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Items dealing with employee communications

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

ThoughtFarmer: A lesson in excellent blogger outreach

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Just today, I’ve received half a dozen pitches by email. Some are nothing more than press releases without even a passing effort at personalizing the pitch. Others make nothing more than a passing effort. So it’s a welcome relief—not to mention an entertaining and engaging experience—to get a pitch that is personal, creative, and attention-grabbing.

The pitch began with a cryptic email from Darren Barefoot, who asked for my mailing address because he had something to send me. (It helps, when making this kind of request, to already know the person to whom you’re reaching out, which speaks to the importance of having relationships vs. blasting out material to bloggers who have never heard of you.)

A week or so later, a package arrived at my house. It contained what you see in the image below:

• A letter welcoming me as a new employee of a ficititous company called Tubetastic Inc. (slogan: “We make tubes. A whole series of them.” This pitch was going to people who would appreciate the dig at U.S. Sen. Ted Stephens and his famous speech supporting an end to net neutrality in which he described the Internet as “a series of tubes.")
• An org chart showing exactly where I’m situated in the new company (I’m the Tubular Comptroller, part of the Operations department, reporting up through ZDNet’s Dan Farber, Tubetastic’s Director of Tube Distribution.) The org chart also shows me who else has received the pitch.
• A name badge complete with my photo, copied off my website.

There’s no hint in the welcome letter of the pitch behind the package. Instead, Darren (who signs the letter as an HR rep) informs me I’ll be featured in an upcoming edition of the company newsletter, then invites me to learn more about the company by logging into the company’s intranet. The letter includes a username and password. Who wouldn’t log on?

What I found was Tubetastic’s intranet fully loaded with Enterprise Web 2.0 features: Twitter feeds, blog posts, a presence status (like Facebook’s), a newsfeed that updates me on what other employees have been doing (also like Facebook’s), and my profile. This is where the draft of my “interview”—set to appear in the company newsletter—is waiting for my comments as well as an answer to an additional question. The profile also includes links to the latest articles from my real blog along with the ability to edit my profile, which already contains all the information a typical employee directory would offer (title, reporting relationship, mailing address, phone number, email address, etc.).

The top of the home page features a link that will explain everything. This is the pitch: The intranet was created using a tool called ThoughtFarmer. I followed a link to a ThoughtFarmer page that includes YouTube videos, screenshots, and other resources that go into more detail on this “ultimate intranet.” The elevator pitch tops the page:

ThoughtFarmer is the ultimate intranet. Forget the impossibly complex, seldom-used corporate intranets of days gone by. ThoughtFarmer is a simple, social way for employees to collaborate, share ideas and find information.

What’s special about ThoughtFarmer? It combines the best of wikis and social networking. It’s an intranet for intranet-haters. Plus, it sits behind the firewall, just where your IT manager wants it.

At this point, I was spending a fair amount of time noodling around both the faux Tubetastic intranet and the ThoughtFarmer site. I must confess, I was pretty impressed with ThoughtFarmer, which includes a slew of features ranging from single-signon and polls to inline tagging and image galleries.

What I didn’t see is any reference to the kinds of resources that reside on the old intranets that are still important: benefits enrollment, work-related online applications, database access, requisition forms, new-hire recruitment tracking, payroll stubs and the like. Most employees use intranets to complete tasks, so these are important. My guess is that you would continue to host these resources right where they are and link to them from tabs you’d create, such as “Human Resources” and “Work Tools.” Maybe someone from ThoughtFarmer will confirm that in a comment here.

But the point is that I spent time with this product site—and wrote about it—because the pitch was compelling. If I had received yet another press release introducing ThoughtFarmer, it would have gone where all the other press releases I receive go—into my email trash. So, what did Darren and the ThoughtFarmer marketing team do to stand out?

• They made the pitch personal. They made it clear they knew who I was and that I wrote about intranets with some regularity.
• They piqued my interest by asking for my mailing address without giving me a hint about what I’d receive. I only accepted this offer because I knew Darren.
• They sent the pitch to me in the regular mail in a package that cried out to be opened.
• They spent time and effort to create something different. While mock intranets have been around for more than a decade, this is the first one I’ve seen that listed me as an employee.
• They made the pitch interactive. I really can modify my profile and get engaged with the intranet at a number of levels.
• They actually had a compelling product to show off.
• The personalized profile, the name badge, and the other personalized elements are cool, but none of it feels even remotely close to a bribe.

Now that’s blogger relations.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Speakers & Speeches: Employees Are the Brand - April 23, 2008

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Content summary: Shel Holtz presents a breakout session on the blurring lines between internal and external communications at the Society for New Communications Research New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, California, on April 23, 2008. The session delves into internal communications practices that prepare employees to represent the company in their social media activities.

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Thursday, May 01, 2008

Remembering Alvie Smith

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Checking my feeds, I found a short obituary noting the passing of Alvie L. Smith back on March 19. I figured somebody must have noted Alvie’s passing somewhere in the blogosphere, but a Technorati search turned up nothing.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Alvie was 84 and had been retired from his role as General Motors’ director of corporate communications two decades ago. Most people practicing communications today probably have never heard of him. But much of what we take for granted in the practice of employee communications was innovated by a handful of early adopters, Alvie among them, along with others like Myron “Mike” Emmanuel. The work of other acknowledged leaders like Roger D’Aprix was made possible by their early steps.

