Humana staff’s grass-roots case for social media

Communicators now look to migrate internal exchanges from Yammer to Socialcast

Sometimes the best internal communications ideas don’t come from the communications team, nor do they come from the top. Sometimes employees decide how they want to communicate—and they run with it.

The business microblogging Web site Yammer isn’t an officially sanctioned program at Humana, but that didn’t stop 3,000 employees at the company from jumping on since February.

Greg Matthews, director of consumer innovation, says Yammer was “brought in to the company by some folks in the IT team who really wanted to experiment with it. For the first couple months, just a few dozen people were using it; but it really hit hockey-stick growth around April or May, to the point where now have over 3,000 people using it.”

That’s a little more than 10 percent of the 28,500 Humana employees nationwide, a small percentage. What intrigued upper management was that it grew so quickly on word of mouth alone. They pondered Humana’s existing, but minimal social media policy, and communicators started searching for an alternative micro-blogging option that would incorporate Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes, which Humana already uses.