Find out easily if your message hit the mark or not

Snap Comms just rolled out a new Report which is worth its weight in gold for communicators.

Now Admins can find out in 4 clicks whether their scrolling news ticker, alert, desktop poll or quiz was delivered, displayed, opened, and acted upon.  They can even drill down to individual employees and see who’s ignoring actionable items.

Measuring the basics like message delivery and subsequent employee action in response to corporate annoucements/updates has been rather difficult for most internal communicators. I hope our tools make it significantly easier to figure out if messages reach their target.

(Available to all our hosted customers NOW – check your Content Manager.)

This puts us even further ahead of email as a channel, don’t you think?  I wonder what it would take to regularly measure the following for every email:

Here’s a good video with personal examples of how top executives see very clearly the impact and cost of Information Overload in their own work.  It’s from Basex, a leading knowledge economy research firm.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=1897651&dest=-1]

Every person in an organization has knowledge and information that’s extremely valuable in the right context. Companies internally are capturing  more and more of it and making it accessible, thanks to smarter intranets, wikis, blogs, collaboration tools, etc.

While we’re making oceans of information available to employees, it’s clearly a struggle to enable people to tap into the GOOD stuff that’s useful to them at the right time. And the stuff that’s good for one person, isn’t necessarily good for another. (If I’m in distribution, I’ll need a very different set of information than the person in corporate sales, for example).

It seems to me that in this context of Information Overload,  the internal communications function is more important than ever: it’s I.C.’s job to put forth and highlight the small percentage of stuff  that IS good for all employees (in the company/dept/area they’re responsible for), isn’t it?  

It’s no wonder initial research points to a positive ROI for quality employee communications: see the 2007/2008 Watson Wyatt Study.

Thoughts, anyone?

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!

As an Employee Communicator, responsible for getting important company info out to staff, what can you do to reduce email overload?

HOW TO REDUCE EMAIL OVERLOAD INTERNALLY:

1. Control the distribution lists.

If your company has more than 100 staff, it’s time to limit access to distribution lists. Making it harder to email the entire dept/company/division is a good thing: when it’s easy, everyone does it without thinking very much, and it’s harder to get critical stuff noticed after a while, more and more gets sent as a result… voila, email overload.

Having a gatekeeper for email distribution lists gives you the opportunity to:

• Green light/Red light. Determine if the message is important enough to merit its own individual email or if it should be published in another channel (i.e. in the weekly news bulletin, on the intranet homepage, etc.).
• Sanity check the actual content. Review and revise the message content  if needed, to make it clear, concise, and relevant to the audience.
• Schedule. Send the message at an appropriate time, being aware of any other emails set to hit employees’ inboxes. 

2. Consolidate company news and announcements.

More and more companies are summing up company news and announcements in a single daily or weekly electronic bulletin. This cuts down on interruptions, takes less time, and (if done right) helps employees absorb the information.

Keep these points in mind:

• Create decent Headlines. If you use a generic headline like “Daily Digest for March 27th”, expect a drop off in readership by about the third issue.  Instead, list the top 3 items in your headline: “DD: new CFO announced, is
  

  Visually-rich bulletins are easier to read

  your bonus safe, new Fortune 100 signed on”. You’ve a much better chance of attracting attention.

• Use HTML – make it visual, please! Bold and spacing will only take you so far. Include thumbnail images, decent visual formatting to cue the eye, and lots of hyperlinks to more detail.
• Keep items short – hyperlink to full articles on the intranet if you have to.
• Measure – find out which items employees read and which ones they like. Track click-throughs and let them rate articles.

3. Establish consistent guidelines and practices for senders.

Quite a few corporate-level communicators have told me that they only look after corporate emails and have little idea what emails are sent by departments, divisions, and local offices. If you have Communicators or Coordinators looking after email broadcasts for a portion of staff, TRAIN THEM, TOO. 

Provide email guidelines that include considerations/best practice for content, structure, frequency. If your company is Web 2.0 enabled, establish a Comms forum for them, where they post examples, questions, problems, suggestions.

4. Convert information to “PULL”. 

For the 80% of information that is not time critical or applicable to all staff, put it on the intranet and let employees subscribe to subject matter updates or use RSS to pull what interests them as it becomes available.   Read more on this here.  As it becomes possible for employees to ‘pull’ more of what they need to do their jobs (and less gets blanket-emailed), the remaining information that needs to be ’pushed’ out will have  a bit less competition .

5. Give employees a better outlet for ‘broadcast’ messages

We’ve rationalized official corporate emails; now it’s time to tackle another big offender: employee’s broadcasts. These email blasts concerning girl scout cookie sales, sponsorship for a charity fun run, and company softball team, bypass distribution lists – employees simply add the names of the 50+ colleagues they can think of at the time. Set up another channel and get these out of email altogether.

• Set up an electronic bulletin board, an internal craigslist, or even a shared email folder where these types of announcements get posted.
• Gently establish that it’s no longer OK to email these kind of announcements farther than your immediate team (and explain why).

What do you think? Anything I’ve missed?

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)