Alvie’s book, “Innovative Employee Communication: Nw Approaches to Improving Trust, Teamwork, and Performance,” has long been out of print and is out of date (no Internet, for instance), but Alvie’s work as captured in the book laid the groundwork for advancing employee communications beyond the production of house organs by secretaries.

Alvie went to work for GM in 1955 following an Air Force career that included 35 missions over Germany and France in World War II. At GM, he wrote more than 500 executive speeches (many for former GM President Ed Cole) and produced a variety of films. But I first became aware of Alvie, through IABC, because of his contribution to internal communications.

On reading of his death, I checked Amazon.com to see if his book was still in print and found he had written other books during his retirement, including one called “The Joys of Growing Old,” which earned strong reviews from readers. It turns out that he had been through six major surgeries and had gone blind late in his life, yet never lost his sense of humor or his passion for life.

Godspeed, Alvie.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

One message does not fit all

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On episode 335 of The Hobson and Holtz Report, Eric Schwartzman shared bits of an interview he conducted with Maureen Kasper, senior director of communication at Cisco Systems. In the interview, Maureen addressed an issue that I’ll be talking about during my session tomorrow at the New Communications Forum: the blurring of the line between internal and external communications.

We did create content that was different—here’s the external face to something and here’s the internal face to something. I don’t think you can do that any more. It’s the same. It’s better communication. You’re not worrying about, “Am I thinking externally or am I thinking internally?” What you’re thinking about is, “What’s our message?”

Maureen noted that Cisco employees once criticized the company when they perceived they were getting the same spin on messages as external audiences. Now, she says, it’s a strength. “It goes back to transparency. What you say externally has to be the same as what you say internally, and vice-versa. If not, you’ll get found out very quickly.”

I agree—and I disagree. The core message absolutely must be consistent. The days are long gone (not that this was prudent or ethical behavior when those days still existed) when you could deliver one message to employees and another to, say, investment analysts:

Employees: We’re merging with Acme in order to absorb a major competitor and bolster our earnings.
Analysts: We’re merging with Acme because of the natural synergies between the two organizations and because we’ll be able to better serve the marketplace working together.

However, I don’t agree with the notion that you can craft a single communication for each audience. Whether or not you share your external communications with employees, they’ll see it—or, at least, have access to it. The message to analysts ends in analyst reports which find their way into investment blogs, the media message is published on news sites and from there into the blogosphere.

But employees still need the internal spin, and I’m using that word in the constructive sense. In a merger, analysts care about the impact on value and share price. Employees may also care about that—particularly if they own stock—but they have more immediate concerns that aren’t on the minds of other publics (including local communities, NGOs, activist groups, the government, and so on). They want to know about the security of their jobs, the status of existing projects, where they’ll wind up in the revamped structure of the new company and whether their benefits will change.

Spinning stories (in the good way) to accommodate the unique interests of each constituency is at the heart of effective communication. It’s why we research the audiences before we craft the communications.

By the way, I’m absolutely certain they do this at Cisco Systems and that Maureen didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Her remarks just led me to want to articulate this point of view, which also argues for the continued need for some traditional communication. A single blog post from the CEO about the merger just won’t get the right information into the right hands. Targeted communication can start targeted conversations among publics with different interests.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Who should own internal social media?

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I got a call from a Ragan reporter today. She’s writing about the debate evidently going on over at MyRagan, the communicator’s social network, over who should own internal social media.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? There’s still debate raging over who should own the intranet. (This is another topic of discussion I found at MyRagan, just to prove that it hasn’t been resolved yet.)

Specifically, this writer told me, there were three departments vying for control: Communications, Human Resources and IT.

My answer: The employees who use it own it.

That’s not the same answer that I give for intranet ownership, where a cross-functional governance model almost always produces the best results. For enterprise web 2.0, though, we’re not talking about a tool that will be used as a channel for traditional communications. We’re talking about employee social networks, employee blogs, wikis and other tools that allow employees to network among themselves.

Certainly, IT has a major role to play. HR needs to be involved from a policy standpoint, while communicators may have a good handle on how information moves through the organization, insight that would be helpful in putting together an effective suite of tools. All three departments had a hand in the introduction of social media to the intranet at Northwestern Mutual Insurance, with the communicator identifying the need. IT helped determine that an external hosting solution would be the best course, while HR ironed out issues with labor contracts and the like.

But once an enterprise web 2.0 solution is in place, it’s ideally the employees using it who will determine its evolution.

If you have social media behind the firewall at your company, who owns it?

Incidentally, I got a press release today touting a new Forrester study that claims spending on enterprise web 2.0 will grow 43% per year over the next several years, reaching $4.6 billion by 2013. The survey says 56 percent of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority this year.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Social media, intranets, and tools

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I’m getting a little tired of the chorus of voices that suggest companies take a step back from integrating social media into their intranets because, after all, social media are just tools. We need, the authors of these opinions insist, to focus on strategy in our internal communications.

