Enterprise Social Networks Case Study – Nestlé created Facebook styled intranet NestChatter

Nestlé has more than 330,00 employees worldwide and manages some 2,000 brands like Nescafe instant coffee, Kit Kat, Maggie, Nespresso coffee, Pure Life bottled water, etc. and each day sells 1.2 billion items. Nestle has a very active presence on various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, etc. The company successfully manages 1,500 pieces of content being posted every day on social media, 50 percent of all Nespresso capsules being sold online, 180 million Facebook “likes” (with growth of 5-7 percent every month) and 200,000 employees on an internal social media platform. The company has more than 170 million fans across over 750 brand pages on Facebook alone. Company planned to embrace the social media both externally for customer engagement and internally for employee engagement. For social media strategy to be successful a well-planned and developed content strategy is a must. Content developed by professional media agencies, content generated by customers and also the content generated by employees is essential for any social media strategy to work. Enterprise Social Networking software developed by IBM, Saleforce.com, etc. play an essential role as the companies can create their own Facebook styled intranets within the company for active employee engagements.

Nestlé embraced social media inside the organization successfully and it implemented one of the largest internal social networks with more than 200,000 users using enterprise social network platform developed by Salesforce.com’s Chatter platform. Facebook styled intranet which Nestlé created is called NestChatter that significantly increased the level of sharing and collaboration by employees in the company located worldwide. Employee communities were formed with an agenda to promote online listening best practices and another strategy “Winning with Mobile” that is mobile apps and mobile friendly sites. Company went further and also used it to recruit talent with relationship-building skills and such employees were identified based on the way they collaborated and participated on the intranet platforms. Nestlé has been on focusing on finding ways to encourage and spread virally digital communication among employees across the globe. Employees are asked to blog and are scored on likes, viral share and post clicks. There is an internal version of YouTube and Facebook (similar to Chatter) with employee-generated content.

NestChatter streamlines the passions and experience of employees to create content, and use it as internal currency and also encourages creating new ideas and recognizing innovative staff members. The intranet too also improved the efficiency of employees through sharing information, collaborating on projects across geographical regions and time zones, efficiency of marketing teams that using the information created new innovative campaigns for various products and also helped in testing and interacting with customers in innovating new products and improve existing products. Active engagement by customers has reduced significantly the time to market and product failures too. Another case that significantly highlights the need for Facebook styled intranets within the organization that not only promotes employee engagement but also generates content that is very critical component of social media strategy.