Jon Udell (via Paul) touches on a point very close to my heart:

…I was struck by how hard it is for the benefits people to explain their offerings.
…
Benefits people and coworkers often won’t be in a position to meet that
need. But a social application that matched up employees in similar
life circumstances could be a great way to transfer highly particular
kinds of benefits knowledge.

Employee benefits communications, in fact the entire onboarding process at corporations, can be tremendously streamlined, and the lives of the subjects enhanced, by applying very basic social networking and knowledge sharing tenets.  At SelectMinds, we spent a lot of time communicating this issue to our clients, and the resulting SelectMinds Employee Onboarding Program is a great example of what can be achieved.