So much of the hullabaloo about social media is focused on the way brands engage with consumers that we often forget that these new Web technologies are great for internal communication, too. Having spent a good chunk of my career in employee communications, it’s an area that I know could benefit from a little more social sizzle.
Here are 6 ways to spice up an internal program:
- Video. How many employees actually read those 1,500-word missives that the CEO sends out each week or month (even if they’re craftily ghost-written by a communicator)? Probably not too many. Try recording the message with a Web cam instead. Execs will love it because it takes less time than the back-and-forth editing of a written piece, and employees will connect more with a real person talking to them than stiffly-written corporate updates. Embed the video on the company intranet and allow employees to rate or comment on it.
- Wikis. Version control on a document has been the downfall of many a project. When you have a dozen people working across continents and time zones, e-mailing around a document for review can result in a mishmash of comments and input. Set up an internal wiki for a project that allows team members to edit, review, comment and approve aspects of a project so that everyone’s on the same page.
- Internal networks and directories. A great feature of the Web is it’s ability to exploit the “weak ties” among people. A product developer in India may be struggling with a problem that a technologist in Brazil has expertise in. Create an employee skills database that’s internally searchable and allows them to fill out a profile with their interests, expertise and qualifications and post requests. Don’t have the resources to build out your own system? Try creating a private LinkedIn Group for your employees (just make sure they’re not sharing information that’s company-sensitive).
Gather Feedback. Think of what Ford is doing with the Fiesta Movement: allowing a select group of people the opportunity to test a product, provide feedback, and share their experiences. Why not do this with employees? If you’re thinking of implementing a new system or policy, pilot it at a single location first, but allow the employees there to publicly express their thoughts about it via an internal microsite. Most importantly, listen. Take their feedback to heart and make changes to the program before it’s rolled out company-wide.- Develop knowledge communities. Create forums for a particular function, process, location or project and allow employees to ask and asnwer questions. Incentivize them for participating — not necessarily with money or reward — it can be as simple as giving them points or a ranking based on their answers (think Yahoo! Answers). Make it easy for employees to draw on their coworkers’ knowledge and show off their own.
- Mobile messaging. Create a short-code system for employees to get messages on their mobile phones. Inclement weather? Let them know the parking lot won’t be plowed and they can work from home (score!). Alert them of urgent, time-sensitive news. Use this platform sparingly (text message still cost many users money, so make sure it is opt-in). For a distributed workforce that may not be at a computer very much (like a field sales team or line manufacturers), text messaging can be a good way to reach employees with must-read news.
What else have you got? How have you seen Web 2.0 concepts used innovatively for internal communication?
Image via Flickr user ..Lodi
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I like the idea of using Social Media inside the corporate firewall. Specifically on the video piece we have run into constant battles about bandwidth. When you have many small locations the distribution becomes an infrastructure nightmare. I imagine with one, or a few, large distributed offices that goes away.
Firewalls and bandwidth issues can be a real headache for internal communicators who are trying to push the envelope. And companies are usually loath to allow video to be hosted on external sites (like Viddler or Vimeo) even if they’re protected/private. Fortunately, it seems that it keeps getting easier to distribute video online, as capacity increases and relative file sizes decrease. Another option is to look at audio/podcasting if video is too much of a bandwidth hog on your company’s internal system.
Hi Amy. Thanks for sharing. I like the knowledge community idea – specifically the ranking part.
Kind regards, Rachel
I think it’s also critical to keep the culture and demographic of your internal customer in mind when you’re considering shaking up internal comms with new technology. We recently surveyed our franchisees to see how they preferred to recieve communication, and they overwhelmingly said that they’d read something before they watched a video. This suprised us somewhat, but when you look at our demographic base, this makes sense.
Of course, there’s also something to be said for shaking things up anyway. If people haven’t experienced a system, tool, or tactic for internal messages, test them out and just see how it goes. I think internal communucation is interesting, because really, it’s perhaps a much “safer” place to test new ideas but we tend to just stick to the same old, same old.
Internal needs innovation, too!
Tiffany – Absolutely! Not all solutions work for all organizations. It’s good to survey your audience, as you did, to get a sense for their preferences. But I’m with you on trying new things and experimenting. Sometimes shaking things up is exactly what leads to a culture change. A group of employees may state that they prefer one method over another without ever really having been exposed to the other. Talented internal communicators find that balance between giving employees what they want and pushing the envelope with new tactics that it may take a while for employees to get comfortable with.
Amy,
I love the Wiki idea! I’m using Google docs now, but the wiki might be a great idea in the future.
Also, people LOVE video. It doesn’t have to be fancy at all to be effective.
Great list – going to see how a few of those might be able to fit into our internal marketing efforts!
Sometimes the fancy, slick videos are the least effective. A quick, amateur video of an executive leader delivering a message, while it may not be lit properly or have the perfect sound quality, can seem a little more authentic. And it’s usually a lot more timely – fancy videos take a while to produce.
Great post Amy. I really like the CEO video aspect and have brought it up for discussion with my boss, who is looking into it.
I hope that it works out! You’ll have to report back and let us know if he went for it.
