I ran across an interesting blog post a few days ago by Jeremy Robert, titled “Internal Communications- Freedom of Speech? You cannot be serious!”
In it Jeremy says he cannot understand companies like Coke and Ford letting their employees loose in social media channels – they’re planning to let them talk on behalf of the company without going through PR. Here’s an exerpt:
You simply do not allow employees free rein. You don’t. It is accepted.
Then along come the social media strategists. “It’s all about content, it’s all about dialogue, it’s all about the quality of the conversation” – free spirits in the digital age. Not for them the rules of the old guard – no, the rise of the internet and FaceBook and Twitter has changed the world and we must move on or wither and die.
It appears that their lobbying – and the continuing spread of Shiny Object Syndrome – has convinced even the most conservative of organisations (Coke, anyone?) that they should be allowed to let employees post directly to the social media sites, without passing the sense/health check that is the PR department.
I stuck in my 20 cents here (employees should be empowered/let ‘loose’ but properly trained/guided as to what’s appropriate what’s not). What do you think? Are employees encouraged to get out there in the social media world and represent the company? What kind of training/caveats are in place to ensure they don’t damage the company’s reputation?
Who in your company is speaking on its behalf and how has this worked for you?
Check out this great post I just ran across at “General Smelectric”, a spoof blog as far as I can tell. A funny example of extreme internal spam. A lot of it rings true…
Recent research has shown that out of 300,000+ employees:
95% do not read this email
33% automatically filter it into a folder marked “SPAM”
60% who do open the email scan through it for notifications on discounts or contests, then Shift-Delete it when finding nothing
Thus, going forward, instead of “The Latest at General Smelectric,” Corporate Communications will be using the following subject line: “Please read: You have been fired.”
This webinar will explore some practical ways to both manage email internally and to channel noise away from email and into more appropriate vehicles.
We will mention the SnapComms channels that we market as one possibility, but they won’t be the focus of this session. We’re talking about the bigger picture. (If you want to get your head around our visual messaging software, book us for a demo or visit our website and check out the videos/details).
Hope you can join us!
Details: Wednesday, August 19th, 11am PST (2pm EDT). Register Here
Recently the Content Manager controls have been updated – they now provide Master Administrators 3 ways to limit sub-Administrator’s rights: by Targeting Group, by Campaign Folder, and by SnapComms Tool. Here’s what this looks like:
1. Targeting Groups. Master Admins can access any Administrator’s profile and specify which Targeting Groups they will be allowed to use when sending messages, screensavers, or setting up blog/forum participation lists. Here’s what you’ll see on the second tab on their profile, called Targeting Permissions:
This is useful if you’ve set up Admins for each division/department/geography and want to limit their messaging to their particular area.
2. Campaign Folders. If you’ve set up your content into multiple Campaign folders (organized by department, type of communication, situation, etc.) which we definitely recommend, you may want to keep some folders confidential to other Administrators, to protect time-sensitive information. Here’s the tab that lets you limit an Administrator’s access to certain content:
3. SnapComms Messaging Tool. The third way you can limit their activity is by limiting which of the SnapComms messaging tools they are allowed to use. Perhaps the Daily Bulletin Manager shouldn’t be sending out Alerts or setting up a Q&A Forum. Here’s what the tab looks like:
Lastly, here’s the tickbox that keeps Admins from seeing the User section and changing any of the above settings themselves:
Keep the box TICKED for your Master Admins and untick it for everyone else.
A global company based in the UK is using the SnapTicker to broadcast internal ‘tweets’ twice a day from the CEO, according to Chris Leonard, one of the founders of the SnapComms software company. We met up in June at the IABC World Conference in San Francisco, and he told me the story:
The company took on the SnapComms software in order to recapture staff’s attention and refresh their internal communications. The CEO began sending short ‘tweets’ out to all employees twice a day, as a way to engage them directly. But instead of using Twitter, he sent them through SnapTicker which fires a company-branded scrolling message onscreen for a couple of minutes.
