Social Media @ HP – WaterCooler deployed internally

HP’s culture famously known as the “HP Way” focused on innovation, integrity and collaboration, which was a natural match for social media. HP followed the policy of management by walking around which allowed employees share experiences, learn from one another in office, and employees developed their careers through discovery and learning from peers. HP has changed over decades and with the changing technology and emergence of Web 2.0, HP also embraced these technologies and provided various platforms for their employees. HP currently have over 300,000 employees and have more than 350 social media communities, blogging and social media activity has increased by 10 times, and the referrals from social networking sites doubled and company has benefited remarkably due to employees conversing directly with the customers.

HP had been encouraging its employees to blog and they can participate in group or individual blogs on company specific business topics and other topics ranging from photography, personal hobbies, about employee families, IT management to innovation. All the blogs are linked to company website and through blogging HP audiences could join communities with different interests and allowed HP to personalize their brand and connect directly with stakeholders. HP provides requisite training to employees that will represent the company on a social network and employees are provided with guidelines and have a well defined, publicly available, blogging policy. They even have a digital media council, which includes representatives from all business units, that sets the policy for how HP will participate in social networks. HP intranet @hp launched 2006 was another initiative which was a one-stop access to everything from personalized portal access to HR tools and forms, online purchasing, collaborative tools, podcasts and webcasts, and a special ‘newsgram’ Cheater that automatically summarized description of the stories published in a given week and distributed to all HP employees.

WaterCooler is a tool developed by the HP Social Computing Lab in 2007, and deployed within HP and it started as aggregator of RSS feeds from across the company and as time passed by turned into a social media aggregation platform that aggregates content from HP’s internal wikis, microblogs, various discussion forums, and social bookmarks. The system is integrated with HP’s user directories and has a documented set of open APIs and supports a powerful and expressive set of content filters across different social media systems. Tags provide the basis for public profiles of people in WaterCooler allowing anyone to apply a tag to anyone else and allow users to support distributed teams that span business units.According to HP, 61% of users in a recent survey reveal WaterCooler changed their perception of collaboration at HP while others say it makes the company feel more personal.

HP Social Computing labs have developed WaterCooler and with more than 100,000 employees using this tool, plans are there for selling this tool to their clients. Research areas of the Labs are unique like using social media to predict future, influence & passivity, etc. HP is also empowering its employees to communicate and collaborate, using social media, with fellow employees and other stakeholders to create and innovate market changing solutions.