Amy,
Great ideas – we’re planning to use Microsoft SharePoint as a platform to help us roll out a lot of wiki and rss feed-type things in the next year or so, which is a big help for a company like ours where we operate on an internal network without any connectivity to the Internet.
Another idea that we implemented recently was to start a blog with our General Manager, which would be similar to your video recommendation. Our employees love hearing what’s on his mind and have even started e-mailing him comments directly. It’s been a great way to bridge the gap between the head of the company and the individual worker. Our General Manager loves having a direct connection to his employees – and the best part is, he writes them himself with minimal editing from the communications group, which makes his message much more authentic.
Thanks for stopping in, Michelle. An internal blog is another great way for management to connect with employees in a more authentic way. The thing I worry about with internal CEO blogs is the time commitment – many of them don’t have it. Not only do they need to develop blog topics and write posts but for it to be really effective they should keep up with comments, as well. I know of a few organizations that actually have the CEO audio-record posts and then transcribe them to save time. But one tactic that makes me uncomfortable is when a communicator completely ghost-writes the entire blog and moderates comments. It somehow goes against the spirit of blogging for me – even though I recognize that many other forms of internal communication (like a CEO email or newsletter column, for example) are ghost-written. You’re very fortunate that your GM enjoys blogging and can do so effectively without a platoon of communicators at his side!
As we all consider the increasing number of communications channels with which to convey messages to our internal audiences, we must consider two important things. People consume information in different ways (that’s nothing new). But, in this modern communication era, the same person will fluctuate in their information consumption habits. No longer can we assume that when an employee/member/associate responds in a survey that they prefer video, that they will prefer video in all cases.
What we practice at HNTB (and we all know this) is to multi-channel the same message. Use the CEO’s Web cam message AND an audio podcast for those with bandwitch problems AND the CEO’s written piece AND an online news story on the intranet about the same content. This gives our employees the choice of how and when they want to consume the information.
This is not far from what Don Ranley teaches about for a print story. He taught me long ago to give the reader multiple points of entry into the story. Hey, the reader may not read from top to bottom, so give them multiple ways to enter the story and still gain something meaningful if they don’t read it all. We simply apply this principle more broadly. We view all of our internal communications as a network and simply brodcast the same message through our radio, TV, print and online channels of our network. Employees simply chose which they use.
Thanks for giving us some insight into how you manage internal comms at HNTB, Dan. Multi-channeling can be an effective way to reach an audience that has diverse preferences for how they consume content. Just curious – how do you measure which channel is most used among your employees? Do you have any data that shows over time that employees have migrated from one channel to another? It would be interesting to see which channels are most popular and if that changes based on the type of message (e.g., is benefits info via written messages on the intranet but operating/performance info is more popular via a video format).
hi, amy.
these are great ways for companies to facilitate, not direct the conversation. some companies are also seeing a bottom-up approach where the employees are using the tools first. i think we’ll see a lot more of this, as employees know of the tools and their potential usefulness from their everyday lives. vodaphone is the most recent example i know of. employees there started using twitter for r&d and collaboration before the organization broadened its application. there’s a link to this info in a post i recently (finally!) wrote brainstorming ways twitter could be used with internal comms
(http://bit.ly/210XP7). since we chatted about this a while back, i’d be interested in your thoughts.
cheers, f
As smart as it is to multi-channel, it makes measurement a real headache. When we conduct quantitative and qualitative internal research, we ask fewer questions about channel preferences than we used to. Instead, we prefer to conduct research to measure message comprehension and not about which channel, since we already know our internal audiences consume information on all channels, but to different degrees in different situations.
We could find out if employee X prefers video for executive communications, wants an online intranet story for employee profiles, wants an e-mail broadcast for internal announcements and prefers a podcast for feature stories. But, determining this is a monumental task. However, designing communications for 4,000 employees who’s communications-preference matrix is different and fluctuating is simply impossible. So, our solution is to send the same messaging out on all the channels and allow the employee to self select.
Now, we as internal communicators are ultimately concerened (or should be) with message comprehension. This is what we chose to measure more so than channel preferences. If we’re multi-channeling, we’re guaranteed to use the most effective channel for the greatest number in our audience. Since we’re multi-channelling, we don’t worry about channel migration which allows us to concentrate our efforts on the actual message and less about the channel.
I should point out an important fact for our internal communications. Professional services firms (PR agencies, law firms, engineering firms, etc.) generate revenue by billable hours. This is a significant hurdle for an internal communicator. How would you feel if you knew that the company was losing money when your audience stopped to read, listen, watch your communications? We cannot bill the time our engineers spend keeping up on internal information. Therefore, we must design communications to be consumed through means the engineer can work into their day and have the least negative impact on the company’s billable hours. This supports another of Don Ranley’s tenants: respect the reader’s time.
Again, we’re less concerned with channel preferences than we are about message comprehension, which is what we measure. And, as expected, an audience has better comprehension when they consume information in a manner they select.
Hope that helps,
Dan
Oops, typo alert in previous reply, sorry!
We are looking at expanding our internal communication and the use of social media for employees and this is helpful.