Social media are web-based or mobile-based platforms that allow users to interact with each other simultaneously and instantaneously. These revolutionary technologies have freed users from restrictions imposed by location, time or even status, to come together. Users and participants can pass along the resulting collective interactions to other interest groups, thereby eliciting other people and groups to join in the same discussions. Freed from conventional limitations and boundaries, social media rapidly spreads information to other online communities.
Typically, social media services are free and accessible to Internet users, most of whom access the content either at home or on their mobile devices. This free and constant access to information has allowed users to become less inhibited in networking with strangers or even in engaging in unfamiliar topics. Online interactive communication can potentially attract a range of different interest groups from varying backgrounds, all of whom can contribute to a discussion on the same webpage, which might lead to the production of new ideas.
The net result of this important communications revolution is that social media have provided channels through which organizations, interest groups, and individuals can come together and develop relationships with each other in ways that previous forms of communication did not allow for. Social media provide networking opportunities for users in which people develop and maintain relationships that are often founded upon or maintained through shared common interests. Thus, social media has been used as a major means through which organizations, interest groups, and individuals advertise or market their products, services or ideas.
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have grown in prominence and importance, to the point where they are now the three leading social media sites through which organizations and interest groups market services and products, or share perspectives, ideas and information. These social media platforms offer organizations, interest groups, and individuals the ability to reach their target audiences either on their stationary or laptop computers or via their mobile devices. In terms of their frequency of use, among all websites on the Internet, Facebook ranks sixth, Twitter ranks eighth, and LinkedIn ranks tenth. Facebook functions in more than 75 languages; Twitter functions in more than 25 languages; and LinkedIn in more than twenty languages.
Offering testament to their breadth and popularity, as of May 2012, Facebook has more 900 million active users, Twitter has 140 million, and LinkedIn has 161 million. To access organization or individual sites on Facebook or LinkedIn, users must register their own individual Facebook or LinkedIn accounts before they can interact with other account holders. Users can describe their companies, organizations, backgrounds, interests, and future goals on their own pages and share them with other users. In addition to introducing backgrounds, users can also create their own online networks on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn by adding other users as connections for developing, maintaining, and retaining relationships. In order to expand their influence, users can post their updates on their own pages so as to elicit others to comment; the resultant communications can be displayed by friends of friends or other connections, thereby creating ever-growing circles of influence.
Social media provide businesses with an excellent tool for reaching internal and external constituents in a rapid and cost-effective manner, thus allowing them to expand their business influence efficiently. They use social media for, “marketing, media relations, internal communications, investor relations, corporate social responsibility, public affairs, and crisis communication.” Since this paper focuses on how social media have impacted human resource management and on its working functions and relationships both inside and outside their organizational communities, from here, I will briefly lay out a few successful cases of how organizations use social media to build better working relationships for employers, employees, and the public within and outside their businesses.
According to SHRM Social Media in the Workplace Survey, corporations have committed 67% of their social media resources to marketing, 44% to human resources, and 38% to public relations (some activities can cross more than one domain, i.e. they can be involved in marketing as well as public relations). As for external outreach, Facebook comprises 45%, LinkedIn 38%, and Twitter 28%, of external communications that take the form of social media.
Pfizer is the world’s largest pharmaceutical company and it has many locations and thousands of employees worldwide. Due to the myriad and diverse cultures, locations, and local organizational structures in which the company operates, it naturally encounters challenges in the course of making clear to its international workforce the spirit, expectations and details of its core values and missions. Before the incorporation of social media for internal uses, the company felt that employees had some confusion about the company’s overall visions and future standings. To unify its worldwide employees with the company’s core visions, it has designed and developed internal social media, known as “Pfizerpedia” to engage employees in the details of the company’s decision-making processes. Pfizerpedia is a Wiki of Pfizer containing the company’s critical information that can enable worldwide employee-participants to understand the company’s unified mission to refocus employee workforces onto the company’s central missions.
Roughly three-fourths of American organizations require their recruiters to undertake online searches and screenings of potential job candidates in order to understand better their background for recruitment purposes. Indeed, more than 80% of employers report that candidates’ online reputations can affect individual candidate hiring outcomes. Social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, provide popular online locations through which human resource workers search for potential candidates and check backgrounds for job openings. The idea of using social media as an integral part of the recruitment process grows out of the assumption that candidate-generated online content can provide a powerful indicator of employee fitness and compatibility with company cultures and interests.
To this end, human resource offices and managers should incorporate social media into all aspects of their functions, particularly with respect to engaging employees within the workplace and when recruiting candidates for job openings. The potential uses of social media within the realm of human resource management is indeed limitless. It can be used as a tool for corporate restructuring, human capital management, corporate cultural development, and a broad array of other similar things. One of the unique aspects of social media are the degree to which they do not fall victim to time boundaries and other kinds of limitations inherent in standard communication. As such, it would seem only intuitive that social media can be adapted to other functions of human resource management.
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