The first time he included a link to his internal blog in the ticker (unlike traditional TV crawls, this one lets him embed links), so many employees clicked through that I.T. had to quickly scramble to accomodate the sudden and significant increase in blog traffic! The outcome far surpassed their expectations.
For this company, the SnapTicker has proven to be a powerful way to initiate regular interaction between the CEO and staff, especially those outside of their head office.
Hearing stories like these is great, because content still is king. It’s how the SnapComms tools are used and what content you put in them that takes them beyond being just another cool gadget, right?
So how would you use the Snap Ticker in your corporation? What content/link would be worthy of an onscreen ticker? Submit your thoughts and we’ll publish the best ideas to Twitter and our website (giving you credit and a free link).
SnapComms, the software company behind the Snap Messaging Tools for employee comms which we market in the U.S., are a Global Sponsor this year for Melcrum.
The SCM Summit has some stellar Corporate Communicators lined up to speak from companies such as Kraft Foods, International Monetary Fund, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, IBM, Pfizer, and Walmart. You’ll also find some of the very best consultants sharing their knowledge as well, including Stacy Wilson, Chris Gay, Linda Dulye, David Grossman, and Kathryn Yates.
If you’re interested, call or email me by September 4th.
Doesn’t it make sense for the Internal Communications function to take on the role of protecting employees from internal spam and managing communication overload? So why isn’t it happening?
The lack of case studies, best practice writings, combined with the number of Communicators who’ve told me that they struggle to get employee’s attention due to internal overload, makes me think no one’s doing it. Very few seem to be taking action beyond gatekeeping email distribution lists, consolidating the news and publishing an email etiquette guide that nobody reads.
I’d also wager that most internal communications departments focus primarily on what comes out of their department and don’t get around to investigating communications overload. They often have low visibility and/or influence over what hits employees from other departments, divisions, segments, etc. Few have the big picture on whether communications overload is occuring and to what extent.
They don’t know:
What’s scheduled to be broadcast to employees (from ALL areas – HR, Sales, CorpComms, Execs, Depts, Regions, etc.)?
What’s the employee experiencing in terms of comms overload?
Is the content consistent across the organization?
How much is quality information and how much is internal spam/unnecessary noise?
Are messages being communicated in a way that is easy to process?
I thought I’d better remind myself of what the core Internal Comms function is all about (have I got it wrong? Maybe it’s function is more limited than I imagine.) So I pulled out my copy of Shel Holtz’s book Corporate Conversations and ran across Chapter 10, “Managing Communications Overload”.
An entire chapter on establishing a “message mission control” and what can be done to change the messaging culture inside a company! He gives some good ideas on how to manage this kind of ongoing project.
Shel also gives me an answer as to why it’s not being addressed (p.181) : “Management doesn’t think it is worthwhile. Managing how employees pass messages among themselves is seen as off-radar, something that simply happens. Targeting resources…to help employees message effectively is just busy work and doesn’t grow the bottom line.”
Is this still the reason today, in your opinion? What do you see in your own organization?
Or maybe I’m wrong and Internal Communications IS starting to act as “Message Mission Control”. Let me know.
What do your internal broadcast messages (probably email) look like? Do they:
Use color?
Have a consistent structure?
Make the Call-to-Action Clear?
One of the suggestions I made in a recent article published by CW Bulletin (IABC) on Ways to use Visuals in Everyday Communications was: use Layout, Color and Icons to provide visual cues and make it easier for readers to absorb their information and take action.
That’s what the SnapComms messaging tools (which we offer) do.
A basic visual example. Which of these would you rather read? Which is easier for you to read? Which is more likely to drive action, do you think?
Several corporate communicators wrote in with stories about how they were blamed by Management for a lack of employee response, despite sending several quality emails out on a particular subject. Employees didn’t show up to an event or complained they were ‘never told’ about key changes, despite the efforts of Communications teams. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Have you ever found regular corporate emails had little or no impact?
