For this month's Net2 Think Tank, we asked you for your tips, tools, and suggestions for communicating online within a team. Many organizations have found ways to work seamlessly across the hall or across an ocean using online tools to facilitate their internal communication, but finding the right tools for your team takes effort. This round-up aims to help you to jump-start your creative juices and re-think the way you look at internal communications.

Below is the round-up of responses we received. Feel free to add your ideas in the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Large Teams:

Large teams often have a person or team dedicated to internal communication efforts. The goals, tactics, and tools associated with internal comms for a large team that may be made up of hundreds or thousands of people are very different than those within a small team.

At TechSoup Global, for instance, they recently tested a tool that sends an audio slideshow via email to their internal network. As Barb Shaughnessy explains, the tool is not only a novel tactic to gain attention, but also an effective tool to share a message:

The tool is called GoldMail, which allows for the creation of audio slideshows delivered via email.  I created a GoldMail to announce internally the expansion of the TechSoup GoldMail product donation program.  I received a lot of positive feedback from TechSoup employees who felt the GoldMail was an interesting change of pace from the standard text-only "all staff" product launch announcements.  My GoldMail proved to be both an effective product demo and internal communication.  TechSoup staffers are already considering using GoldMail for short training tutorials and to better explain PowerPoint presentations using voice annotation.  If interested, you can take a look and listen to my GoldMail here (requires speakers or headphones). 
>> Read Barb's entire post

Dan Michel from Feeding America, reminds us that internal communication doesn't necessarily mean it has to be private! The organization uses a public twitterstream paired with a private extranet to communicate with their network of food banks:

We have a team in our communication department devoted to internal communications. The primary web portal is our extranet for our members, HungerNet. This password protected site contains valuable resources for our network.

For our recent Network Summit in April, we utilized a variety of tools for users to contribute content.

- There was a photo upload on our extranet.

- There was a blog on HungerNet with many guest bloggers talking about the Summit.

- We created the Twitter account @FANetworkSummit for attendees to follow.

- Encourged using the hastag #FASummit to track posting during sessions.

Our food banks found these tools to be effective and helpful during the Summit. This will only lay the groundwork for future events.

>> Read Dan's entire post

Small Teams:

The size of the team really matters. For small teams, internal comms is less about broadcast messages and more about getting to done on everyday work. We like to think that our team is a good case study for innovative internal communications. Here, NetSquared's Amy Sample Ward explains how our team works:

We are a distributed team, so there are three core tools that we use every single day in order to work with each other: Google docs, various wiki platforms, and basecamp.  Docs are used for drafts and working on content at the same time.  We move to a wiki or other privately shared site for projects with collaborators outside of the team, that way we can have a private yet shared place to collaborate.  Basecamp, at least for our team, is reserved for project management within the team but across projects - we are a small team so it helps us check in about what's going on and what needs to be done without having to call or email each other.

We also use delicious to save bookmarks, share bookmarks, and even curate content for the site.  All of us like to know the kinds of things the rest of us are reading, and a public bookmark tool like delicious makes it really easy to do.  We can also save interesting or important things for each other without adding to the email clutter.  Blog posts like the Net2 Recommends are curated through delicious, by team members saving things they come across during the month with a shared tag.

Lastly, even though we are sharing documents and work spaces, we need to be able to talk in real time. Across time zones, the tools we use most are skype and gchat - because they are both free and we can easily jump in and out of conversations.

>> Read Amy's entire post

Dave Chakrabarti commented on our Facebook Page to share a list of several other tools he uses in his small team:

We're starting to use Open Atrium. We also use IM (platform and program agnostic) with the OTR plugin for encryption, Skype on occasion, and good old email

The Big Picture

At the end of the day though, each team is unique and the tools that work for one team will not necessarily work for another. Here are several tips from Joitske Hulsebosch about how to choose the right tools:

My take is that there are so many tools, for lists of tools see for instance the web2.0 awards. The tools are like the hammer. It is not so hard to buy a hammer. What matters though is the way we use the hammer: to build a house or to nail a painting on the wall. Of course the tool choice is important too, after all you may need a screwdriver instead of a hammer when your wall is so hard you need to drill a hole. But what is more important is the art of using the tools; the art of the carpenter. Here come's the difficulty in organisations: more and more we will work in organisations where preferences differ. There will be a huge diversity in communication habits. Some may enjoy twittering (and their pitfall may be to forget to have real face-to-face dialogues), others prefer to use the phone and may not like an email overload. Some will be perfect carpenters, while others haven't even heard about hammers and fear their impact. This makes using online tools for internal communication so complex.

>> Read Joitske's entire post including additional tips for choosing the right tools

How does your team communicate internally? What innovative tactics or tools are you using to broadcast messages to your large team or get everyday work done within your small team? Leave your comments below!

About Net2 Think Tank:

Net2 Think Tank is a monthly blogging event open to anyone and is a great way to participate in an exchange of ideas.  We post a question or topic to the NetSquared community and participants submit responses either on their own blogs or on the NetSquared Community Blog.  Tag your post with "net2thinktank" and email a link to us to be included. At the end of the month, the entries get pulled together in the Net2 Think Tank Round-Up.