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. 

1. Chuck Gose, Media Tile, also formerly worked in Internal Comms at Rolls-Royce and General Motors.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4ei1mFB71Q]

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?  

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUbPvKxHJiA&feature=channel]

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?

2. Jeremy Schultz, Employee Communications at Intel

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TvlaGIeKlI&feature=channel]

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…” 

3. Paul Barton, ABC, Director, Employee Communications at Hawaiian Airlines

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9WWseisVyM&feature=channel]

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.

4. Dave Meyer, President at Bizzyweb, previously in Retail Communications at US Bank

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbuTyERUjW4&feature=channel]

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.

In light of last month’s news that Oracle is acquiring Sun and will have to make more cuts, I wonder about the direction the new company will choose for internal communications. Hopefully we’ll get a glimpse into decisions and strategy, once the change is all done and dusted and employees are free to talk about it.

Over the past year and a half, Sun has been actively sharing their approach to employee engagement/communications and building internal communities.  Their commitment to employee engagement, productivity, collaboration and innovation are impressive.  (Just do a Google search on ’sun employee communications’ and you’ll see lots more.) 

I saw Sun as a portent of the future: social media (+ probably comms technology like ours) morphing traditonal, hierarchichal, silo’ed corporations into next-gen companies where employees are personally/emotionally connected to the business and empowered to innovate/contribute to change. 

The Fast Company article a few months ago on Cisco showcased another technology company going the same route.  The Authentic Enterprise Report from the Arthur W. Page Society also gives a great analysis of how companies need to open up and communicate authentically with customers, employees and stakeholders if the want to survive and thrive in the future.

But engaged, collaborating employees and honest, authentic communications weren’t enough to save Sun or help it evolve fast enough to survive, were they? 

I still believe that employee engagement is a fundamental part of business success, and social media will profoundly change internal communications as we know it today.  However, employee engagement and great internal comms are not magic bullets able to ensure a company’s survival no matter what. Unfortunately for us.

Yesterday we gave a free, 30- minute webinar aimed at helping you communicate out to dispersed salesforces. Here’s a condensed summary of what was said.

Take a good, thorough look at what you’re ‘pushing’ out.  By evaluating and honing not only your message but HOW and WHEN you send it and what you actually want readers to do with it, you can drive down sales cycles, improve take up of promotions, and also engage employees more deeply.

The 5 aspects to consider:

1. MEASURE – measure and benchmark readership, click-throughs, surveys responses, and other activity resulting from your push communications. Figure out what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ response rate.

2. CONTEXT – investigate what else is being pushed to your salesforce: by whom, how often, at what times. Profile your audience and communicate in ways they prefer. Evaluate your supporting resources (is the intranet rather crappy, so you need to send pdfs with details? Or should you simply hyperlink to the resources). 

3. MESSAGE – there are great resources out there to help you craft great content and maximize your chances of it being read and absorbed. See the IABC Report: Preparing messages for Information Overload Environments for six key recommendations; a great starting point. (Available free to IABC members, non-member click here.)

4. CHANNEL – while most push communications still go out in good-ol email, there are many, many ways to deliver your message. Consider using a combination of several messages and evaluate for 5 criteria.

5. INVITE INTERACTION – ‘push’ communications has changed: nowadays it needs to include an invitation to participate/communicate back.  More than ever we expect and enjoy contributing our comments to articles, posting our thoughts on Twitter/Facebook, and being acknowledged for it.  Align with this changing landscape to meet employees’ expectations but also to gain valuable insight and knowledge that often can be applied to the business in valuable ways.  Send your broadcast communications’ to knock over the first domino in a chain rather than to sledgehammer your audience with your info.

With that in mind, we invite you to have a look through the slides and contribute your thoughts on whether they make sense, if we’ve missed anything, or another aspect of the topic. Thanks!

Here’s the rationale:  (thanks @yammer_team!)
yammer_team @paulasnap On Yammer the Recipient gets to choose what content they receive by following tags, people, groups. Email – the Sender decides. 3:52 PM Dec 17th, 2008 from web in reply to paulacassin

Now, I love Twitter and also Yammer, don’t get me wrong! They’re great tools.
But for email overload, here’s the main problems with the argument:

Corporate emails won’t stop! People won’t stop emailing you those corporate broadcast messages you don’t want, or CC’s to cover their butt, or the monthly HR newsletter – they’re going to adjust to using two channels (email and Yammer) to try and cover everyone they want to hit.

Think Info Overload, not just Email Overload

Full adoption?  The two-channel approach will stop only when you have full employee take up of Yammer. Face it: it’s going to be a long while before full adoption, maybe never. (Think of your colleagues who haven’t even heard of Twitter, can’t figure out how to subscribe to a Youtube channel, and have a cellphone for emergencies that they never turn on.)

Most email is simply replaced by Yammer.  You may lose a portion of email noise by not following everyone, but you’re probably going to follow your closest colleagues creating the majority of your individual email load. And the email noise that does disappears is negated anyway by:

An increase in overall messages. If you get one less email but 5 Yammers instead, is this reducing information overload? People will send a lot more stuff on Twitter or Yammer that they would never email;  you know it’s true!  (”Spaghetti is good today in the cafeteria…I’m struggling with my business case for Project B…Who messed up the bathroom stalls on the 2nd floor? Gross..”)

So while I’m hooked on micro-blogging and convinced it has immense value in the enterprise, the value won’t be found combatting email overload.

Look for value here, instead: fostering collaboration, increasing knowledge-sharing, building engagement, improving overall productivity, saving massive amounts of money on Web 2.0 projects.

(my next post: what really DOES reduce email overload)

I can’t wait until Monday, June 23rd, when we launch our new web 2.0 tool, Snap Interactive.

We’re attending and exhibiting at the IABC International Conference in New York, and will officially announce our new tool there.  It solves a couple of common problems faced by communicators attempting to deploy blog-type tools in house.

If you’re attending the conference, please come by stand 202 in the Exhibit Hall and ask us about it.  We’re offering an extended free trial to any company represented at the IABC Conference…