Social Media @ Intel – Planet Blue internal social network for Employees

Intel, the world's largest and highest valued semiconductor chip maker, based on revenue has an internal social media platform called Planet Blue that was launched in 2009, which is company controlled Facebook styled intranet, where more than 1,00,000 employees can connect with each other, collaborate and share knowledge. Planet blue includes blogs, wikis, status updates, discussion forums and employees can also form groups based on their interests, hobbies, etc. Employees not only communicate and create groups but also use the platform to ideate and innovate which is essential for Intel as there is constant pressure on the company to develop new products. Intel earlier had a wiki based platform for collaboration, called Intelpedia, "the Intel encyclopedia that anyone can edit," was launched in 2006, which employees can edit freely  and had millions of pages and thousands of contributors. Intel had a culture of technology-based information-sharing since early 2003, when employee blogging started predominantly included self-maintained servers under desks and these internal employee blogs gained popularity. Intel CEO Paul Otellini launched his employee blog in 2004 and other top execs and leaders followed throughout 2005 culminating in a fully IT-supported platform that same year. Intel also started its popular developer blogs and wikis for software collaboration called Intel Software Network back in May 2006. In April 2007, Intel created Blogs@Intel as a new business tool for customers and employees to directly communicate and collaborate. In June 2008, Intel added the Digital IQ training program for employees that contained around 60 programs online with certification on how to use these social media tools to increase innovation, communication and collaboration at work.

According to a post titled “How successful is your Enterprise 2.0 strategy?” on Intel communities, “some of the metrics Intel track are related to adoption – such as active users (creators, synthesizers, consumers) and “unique visitors”. However, these indicators may not accurately represent the success indicators of the platform. Quality of discussions, impact of these discussions on the users, problem resolutions, agility in solving issues, ability to find subject matters experts quickly could be different parameters which can really show how successful the platform is.” This highlights that Intel closely monitors its social media styled intranet and hopes that the intranet will fuel social learning among employees and also use it for their career development where they can look for positions and chat about their career progression. Intel created a comprehensive set of social media policies called the Intel Social Media Guidelines that are available in over 35 languages designed to help employees to understand how to manage their social media presence. Intel also created Social Media Center of Excellence, which is a cross functional body of experts from Marketing, PR, legal and Digital Communications, who collaborated to create guidelines, processes, strategies, and skill-building courses for how Intel employees can use social media tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, and social networks around the world. Intel is further looking to improve its Planet Blue and is looking to add voice control features to the content so that employees can use it effectively for their collaboration, communication, learning and knowledge sharing initiatives. 

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.