Case Study: Enterprise Social Network @ Pfizer – Pfizer World intranet & My World

Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies in terms of revenues, with employees of around 1, 00,000 and operations across 150 countries in the world had implemented an enterprise social network styled intranet within the company for their employees to communicate and collaborate across the globe. Pfizer World intranet is built on Microsoft SharePoint platform and the company prior to this had more than 400 intranet sites. Bob Libbey, Head of Digital and Social Communications at Pfizer, Inc., likes to think of PfizerWorld – the company’s singular internal channel - as an online town square. “People come to get their news and information about the enterprise - about the various pieces of Pfizer - that’s a big part of what’s made the project a success. Obviously we use email a lot; we distribute a promotional newsletter twice a week to show what’s upcoming in PfizerWorld. We need to be careful not to overload people. We’re always looking for ways to help people sort their information. That to me is the biggest challenge right now - helping people prioritize all the news and information that we’re sending to them,” Libbey explains.

In 2008, the site had 1.4 million article views; in 2009, the number jumped to 3 million article views, along with 10 million site visits on the whole. For 2010, article views topped 5.2 million and visits reached 55 million. In its third year, PfizerWorld generated 5.3 million article views and 61 million page views, up 279 percent and more than 1,000 percent respectively over the predecessor site. And the project yielded $20 million in maintenance, support, and development savings over the four years. The news crawl runs along the bottom of people’s desktops and includes the top stories of the day from PfizerWorld, top news clips of the day disseminated by the Media Relations team and breaking news as needed.  Pfizer also launched a social networking hub called My World,  a personalized intranet page to increase employee engagement, enable information sharing and facilitate collaboration; and a colleague message board called Moving Pfizer Forward to encourage candid discussion about company issues and employee engagement  and introduced as part of our PfizerWorld intranet platform back in 2010. That first year this internal networking hub drew 41,000 unique users who generated 800,000 page views. The second year it rose to approximately 60,000 users driving 1.6 million page views. Pfizer expanded its Social Media Policy to reflect the rise in usage of internal and external social media channels across the company. 

Internally, Pfizer created new employee channels, including the only pharmaceutical-company sponsored blog for Pfizer scientists, Think Science Now, on Pfizer.com; a personalized intranet page for employees; and a colleague message board. Pfizer also made content easier for visitors to share through Facebook, RSS etc. Many of the blog postings from Think Science Now appear on Pfizer’s Facebook page, for instance. Pfizer had been able to implement and integrate social network styled tools and platform internally so that employees can actively use it, collaborate and communicate with colleagues across the globe and work together to achieve the organization goals.