Everyone is so info overloaded today that it’s getting harder and harder to cut through the noise with email. And if you can’t get employees’ attention, good luck ever getting to the very basic stage of ‘informing’, OR to the point of changing behavior or getting some sort of action. The impact on an organization overall is huge – it takes longer for change to happen.
Here are some ideas on how to change this:
FIXING YOUR CONTENT
1. Set up common tags (Action, FYI, Urgent, Request) in the Subject line to cue readers. If you want a response or action, you’d better say so right off the bat.
2. Standard email message structure across the organization: I like this recommendation from the IABC Research Report, “Preparing Messages for Information Overload Environments”. They give examples from Proctor and Gamble and Microsoft, who have standard proposal structures (i.e. Idea, Background, How it Works, Benefits, Next Steps) which are consistent across the organization and help them improve communications effectiveness and efficiency. This idea can be adopted to email for corporate announcements. Here’s one possible structure for broadcast emails:
a. Summary (two lines explaining what the email is about)
b. Call to Action (what action the reader needs to take – learn this, complete this, attend this, etc)
c. Deadline/Timeframe (deadline for action or expiry of relevance)
d. Details (additional key details written out in the email itself)
e. Additional Information (hyperlinks to the intranet, attachments, Q&As, etc.)
CONSOLIDATION
3. Consolidate – reduce email broadcasts by setting up a daily or weekly news bulletin, and have depts and employees feed their announcements into this. This means fewer individual interruptions for staff and makes the few remaining critical/urgent announcements that do get sent separately stand out.
(I wish I could find some decent statistics on the number of businesses doing this – we’ve seen these kinds of bulletins become more and more prevalent, but they are still not ubiquitous, especially in medium and small enterprises.)
CHANGING THE GAME
4. Create and enforce Broadcast Communications Guidelines. Rather than approaching each email or project separately, take a company-wide view of broadcast communications. Manage it to protect employees from too much noise and to make sure the critical 5% can be heard.
Establish (through two-way interaction, of course!) company-wide guidelines/criteria. Train all dept/managers who broadcast to use them and hold them to account. This reduces noise, improves message quality, and ultimately helps staff be more productive by making it easier and faster for them to process and absorb key information.
Are there any people out there who’ve actually taken their company’s broadcast communications in hand? Have you done an audit, established criteria for what’s worthy of broadcasting, defined which channels are appropriate for which messages? I’d love to know how far people have gone with this.
At the IABC World Conference in San Francisco, a communicator from Johnson & Johnson mentioned that they’d done a lot of work and had internal broadcast email under control – anyone else? Other communicators I met in Employee Comms sessions or in the halls agreed that email overload was a real problem in their company, to varying degrees.
I managed to get to a few early sessions during last week’s IABC World Conference in San Francisco, one of which was Steve Crescenzo‘s panel on Employee Communications. I used my trusty Flip video and did a quick record of the panelist’s opening comments. Anyone else attend this conference session, too? Please comment at the end with what you recall from the session!
Apologies for the sound quality though, which leaves a lot to be desired – the recording was quiet to begin with, and then sending them to Youtube garbled it a bit! If you can’t stand the sound, read the paragraphs below each video for the gist of it.
Chuck made a great opening point – right now Internal Communicators are getting beat up every day, facing crisis after crisis after crisis, non-stop. What’s going to happen to communicators as well as employees when we go into recovery mode? How are communicators going to engage with employees who have been sticking around just because they have no where else to go? How are they going to keep themselves motivated after living through such a tough time?
Steve Crescenzo commented in reply that all the communicators he’s seeing ”are in foxholes” right now. It’s going to be a massive task to win back trust of employees once things have moved on. What are communicators going to do to re-engage the employees who are left after the cuts and restructures?
First he noted in response to an earlier point (Steve C, I think talking about death by editing and having good writing emasculated) that as a writer at Intel: he owns his headlines! He gets his articles approved/looked over by the people he’s writing about, but he doesn’t send them the headline for approval at all.
