Excerpt from our October 1st press release (representing SnapComms in the U.S.):

Goleta, CA and Auckland, New Zealand (PRWEB) October 1, 2009 — SnapComms (http://www.snapcomms.com) announced today that it recently signed a contract with Cox Communications, the third-largest cable television company in the United States, for the delivery of internal messaging and corporate screensaver software.

interactive corporate screensavers

Rella Stone, Senior Manager, Information Security at Cox Communications, answered a few questions regarding the project:

Q: What business issue does the internal communications software address?
A: We have flexible work options at Cox as well as a large mobile workforce. We were looking for a cost-effective way to reach everyone, both globally and for targeted messaging.

Q: What are you planning to use the communications tools for?
A: Our initial use will be for security awareness messaging.

Q: What you do think the benefits will be?
A: We want to see increased visibility of security awareness messaging for all employees, more visibility for urgent messages, and a much better ability to target messages to specific groups based upon business need.

Q: Why did you choose this particular communications software?
A: The main selling point for us was the flexibility of content administration and targeted messaging. We prefer to be a corporate office that partners and collaborates with our field locations.

Here’s the full press release:  http://www.prweb.com/releases/internal/communications/prweb2974084.htm

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).

1. Use color?
2. Have a consistent structure?
3. 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?

                     

A recent article on Ragan.com about “Why Employees Don’t Read Your Emails – and What to Do About it” was very enlightening, not for its familiar recommendations, but for the reader comments: 

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. 

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.