Communicating to Employees with Digital Signage in a New Era

In today’s digital environment, companies are increasingly leveraging social media as a new way to reach customers more effectively and to spread news of their activities more rapidly. Currently, 70% of organizations around the world use social media for internal communication, brand promotion, and talent recruitment.

The ubiquitous use of social media has also brought new challenges to today’s workplace. One of these is the apparent addiction that the Millennial generation has to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Critics are arguing that unregulated usage of social media can negatively impact productivities, not to mention safety issues for on-the-go employees.

Not discounting the benefits of social media, it is very important for companies to figure out ways for employees to stay ‘positively’ engaged and eliminate the unwanted distractions.

Having centralized social media display within a company’s communal space may be the answer. The term ‘Digital Social Wall’ is not new, but its inherent benefits may go BEYOND the benefit of sharing ‘likes’ or ‘tweets’.

Here are 5 immediate benefits that digital social wall can offer:

1. Getting your emloyees involved in customer service

In market driven companies, employees’ social media is allowing them to stay current with market trends and issues important to consumers as well as the general public. Real-time sales activity data and customer satisfaction data presented with visually pleasing elements (a traditional digital signage feature) can now invite tweets, hashtags, and likes to go along with them.

2. Collectively communicate brand messaging without concern

One major benefit of social media is the free word-of-mouth marketing. Many companies are already engaging customers through their own dedicated Facebook or Instagram pages. Although they recognize the benefits of having crowd-sourced content from employees as part of their brand reinforcement, most are reluctant to include them due to governance and compliance. A publicly displayed screen can now include positive feedbacks and can effectively deter negative messaging without complicated third party software for filtering.

3. Increase morale and recognize top talent

Retaining top talent has always been a major focus for most organizations. Study have shown that people they are more willing to stay at a company if it has a positive culture of encouragement. Employers can capitalize on this by having employees create company events or employee recognition pages on LinkedIn or Facebook, and feature them on digital displays. Employees can now have a sense of pride that their success is not only being ‘shared’, but is being advertised.

4. Creating strong bonds with co-workers on all levels

It is widely known that social media can also help to establish strong bonds among workers by providing them with the ability to better understand those with whom they are working with. In larger organizations, co-workers can easily miss each other because they may not be part of a group connection. Deploying digital displays with larger viewing area can attract a much wider audience by featuring compelling introductions of a co-worker or a new hire who otherwise you would not be aware.

5. Beyond social media

This may be more obvious than the previous 4, but a digital screen can function beyond a social media display by incorporating multimedia content such as promotional videos, digital menu board, announcements, and digital posters. Interlaced between social media postings and driven by predictive analytics, these traditional content can finally become much more relevant and engaging by displaying to the right group of employees at their ‘Moment-of-Mention’

Digital displays powered by social media can be a highly effective and engaging communication channel for the workplace. But it’s a long-term commitment that requires care and feeding, both from a content and technology point of view. The key to making this a reality is to find a reliable vendor that offers the right social media content management tool and affordable hardware.

Author Mark Shi will be presenting a free on-floor workshop at CorpComm Expo 2015 entitled, “Social and Beyond – Communicating to Employees with Digital Signage in a New Era,” on Thursday, October 1st from 12:15-12:45pm at the Georgia World Congress Center. For more information about CorpComm Expo, or to register for this or any other educational seminar or workshop and learn more about digital communications technologies and strategies visit the CorpComm Expo website.

If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!