Jeremy then went on to give a mini-case study that’s brilliant for its outcomes, not just its use of social media tools (the way it should be, I say!):
During the 1st Quarter their Chief Administrative Office had put out the word asking for people to keep discretionary spending down. Jeremy’s colleague came up with the idea of running a campaign to support this. They used a blog initially, asking for ideas from employees. After sending it out to a smaller group and getting some ideas posted as comments initially, they did a story on the intranet and got tons of ideas coming in.
Over time, they went through ideas, categorized them, and put them on a wiki for everyone to access if they wanted ideas.
Results: the CEO thought it was great and had Finance go through ideas. They came away with 12-15 things they could implement. Another great face-to-face outcome they started doing: office swap meets – employees could bring along extra stuff from their desks and trade it. ”We found that if you just put any old junk inside of a box, people will go crazy for that…”
Last year, Hawaiian Airlines bought every person in the company an ipod to kick off their podcasting. They had just been through a very tough summer – Aloha Airlines and ATA (their two main competitors) went out of business in April, putting the pressure on employees. The CEO came to them wanting a way to give back to staff. Paul came up with the idea of giving everyone an ipod, expecting to get laughed out of the room…”and I was, by everybody except the CEO”…They pre-loaded it with a message saying thank you from the CEO and a clip of the first Hawaiian Airlines flight in 1929 (YES, 1929!).
Paul also commented that he’s quite interested in the advent of social media and rising importance of authenticity. Our communications have to change as a result, and employee communicators have to pay attention to nuances – work out how to deal with it, what do things really mean? Tone is more informal now.
Crescenzo comments (end of video): social media is not just a new set of tools; it’s a different mindset and different content is required. He gave an example of a CEO he coached recently who wanted to blog, but the content he came up with was boring and full of buzz words. Had to go back and train him to be conversational. Employee Communicators need to take a role coaching execs on how to change their approach.
Dave spoke about the importance of getting creative, despite a company’s circumstances. The financial sector is extremely regulated and focused on the bottom line. At US Bank they were very well know for being efficient. They’ve shifted in the past few years: ready to take risks now and moving towards some interactive comms – polls on the site’re getting into social media/two-way dialogue with online polls asking non-work questions, like what is your favorite color, for example.
The latest CEO is very personable and inspires people, more so than his predecessor. At one point, US Bank did a cross-country tour with market leaders in 56 different locations, across 3 time zones. The CEO got out and delivered his personal message, support by the local market leaders. They told staff this is what is happening, this is why we’re going to survive. CEO also now has a column on the new intranet and answers employees’ questions. Trend = getting more creative even in the face of a commitment to efficiency (i.e. US Bank was famous for banning post-it notes, paper clips -> staples cheaper). In today’s economy you have to be more creative, as we face a lot more limitations.
Crescenzo commented that he’s seeing a re-emergence of print now as well – 2-3 times a month people are sending him internal publications to review…But has to be good stuff – not just ‘grip-n-grins and cliches.
There were great comments by the audience at this point, on the fact that employees are hunkered down and ‘holding on to the radiators’, as one person put it. A lady from a region in Canada spoke about how they have more jobs than people right now and all internal comms can focus on is retention, recruitment and training. She warned the rest of us to take note and be ready for recovery, as the balance of power (which is now in favor of the employer) will certainly shift again.
Steve C mentioned one Exec who was being very frank, saying “we’re in tough times and we’re here to make a profit to survive; we’re not here to keep our employees happy.” This is authentic, yes, but if you’re telling employees they’re expendable and their happiness is none of the company’s concern, they’ll be off and running as soon as possible, leaving the company trying to recruit and retain talent.
Who else got some good stuff out of this session? Let me know.
I’m in the L.A. airport, waiting for my San Francisco flight right now – heading up to the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) World Conference, which starts on Monday. If you’re interested in improving employee comms or a consultant looking for the lastest information on new approaches, you’ll probably find a lot of value at our Exhibit Stand.
