100,000 BT Employees Get Their Own Social Network

The UK’s largest telecoms company, BT is reportedly to roll out a custom social network for its 100,000 staff.

Personnel Today reports that the company is to give each employee their own social profile on an internal network designed to make collaborating on projects easier wherever they are. The service, based on Microsoft technology, will allow staff to “be able to see, at a glance, what projects, and even what documents, other members of staff are working on.”

While social media is now reasonably well developed as a marketing tool, its usefulness for internal communications is still in relative infancy. Services like Socialcast make internal comms much easier within companies, although for companies on the scale of BT a custom solution makes much more sense.

As someone who (briefly) worked at BT a few years ago, I can vouch for the mind boggling size of the organisation. Finding someone with the skills required to solve a particular problem across the company’s many divisions was a frustrating experience and it’s great to see that social media is being used to make life easier for BT’s employees. Hopefully it should lead to a quicker, more efficient service for customers too.

[Image credit: PSD]