MaaS360™

When mobile workers spend more time at home or traveling around the country than in the office, they miss out on something important: feeling like they are a vital part of the team. Without the daily interactions of hallway greetings and lunchroom conversations, mobile workers may start to feel disconnected. Social media provides tools to break the isolation.

"Mobile is always on and always connected, which is the foundation of social media," points out Laura Chavoen, executive vice president of Imagination Publishing, a Chicago-based custom publisher and content marketing agency. A fervent social media evangelist, Chavoen advises companies to choose tools based on how they want their employees to be able to connect.

Imagination Publishing itself provides several models, she says. Employees use a Ning group for informal communications, like an online book group and a collection of employee photos. They use Twitter for conversations with each other and clients, for a more real-time experience than email that's still searchable later by hashtag. For entirely internal conversations, they use Yammer and its ability to create subgroups of message recipients. All of these social networks have mobile applications, she adds – which is critical, given research that shows that a significant majority of mobile users access social media via a mobile device.

To start building your virtual water cooler, though, Chavoen recommends starting with a LinkedIn group limited to company employees. LinkedIn makes controlling access easy, and more importantly, she notes, "because it's business-oriented, you'll have to worry less about inappropriate content."