For Your Approval

Jarvis nails it

BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis is an insightful commentator on the state of today's media. In a recent speech at the VON (Video on the Net) conference in Boston, he said:

"We debated for decades in media whether distribution is king or content is king. Turns out neither is. Conversation is the kingdom. Trust is king."

This little wisdom nugget applies to internal communication, too. In our world we debate about the effectiveness of print vs. online, and worry about finding content to fill the 'news hole.' Now we have the new tools of social media. Let's use them to nurture dialogue and build trust, not as another way to shovel more content at people.

Kate wins a big award

My darling wife, Kate Zimmerman, has won Best Food Feature in a Magazine from the U.S.-based Association of Food Journalists in its 2006 competition. The award was open to magazines of every size across North America. Results of the competition were announced on September 16th at the AFJ Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Kate won for a feature she wrote for Wine Access magazine, called Reign of Terroir, about the effects of terroir on artisanal cheese. Kate's in good company. Last year’s winner in the same category was chef, author and TV host Anthony Bourdain, for a piece that appeared in Food Arts.

Kate's been writing great stuff for many publications for many years, but this is her first award, and it's well deserved. Read the article on Kate’s blog.

The Red Pen Diaries #1

(This is the first installment of a slightly fictionalized account of my adventure as the temporary editor of an employee newsletter. Names have been changed but not much else.)

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My biggest client is having a staffing crisis. For various reasons Big Division’s communications department is three or four people short, including the burned out editor of the weekly print newsletter, Plant Site News, who has transferred to another job.

So, for the umpteenth time in my long and sordid career, I find myself stepping into the breech to become the editor of another employee publication.

It’s an interim job – I’ll be looking after the publication for a couple of months while my client finds a candidate to fill the vacant editor position.

At first glance it’s a bit of overkill to use a senior consultant like me to edit an internal publication. But there’s a plan to revamp employee communications at BigCo and I’ve been asked to help with the overhaul. Taking the helm of the flagship division’s publication for a few weeks should give me some insights into how the organization currently communicates, and what might need changing or improving.

In the meantime, starting next week, I have a newsletter to put out. As I write this blog post, the outgoing editor is laying out her last edition. Since I arrived yesterday I’ve been going through the administrative motions to get myself an I.D. card, site pass, company laptop, e-mail and voicemail. Although I’m a contractor, for the next while I’ll be working on this assignment full time, spending two or three days a week at the plant site and the rest of the time working out of my home office.

After three years of being a completely independent sole practitioner, it feels strange getting my photo taken for a company badge. I feel the warm yet strangling embrace of mother BigCo and I am nostalgic and fearful at the same time.

Yesterday I met with the editor for a briefing on the publication, a classic 8-page, 8.5” x 11” house organ that’s been published every Thursday without fail since 2001. It’s packed with just about everything one would expect from a company rag: weekly production numbers, updates on various projects, safety tips, upcoming events, new hires and service anniversaries, HR stuff on pensions and benefits, and so on.

It’s a busy publication – so busy that the outgoing editor suffered burnout after only a year in the job. In some ways Plant Site News is a victim of its own success. Lots and lots of people sending in stories to the point where it’s all the editor can do to keep up with the material coming in. There’s not much planning beyond getting a grip on the week ahead. No written purpose or content guidelines. Just a steady stream of information coming in, and a hard deadline every week to get it out.

When you publish that regularly, for that long, you have content providers who expect their stuff to get in the newsletter, and you’ve got a readership that expects its Thursday information fix. I feel the pressure already.

This is going to be a living, breathing hell. And it’s also going to be a lot of fun.

Let the meatgrinder begin.

Your Master's Voice

Most CEOs don't write everything they say. They don't always have time, and some are not good writers. So they turn to us communicators, and we draft things for them. 

We fabricate quotes for news releases. We write speeches. For internal audiences, we draft the annual Christmas message, the CEO column in the newsletter, the town hall speech, the downsizing memo.

As long as the CEO is engaged in the process and cares about what he or she is communicating, this is not a bad thing. Some of the most fulfilling moments of my career have been when I'm helping a CEO be a better leader. "Shewchuk, you wrote the best words anyone has ever put in my mouth," said one CEO to me. That was a good day.

Putting words in CEOs mouths is a huge responsibility. With every word he or she says, employee trust is on the line. If for one second a leader sounds phony, disingenuous or bureaucratic, that trust begins to erode. Employees have extremely sensitive b.s. detectors, and when the alarm goes off, all ears are closed.

So it was with great interest that I read the quote of the day in today's New York Times. It's about 9/11, of course:

"For all Americans, this date will be forever entwined with sadness. But the memory of those we lost can burn with a softening brightness."
      - Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg

NOT. That was finely pureed b.s. coming from the overpaid fingertips of the Mayor's speechwriter. It's a 'thousand points of light' for our time. And it's a little reminder that speechwriters should try to write things that their speaker might actually  say. Not only does it not sound like Bloomberg, it's just bad writing.

Don't get me wrong. A great speech can contain unusual and profound language that one would not hear in everyday conversation. JFK would never had said to his son, "Ask not what your mother can do for you. Ask what you can do for your mother." But it worked well in a speech.

But I digress. The point is, when you're writing for someone, write in his or her voice, not your own.

 

Back in the saddle

Memories of my family's Maui vacation are fading as quickly as my tan as I re-enter the daily life of a communications consultant.

I've got a few projects on the go. One is to help write a newsletter feature that's a  follow-up to a  series of successful employee meetings held by one of my clients over the summer.

It's an assigment that internal communicators dread. See if you recognize this scenario: At each employee meeting there's a lively Q&A session in which executives answer a wide range of questions from the floor. At the end of each session, the CEO thanks everyone and then promises that "We'll make sure all the questions and answers from all our sessions are published in an upcoming edition of the newsletter [or Intranet site, or whatever]."

That's when the employee communicator in the room swallows hard. The breezy Q&As with their sometimes long-winded, indirect answers have to be summarized in print. Which means drafting  something that's shorter than the live answer, but longer and wordier than anything else that appears in the publication, then going through the usual complicated approval process, and then, finally, weeks after the meeting, publishing the feature, which is bureacratic in tone and doesn't really capture the spirit of the answers that were heard at the session.

I know the CEOs who promise these things have their hearts in the right place. They want to be inclusive. They want to provide a reference employees can turn to for answers to important questions. But is this kind of follow-up a useful exercise? Isn't communication supposed to be a continuum? Is it worth trying to capture and freeze so much information in one place? Didn't the Q&A sessions themselves serve their purpose?

The next time I'm involved in one of these things I'm going to try to coach the executives not to promise a print follow-up. The exercise takes up too much time and resources, and is of limited value to employees.

Or not. Am I just whining? What is your experience with these kinds of things?