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?

Have social media statistics and authority lost their value?

After reading an interesting blog post in the Harvard Business Review titled "Return on Influence, the New ROI", I was feeling quite proud of myself for actually keeping up with the HBR.

I was taken in by the author's claim that she had created a new metric ("Return On Influence", or ROI - I know, it's confusing), whereby she identifies the value of a single fan/follower of her client, which can in turn be used to demonstrate the value of investing in said client to potential advertisers. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Then I read the comments. Yikes.

I kid you not, the first line of the first comment reads, "Respectfully, this is complete nonsense."

He goes on to express his disappointment in HBR for publishing the article at all.

As I scrolled through the nearly 50 comments posted at the time, I was not surprised to see a familiar debate unfold - questioning the process of determining statistics, accusations that the statistics are valueless, stating that this is nothing new, and so on. Eventually the comments question the validity of the author's professional credentials, and finally HBR for even allowing the article to be published.

For me it begs the question - have statistics as they pertain to social media, and to some degree, the notion of "authority", virtually lost their value?

Don't get me wrong, I understand there must and always will be value in measuring statistics... I mean it's not as if I don't track how many readers I get on this blog. But some of the other statistics - the fancier, more compounded ones (ie, Return Of Influence) - are always so debatable. And the more that social media flatten our world such that more opinions are heard, does that threaten the whole notion of authority? 

For example, we have blogs, both liberal and conservative, dedicated to exposing the bias of the mainstream media (MSM), however both sides insist the bias is in the opposing direction. Is that even possible? But I digress.

My point in this post is to pose the question - would we do better to collectively acknowledge that there is value in social media, and stop searching for that "perfect metric" that proves exactly how valuable it is? 

I don't have the answer to this question, but I must say, I think about it a lot lately.

Ironically, one of the commentors on the HBR post referenced a website called ROI of Social Media. I'm pretty sure their "ROI" is the one most of us are familiar with - Return On Investment. I'm going to read it now to see if they're onto something.

In the meantime, please share your thoughts. Do you have a standard set of metrics you find convincing? If so, why? And if not, why not?

Unisys leverages social media to share knowledge and increase engagement

I just read a well written article in Bloomburg Businessweek about how Home Depot is using social media to engage their customers. (Special thanks to the Social Media in Organizations group on LinkedIn for the reference).

I've read similar articles in the past, and always wondered, how can these lessons be applied to businesses for internal use? What are some creative ways that businesses can use social media to engage employees to share knowledge, increase morale and improve productivity?

So I was intrigued when I read this article in the Harvard Business Review. Seems the folks over at Unisys have jumped into the fray and are leveraging social media internally with great success.

I especially like author Jeanne C. Meister's  break out of the 8 keys social media to implementation, obtained from this infographic on Prezi.com. It's really good content presented in an easy-to-digest format.

Note also how the success of this rollout began with Unisys CEO Ed Colement leading by example. As the article and infographic point out, executive support is absolutely critical to making social media tools work, and I believe the more open and transparent leadership is by nature, the more likely they are to really support social media (as opposed to only stating they support it because "everyone else is"). As I've said to clients in the past: if you don't really intend to support this effort, then don't move forward. You can do more harm by implementing social tools and letting them die on the vine than by not implementing them at all.

Again, this often comes down to a sincerity issue. Employers want to get employees engaged, but they must be prepared to do the engaging. Old school leaders assume the technology will do the engaging for them, and that too often only compounds the lack of engagement said leaders are trying to break down.

New school leaders not only join the discussion, they put themselves out there and start it. That's the first step to engagement, knowledge sharing and productivity.

Society for New Communications Research Launches Study To Examine the Use of Social Media “Behind the Firewall”

Here's something that's well timed:

Society for New Communications Research Launches Study To Examine the Use of Social Media “Behind the Firewall”.

It's about time we get some numbers pertaining to how companies are using social media and technology internally. I was just reading a recent Pew survey regarding usage of smart phones and "apps", and couldn't help but notice that, while 38% of those surveyed indicate they use their phones or tablets to access the internet, none listed "business" as a use. This got me thinking... isn't anyone out there using mobile apps to improve their employees' connectivity?

I can't be the only one who's thought of this, especially for environments where employees aren't in front of a PC all day. Wouldn't it be common sense for, say, plant managers working in a manufacturing environment to have custom applications on their phones that enabled them to access internal tools to report incidents or submit timesheets? These are just two obvious uses that come to mind.

What about sales teams or consultants... wouldn't mobile access to company resources, either through their smartphone or tablet, be an obvious value?

As I said, this must be out there, but despite my research I have yet to find any concrete examples of this happening. And assuming it is, I'd really like to know how well it's going. Hopefully the SNCR's study will shed some light, so I'll follow those results and comment on them here.

Are you or anyone at your company doing this? And if so, how's it going for you?

Technology doesn't engage people, people do

I recently rolled out a social media platform for a client to improve internal communications and, among other things, further engage employees with senior leadership and the company overall.

After a couple weeks of limited responses from employees, one leader asked me, "Why aren't our people getting more involved in the blogs?"

I quickly responded, "Because blogs don't engage people, people do."

After weeks of pushing and prodding these leaders to post to the new blogs and initiating discussion threads, it became clear to me that I had overlooked a critical misperception by leadership - that the technology alone would be sufficient to get their employees "engaged".

Furthermore, when pushed to leverage these new tools, many of my clients (the very leaders wondering why employees weren't participating) passively resisted with responses like "we can't say that", or worse, "can't you draft it for me first?"

As the author of this blog, I'm obviously a huge proponent of leveraging new technology to improve internal communications. Yet the slickest tech on earth isn't going to do much if leaders aren't actively using and advocating it. Their participation is critical, not only to show their support for the new media, but also to demonstrate through example that they sincerely want to engage with employees.

Technology is a useful tool through which leaders can connect with their people, but it's not a magic bullet. It can't do the work for them. Business leaders who are serious about engaging employees will put forth the effort necessary to do so.

That means taking risks by being more honest than they've ever been before. It means allowing employees to disagree with leadership in a public forum, and allowing those disagreements to stand in black and white. It may even mean changing course due to valid opinions expressed by those who disagree.

But this is also the advantage of the technology. If leaders are willing to take those risks, they can reap the benefits of the collective knowledge and thinking of their employees, and that is truly engaging.

Anything less, and you might as well not bother.

Have you faced these or similar challenges in your work? And if so, what do you think are the major roadblocks preventing leaders from trusting your advice and participating actively?