Social Media @ Oracle –Engaging Employees & Oracle Community

Oracle increased the adoption social media tools since 2007 and launched blogs, wikis social networking site for the employees and also used discussion forums and sites to connect customers, developers, Database administrators, etc. The social media and networking tools that Oracle adopted were focused to attract and retain talent, engage employees in innovation by inviting their ideas, talent development and allow employees, customers, Oracle community collaborate and learn. Oracle believed employees need to have tools to collaborate and they know the value of discussion forums, blogs and wikis to connect with colleagues to share ideas, answer questions and help each other. Oracle uses the social media and collaboration tools to not only communicate about the database technologies and upgrades but also uses them to engage employees and Oracle Community in the development of the database technology and future development of the company. Oracle initially started with Idea Factory in July 2007, with an agenda to collect innovative ideas from the Applications Strategy teams as the existing modes of email and wikis failed to attract employees to ideate. With Idea Factory success, social networking capability was added to it and it was renamed as Oracle Connect. Employees received Connect very well and many capabilities were added to it like Groups where employees can collaborate and share based on their business needs and personal interests.

Oracle Connect is at the heart of Oracle employee’s internal social networking capability with many features constantly added like OraTweet integration a twitter like platform where employees can update their status and also send tweets to their networks, groups, Pages for groups where groups can have any number of pages editable by its members, activity logs that have updates of employees, sharing capability increased where employees can share links, notes, ideas, questions and feeds from blogs, wikis, forums and filter them based on date, sort, etc and also search capability was also added. Oracle Connect has ultimately become a Facebook for Oracle employees, internally within the organization. Oracle also uses wikis extensively in their organization to connect employees, customers and Oracle certified professionals to collaborate and has more than 17,000 registered users. Users can share their knowledge, collaborate and the wiki has many spaces that allow collaborations between employees, users, professionals and plays a critical role in training and development. Recently Oracle Wikis are migrated to a new platform and are now associated with groups/spaces, as opposed to an open free-for-all, and space owners have curative responsibility for approving new members, moderating comments, etc.

Oracle Mix is essentially a blog and discussion forum for Oracle employees, its customers, partners and developers, who are encouraged to share insights on work and personal activities. It was launched back in 2007 by The Apps Lab so that people could network and stay connected during (and after) Open World and is social network, idea sharing site, group collaboration tool, and answers forum. Oracle Mix has more than 75,000 members and is the official social network for Oracle Community and allowed people to ideate, participate, vote on ideas and suggest sessions in the Open World on various subjects so that they can discuss them during the open world. Oracle Mix has been hugely popular and community users participated in the Suggest a session for the Open World and Oracle too encouraged participation by allotting thirty slots to this in the Open World forum. Oracle Mix too saw major additions to it in terms of video capability, YouTube and Slide share presentation embeddings, etc. Oracle Mix is also available on Facebook, Twitter and other external social networking sites on the internet. Oracle Mix has given the Oracle community a great platform to actively engage with the company and voice their views and opinions and Oracle has listened to them. Oracle Mix and Oracle Connect are two different platforms and both of them are critical for Oracle.

Oracle Technology Network hosts dozens of discussion forums online. One can post questions and answers on this forum and all discussions are threaded so it is easy to find a discussion topic. Participation on the forum is encouraged through points that are awarded for postings and correct answers and there are recognition levels of Pro, Expert and Guru that are awarded. Oracle community has utilized the discussion forums and engaged in discussions about various Oracle technologies. The discussion forums have been a valued forum for the developers, employees and for people who wants to get trained for various Oracle Certifications and become part of the Oracle community. Discussion forums are also the one stop resource for all those who need to keep themselves updated with the various developments in the Oracle database technologies.    Oracle OWL initiative (Oracle's Women's Leadership) is an online portal supplemented by chat and forum discussion features and members have access to announcements, links to industry resources and to professional career coaches. Oracle's Global Leadership Academy is a talent development program that is aimed at senior leaders and uses a wiki, discussion forum, and live web seminar sessions to help develop leadership skills. The success of Oracle and its technologies depend on the way it provides the customers and developer community with the knowledge about the latest technology updates and enhancements.

Oracle has been using various Social media for long and had hugely invested in them and has been constantly upgrading the technology infrastructure for all the collaborative platforms. Many features, capabilities and functionalities have been added to these tools so as to further increase the participation and improve the knowledge sharing and collaboration experience. Oracle has been acquiring companies and integrating the acquired technologies into its core database offerings. Oracle database is the most used database technology and it runs in many Fortune 500 companies. Oracle needs to encourage developers and also need to train many professionals and students in its database technologies and it uses the various Web 2.0 technologies to do this. The various discussion forums, wikis, blogs and social networking tools not only allow collaboration and sharing of knowledge but also provides the Oracle community to participate and voice their opinions in the future development of Oracle and its technologies. Oracle community too excited about these various platforms and Oracle uses these tools to communicate with the employees, developers, customers and others. It is important for Oracle to further improve its social media platforms and collaborative tools as the customers and developers community need to be updated with the latest technology updates and provide solutions and answers to their queries. Oracle is one enterprise that has utilized the social media collaborative tools for the organization success and engagement with employees, customers and Oracle community as a whole.