Does your communications team have a "weapons" specialist?

No, I'm not talking about actual weapons, but I'm sure you already knew that.

I'm talking about a subject matter expert in the art of communications tools and technology (the "weapons" of a communicator), such as your intranet, enterprise social media, and other tools that enable the rest of the team to focus on communicating.

Ten years ago, your communications team needed to be the best writers in the building. They were focused on writing the flawless email or article, painstakingly crafting every sentence and scrutinizing every word to ensure the tone and message were perfect.

But those days are in the past.

Employees don't have the time (or the attention span) to read pages and pages of prose from business leaders. They want short, concise messages, preferably with bullet points that they can jump to and read to get the information pertaining to them.

Therefore today's internal communicators need to be snipers, delivering messages with concise precision, through the best channel available for reaching their specific audience.

The days of blanket emails to the entire company (or large swaths of employees) that only have meaning or require action from a select few are over. Employees are more sophisticated now and expect their internal communications to be personalized, targeted and, most importantly, directly relevant to them. Their online experience at work must reflect their personal experiences with popular consumer sites like Facebook or Amazon.com.

That's where the communications technology and tool specialist comes in.

Enterprises need someone (or in some cases, a small team of people) focused solely on the the tools that internal communicators use to communicate to employees. This includes:

• intranet management issues like publishing governance, content management, updating news feeds and changing layouts. 
• identifying systems and processes for identifying your audiences (such as PeopleSoft or SAP HR), that are kept up-to-date by another team who has a business reason to do so, such as HR.
• determining content distribution models to ensure efficient and effective management of communication vehicles. (For example, where does content originate? How is it distributed?)
• measuring effectiveness of these vehicles.
• researching and implementing new tools and vehicles.
• working with IT to discuss functionality improvements and troubleshoot technical issues.

Without someone in this role, it becomes the "part-time" job of everyone on the team, which means no one has the time or incentive to devise long-term, cross-functional solutions to these challenges. What you end up with is a patchwork of work-arounds that are known by some team members and not others. The result is lots of re-solving of the same problems over and over again, every time they come up.

Having a communications "weapons" specialist ensures that the next time that "weapon" is needed, loaded and waiting in the team's arsenal.

Does your organization have someone in a role like this? If so, does he or she have additional, traditional internal communications responsibilities? If so, is that model working?

All I want for Christmas is ERP and social media data integration

Seems like SAP is on the road to giving me exactly what I want for Christmas, starting with their own Social Media drill down tool:

SAP Invades Radian6 Territory with Social Media Drill-down Tool - ReadWriteCloud.

With SAP entering the fray of Social Media analytics, and already being so deeply embedded with so many customer's internal information (such as HR, Org Management, Customer Relationship Management and Sales and Distribution, to name only a few), can the integration of these two data sets be far behind?

As an internal communicator, this is what I've longed for for years - the ability to use employees' social media habits, both internally and externally, to engage and inform them better. Imagine being able to cross-check employee chatter trends, whether you're using Yammer, Lotus Connections, Microsoft Sharepoint or something else entirely, with organizational information. Is our business transformation seen as a positive effort in Finance but not in HR? Is our sales force frustrated by the implementation of our new mobile sales app? Are employees more satisfied in the UK than the US?

If SAP can track social media trends externally, I can't imagine it will be far off before they make integrating the same information internally that much easier. I envision a communications dashboard where I can analyze which trends are most common among whom in my enterprise, and use that information to target further communications. Perhaps the CEO needs to fly to Chicago to better explain, in person, why we're going forward with a particular project. Or maybe my CIO needs to communicate directly to our Directors and VPs to rally their support for our new strategy.

The more specificity I can get to who's saying what the better, and SAP, or any ERP for that matter, has the most accurate and up-to-date information about my enterprise.As a communications guy, my mouth waters at the possibilities. Can't wait to see where this goes.