The Breakfast Club!

Wow! What a great experience it was to present at last Tuesday’s Social Media Club of DC monthly breakfast. The audience was amazing, seemed enthralled, and asked many good questions.

My cohorts, Mike Kohn, Erin Orr and I, spoke about collaborative cross-departmental work in order to produce cohesive digital campaigns and successful social media initiatives.

Mike and I both work for a large architecture and engineering firm called SmithGroup. He’s in HR while I’m in marketing and PR. Together, we collaborate daily on our fledgeling social media program that was launched in early 2010. Small firm Fox Architects is very fortunate to have Erin as its Director of Marketing. She is a social media dynamo who has used Facebook and Twitter to really catapult her firm into one of the industry’s most well known new media brands.

There is a mostly unseen interdependence between HR and marketing with regard to social media. Employees are many times our firms’ best ambassadors and love to promote their places of work. But these tools are so new, staff many times aren’t clear on proper protocol for utilizing them; should I identify myself and/or employer in my blog? Is it ok to post status updates on Facebook about my workplace? How can we use Twitter to become knowledge leaders in our industry?

To answer some of these questions, Mike, Erin and I pointed to the establishment of simple employee guidelines, goals, and training for staff at our firms. These address the challenge of keeping internal staff engaged and active with our firms social media platforms in a responsible, yet still fun, way.

How are you using social media at your office? Are departments collaborating?