I am a huge proponent of strategic communication. The approach taken to any communication challenge should be designed to meet measurable objectives. Those objectives need to support a broad strategy. And you should devise the strategy to reach a business goal. I always chuckle when I hear that a social media consultant on his first visit to a client, without any research to support the assertion, blurts out, “Your CEO should be blogging!”

But the wholesale rejection of social media from the enterprise because, well, they’re just tools misses a bunch of points. Most employees use social media for knowledge and information exchange with one another. The fear that democratizing publishing will somehow produce an army of citizen journalists all reporting reactive news just hasn’t materialized in the companies that have adopted social media. Meanwhile, most communicators that have integrated social media into their formal communications have, believe it or not, embraced a strategic approach. The tools of social media just work better than older tools for some communications.

There’s more: IT professionals surveyed by Forrester Research have found that social media do add add value through such measures as improved productivity. Employees will use it whether it’s formally introduced or not because it’s better for collaboration than existing resources.

But what bugs me most is the idea that a tool has no power. Taken individually, each social media tool probably should be viewed as “just a tool.” Collectively, though—and in the context of the conditions that led to their adoption—social media are turning communication models on their heads. Companies ignore the fundamental changes to communication at their peril. Conversation has become more important than message delivery, for example. In an interview John C. Havens conducted with Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz for our book, “Tactical Transparency,” Schwartz said that building a community of customers turns the company’s products into community assets. “Somebody who feels part of a community is going to be a much more aggressive evangelist for our products than someone who just paid $29.95 for it at a big-box retailer,” he explained.

And, of course, Sun is using social media with evangelical fervor, along with more conventional community-building tools.

Internally, social media engages employees in conversation more easily than older tools, which is likely to make them much more aggressive evangelists for the company and its plans than someone who gets a company magazine, regardless of how proactive the reporting is.

Besides, and correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t the printing press “just a tool?” Yet if you could ask anyone from Martin Luther to Thomas Paine about the power of print, they would most likely suggest the printing press, while just a tool, also changed history.

Social media are having just that kind of impact. They are tools, but they are also much, much more. I hate to throw out a cliche, but restricting our view of social media at work to the realm of “just tools” is a classic case of missing the forrest for the trees.

Friday, March 28, 2008

The social media manager debate: Can’t we get the fundamentals right first?

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Steve Rubel and Jeremiah Owyang are at odds over the future of a job labeled, “Social Media Manager.” The job description of a social media manager revolves around the coordination of a company’s activities in the social media space.

Steve believes the job will be extinct in short order:

Who should “manage” these sites? Is it the social media specialist or someone in PR with specific vertical sector expertise who also gets digital? My strong feeling is that it’s the latter.

Owyang—who held a social media manager position with a previous employer—disagrees:

While I agree that social media skills will eventually become a normal bullet point in nearly every marketing resume in the future, today, and (for) the foreseeable (future), we’re needed specializing for the following two reasons: 1) The specific duties are foreign to most other marketers 2) Online communities (like the support team) require a dedicated role.

It’s an interesting debate, but one that I believe misses a bigger picture. Jeremiah is right that full-time focus is required for some online communities. Even Southwest Airlines had to hire staff just to handle the moderation of comments to its blog, “Nuts About Southwest.” But Steve is also right that the day is coming when anybody engaged in communications will include online social skills in their toolkit, right along with good writing skills (the entry-level requirement).

Ultimately, though, whether engagement with people is online or off, social or traditional, one-way or multi-directional, multimedia or text, it all comes down to one thing:

Reputation.

I have heard calls for companies to create a C-suite position called “Chief Conversation Officer,” someone to manage the various online social channels that produce conversation. Again, that misses the point. What companies need is a Chief Reputation Officer to ensure all communication with core publics is coordinated in the company’s best interests.

This is not an original concept. Charles Fombrun, chief executive officer of The Reputation Institute and author of books like “Corporate Reputation,” has been proposing the job for years. To this position, through single- or double-solid-lines, would report anybody in the organization who engages with publics. The idea is not to make sure they all utter the same corporate jargon, but rather to make sure the company’s plans, strategies, values and actions are addressed honestly and consistently. A social media manager is a fine idea, but if he says, “Our product is shipping late because of manufacturing issues” while a media relations manager tells a Wall Street Journal reporter, “Our product is shipping late because we’ve had to redesign a part,” that inconsistency will spread through the cycle-less media space—online and off—like wildfire. Whether it’s conversation or a traditional press release, the communication channel must be used to communicate honest, transparent, accurate information.

Few organizations have anybody in a position like this. Even if there’s a senior-level public affairs person, Human Resources and employee communications often don’t report to him, and both communicate to vital publics (employees and prospective employees). Community relations often reports elsewhere, as does investor relations and government relations. And all those employees with their individual blogs? Who’s providing them with the resources they need to represent the company accurately and fairly?

Who ends up managing social media spaces is an interesting argument, but seems to me less important than making sure whoever does it is part of a network through which accurate and candid information is funneled. It’s time to look higher up and beyond the niche. We should get the basics right before worrying too much about the details.