Filtering Through The Social Media Noise

I've been hearing a lot of chatter throughout different companies lately. It's not just happening down the hall. It's online and it's noisy. 

Have you noticed the noise that accompanies social media? There is a lot of good, even great information to be shared in the social space. But to find it, one still has to find their way through the chatter maze. When I started seeing this happen behind the firewall, I realized that this is going to impact employee adoption and make the all important executive buy-in, nearly impossible to obtain.

So how do we filter through the noise and find real business value? It's best to organize the approach by a few categories and tactics.

• Take an assessment of the tools in place for social medial. Find out where the noise is coming from. For example, are employees micro-blogging on tools like Yammer? Do employees share blogs and photos on an internal social networking site? The noise may be in different places or in just one place. Employees may be sharing lots of information in a big way. But is it organized?
• Discover what employees want. Do employees want to collaborate on creative work? Do they want to find job opportunities? Maybe they want to stay connected to real time changes. Assess their needs and use these real-life examples to teach. This will also please the executives since you'll be better able to connect these needs to business goals and ROI. 
• Document and share the best practices and education around the tools in place. How about creating a course for your employees to learn the ins-and-outs of Yammer? Teach them how to use tags/hashtags, topic groups, and narrowing the viewable feed. Each tool offers ways to manipulate the data and it's visibility. Help employees find what they want and teach them to organize their sharing.

Are there methods you've tried that have quieted the noise? Are you offering official training in social media? If so, what do your classes look like? Are they in person or online?