think again. “Global Digital Reports 2020” showed us that the average daily time spent with social media is 2 hours 24 minutes. I thought I would never be that too long to spend my time checking out what other people are doing through their social media. Knowing this fact, it was one of our considerations to use internal social media as one of our communication and engagement channel in Indosat Ooredoo. We need to find a new form of communication in a more “fun” way so that all employees feel the need the check out the news, corporate events, and other corporate activities. We also encourage the employees to share their daily activities, thoughts, even communicate their opinion and feedback; especially in this pandemic situation which the urge to stay connected and “we’re in this together” become stronger.

However, we still need to count that the employees might think: “Do I really want to share my life with my peers, my team, or even my boss? Don’t I have enough this long working hours with them by meeting them online for daily meeting and update? Can I have more time alone outside the work? Why would I need additional social media in my life?” These came up when we launch our internal social media. Another homework for the Culture Engagement area is to groom the WIIFM (what’s in it for me). Since we believe that social media has the advantage of FUN, speed, and user friendly, I might highlight “fun” here because we need to kill the boredom of sitting all day long facing your laptop to do the work. Another one is the speed of cascading the information from top management. This is what we experienced with more than 2000 employees across Indonesia, consisting of islands with three different time zones.

Learning from “social media” users’ behavior, we need to put strategy to engage our audiences who are our employees. Firstly, we defined our pillars to shape our content and activities, which are Corporate Events, Learning, Reward and Recognition, and Community Engagement. The main challenge to achieve such engagement in internal social media is actually to shape the digital behavior of our employees. In the beginning, shifting the communication line from email to an internal social media platform had to be thought through. Additional guidelines might be needed to set the tone (including dos and don’ts, to regulate the traffic of communication lines, to determine the PIC who will act as an editor for some channels, and of course, the monitoring team who responsible for the internal social media engagement number analysis.

The next thing is knowing that our employees are our main audience. Even though many news and updates are top-down communication, we need to realize employees’ needs and interests play an important part in the engagement. You will be pleased to see conversations that happen on social media. We learned that a “giveaway” contest could boost up the engagement through the roof. But this is not a permanent solution to use all the time. Collaboration with the brand communication team will do the favor to create valuable and proper content. One thing for sure, the direct participation from the Chief and Directors level in the platform might give you a surprising result of the engagement.

The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.