Please stop by Stand 3 (right near the entrance to the Exhibition Hall) and say hello, get some free whitepapers, or check out our free trial offer.We’re also giving away some delicious New Zealand wine at the event, because…Chris Leonard and Sarah Perry, the SnapComms founders, are flying in from Auckland, New Zealand for the event. If you want to find out about the people behind the SnapComms software, look out for Sarah or Chris at the stand or in one of the internal comms or marketing sessions.
Rob Drasin, President of Trident Communications out of New York and Snap Comms advocate, will also be joining us – he’s doing great work on the East Coast and has some very good insights and stories on how the software is transforming internal comms for enterprise-level communicators.
I look forward to meeting many of you at the Conference!
If you’re waiting for Intranet nirvana to arrive, how can you create a good news source and also start 2.0 conversations with employees in the meantime?
Here’s a summary of seven suggestions from this morning’s webinar (and slides) on ways to begin now, despite creaky intranets or revamps that are six months’ away. Take note, too, of the assessment criteria to apply.
Intranet Homepage-based short-term solutions:
1. Opensource blog software – options like WordPress provide fabulous functionality, are easy to customize and update. They are secure (ifyou can get I.T. to host and help) and make it easy to start conversations. We’ve oversimplified this a little, but many companies are going down this path and seeing sucessful results.
2. Widgets – get I.T. to upload your html code once with widget embeds, and then update content regularly without bothering your tech guys again. Check out the hundreds of social media bits like sproutbuilder, SurveyGizmo, Google Video, Youtube, Twitter, Utterli, blog/rss feeds…Security and ease of use will vary. This option can be a bit fiddly for the content manager, however.
Web-pages in other places:
3. Snap Comms Mag and Interactive Tools – create templated html content that “lives on the desktop”, is easily updated like blog software and will keep I.T. happy as it’s secure. Employees don’t have to register or even login to the network - the Snap desktop applet does it for them. Prompt employees to visit resources by sending a hyperlink in a scrolling news ticker onscreen. Invite interaction through comments, Q&As, Blogs, Forums, or article submissions.
4. Snap Comms Interactive Screensavers – upload html/jpgs daily or weekly, and have them cycle as screensaver elements on your employee’s screens. Include hyperlinks, polls, and interactive elements and invite employees to click through, or hit Escape to get back to work.
5. Email Newsletters - have a look at your existing broadcast emails as an easy substitute - update your design to match your intranet look and feel, introduce interactive elements like comments, rating polls, staff bulletin board sections, or article contributions.
Non-Webpage possibilities:
6. Voicemail broadcasts – short, punchy 2-minute news updates modeled on radio can be a very successful way to get a kernel of information out to staff, especially those who aren’t in front of a PC all day. Support it with podcasting resources – set up an online archive and invite responses/comments.
7. Microblogging, PDAs/Texting – SMS can be effective if done right – establish guidelines, make sure your news is actually important to your audience. Microblogging tools (Twitter inside the enterprise) are still in their infancy but worth reviewing – while you’ll never reach everyone with this type of tool, it can be a low-cost/low-effort way to get headlines in front of a subset of employees.
The above ideas will not fly for everyone, we know! There are varying levels of security concerns, access to IT resources, and authority in every organization that will make some options viable and others out-of-the-question.
To assess, rank possibilities against these seven criteria (and add your own):
1. Secure? Legal won’t be happy if you stick internal info up on a free blog somewhere, will they.
2. Low Cost? We assume you don’t want to spend a lot, especially if a half-million-dollar intranet initiative is underway.
3. Interactive? If you’re not looking at moving towards a Web 2.0 boat internally and sparking interaction with employees, where have you been for the past 9 years. Check out the Cluetrain Manifesto – start at point number 40.
4. Easy to Update? We expect you’d rather avoid a manual solution and want quick and efficient information uploads.
5. Easy for your Audience? Intranet substitutes need to be easy to take up and should not involve registration, a new login or a lot of voluntary action on the part of employees.
6. Visually-Rich? We’re after 2.0 which means using sophisticated visuals, multimedia, and company branding.
7. Cut-Through? Will the intranet substitute reach all employees? Or will it look pretty and simply be ignored or bypassed?
