Outlined below is a 5 step process to evaluate the communication needs of the company and how social media could change or improve the current paradigms. This process is from the perspective of an internal consultant, who has a sound understanding of the companies vision and strategy. (This is a work-in-progress model, so all comments and criticism are welcome.)

1. Based on the vision and strategy, Identify key entities/groups that interact/or should interact with each other ( e.g. prospects, consumers, Sales force, Mkt , Competion, Regulators, Govt.)
2. Define the optimal mode of interaction between those entities (e.g. listening, responding, interaction, broadcast)
3. Identify a communication paradigm that best facilitates the interaction
   

   matching social tools to communication needs

4. Evaluate existing tools on the basis on these paradigms. ( the example below is an evaluation exercise for the career services department at a business school)
   

   Identifying communication needs and areas for improvement

5. Propose changes and new solutions or else congratulate the company on a comprehensive communication strategy!

Once again, this is a work-in-progress model, so all comments and criticism are welcome!

With all the hullabaloo around Social media Marketing and its ROI. A facet of this paradigm shift in communication tools is being ignored. I am talking about microbloging tools for internal knowledge sharing, no not just twitter. In-fact not twitter at all.
The paradigm of communication, where “whats on ur mind” or “what are u working on” or “what do u need help with”, can be made self evident to a whole legion on individuals who are empathetic towards you, is simply amazing. (if your employees are not empathetic to each others needs, then you have a bigger problem at hand.)

Having worked in knowledge based industries like software development and Automotive design, I realize the importance of being able to ask for help passively and receive it at the right time. All those who have gone through the onerous process of post -project harvest meetings, must share my pain? You must have questioned the fact – will anyone ever be able to reach this document that I am creating ?. The motive behind these Knowledge management practices was noble. But was it accomplished ? Were we ever able to leverage the past experience of another employee sitting at another campus ?

This is where tools like Yammer, status.net (open source) , Identi.ca (based on status.net) come in the picture. Here are more if u want to explore. Say for instance, your organization is in a closed microbloging environment like Yammer , i.e. all ur yams (tweets) are only visible to people within your organization. Now you wanted to know if there is there is anyone in the organization who has implemented a open source CRM tool. Will you send out an email to everyone ? Will you rummage through a repository of harvested projects ? I would rather just Yam “hey, working on an open source CRM project. need help!” . And I guess within , even the largest of organizations- your degrees of separation from the right person would not b more than 2. ( yes I know I need to substantiate wild claims. But it seems sensible enough.)

To really substantiate these ideas I would love to talk to an organization that might have implemented internal micro-bloging tools. let me know if you know of one, either in the comments or @gagantweet (twitter).