It's awards season

Call me an aging communication nerd. I passed up watching the Oscars last Sunday to judge the Intranet feature and internal blog categories for the Ragan Recognition Awards.

I also spent a couple of evenings last week helping judge the publications category of IABC’s Gold Quill Awards. (It's heartening to note that the publications category still draws the most entries -- our group in Vancouver had over 120 publications to judge.)

I always jump at the chance to be a judge in communication award competitions. It’s a rare chance to take a close look at the work of other communicators – to see the kinds of challenges they’re facing and the solutions they come up with. I always learn something from my experience, and this awards season is no exception.  So here, in no particular order, are some observations:

1. When it comes to internal blogging, we’re still very much in the early days. Ragan received only two entries in the new category. They were both impressive and engaging, but also rudimentary and experimental. The communicators who put them together knew they would be learning as they went, and the blogs they initiated, although rough around the edges, reflected a positive, pioneering spirit. One of the measures of a good blog is whether it generates lots of comments, and by that measure the ones I judged were great, if somewhat clunky, successes. Interestingly, both blogs were written by communication staff members and not rank and file employees or executives. Both were quite transparent attempts to simply start a conversation by putting issues on the table and then inviting readers to comment. And comment they did, with some posts attracting close to 100 comments. Some good lessons for anyone considering starting an internal blog:

• Initially at least, expect a flurry of comments that don’t necessarily stay on the subject being discussed.
• You may also get a certain amount of bitching and complaining as people take advantage of having a new internal forum to voice their irritations with their employer and their workplace.
• Allowing anonymous postings tends to encourage comments, but here’s a good rule – if you’re allowing a mix of attributed and anonymous comments, allow immediate, unedited posts for those willing to identify themselves, and moderated posts for anonymous contributors.
• The blogs I saw had effective self-regulation. Comments that are out of line (rude, unreasonable, confusing) get shouted down, with different degrees of politeness, by other readers.
• Set out clear, sensible guidelines when you start the blog so everyone knows what to expect, and what’s expected of them one of the blogs I judged did a great job of laying out the ground rules.

2. There’s a lot of great writing on Intranets, but how much of it is being read? I was amazed by how much some of the writers could get done in a short Intranet feature. At this point Intranets are relatively mature channel and the entries I saw were quite effective in telling interesting and relevant stories. My biggest concern is that so much good work gets done on these things, and no one is reading them. If you’re trying to keep your Intranet content “fresh,” that means you’re highlighting articles on your portal for only a day or two, or sometimes a week, before they’re buried by other content and then relegated to some kind of archive. Readers of this blog know I’m passionate about this: it’s a crying shame that so many companies have abandoned the extremely effective print medium, which is still one of the best ways of sharing information with employees and creating a sense of community at work.

3. You don’t have to look good to be good. I’m big on using great design and compelling photos to help get information across to employees. And I know there’s a disheartening amount of really crappy looking publications out there, with tiny photos, bad typography, amateurish writing and so on. But one of the publications that I judged looked about as bad as a desktop published newsletter can look – but it succeeded because it had clear communication goals and delivered on them. On a shoestring budget, an editor who had to do triple duty as writer, photographer and layout person managed to strike a chord with readers and influence bottom-line results.

4. Anecdotes and quotes are perhaps the two most powerful things in written communication. Stories that have them, sing. Those that don’t, sink. I was reminded of this with every item I judged. There’s really no better way to make an article come alive than to focus on an individual who is experiencing change first hand. Tell that personal story, using the subject’s own words, and you will be a better communicator.

Comments

[Dave Traynor]

Great tips about getting your story out, Ron. One thing I'm curious about...did you judge the Ragan stuff using virtual tools? I'm assuming that you weren't down in Chicago over the weekend...

[Ron Shewchuk]

Yes, Dave, I used virtual tools -- pieces of paper! The work samples were provided by entrants as printouts and sent to me, and one blog came on a CD. I would have much rather been in Chicago, though.

[David Murray]

Hey, Ron, great post.

Here was my impression--this is published in this week's Ragan Report--of the awards, based on the category I judged.

David

The state of the feature story in employee publications: Too short! Just having finished judging the “feature story” category in the Ragan Recognition Awards, we’re at once inspired and dismayed by the state of the art. The best features we saw set out do what feature stories are supposed to do:
• Illuminate the organization’s history in a way that informs its present.
• Vividly show the truly interesting work that’s taking place in the organization.
• Profile particularly wise and colorful employees in a way that encourages individuals to bring their best selves to work.
So what’s got us down? Sure, in this batch we saw some buried leads, windy windups, missing nut-graphs and dull quotes. But it was the BEST features we saw that made us want to scream.
They need to be much longer! They’re feature stories for crying out loud! Reading these stories, we wondered whether there was a little-known clause in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that dictates that no employee publication story can be any longer than 750 words.
The trouble is, for an article to call itself a feature, it must be at least 750 words. And some of these subjects demand 1,000 or even 2,000 words.
Employees won’t read such long pieces, you say? Well we’re not recommending you turn your magazine into the New Yorker. But some subjects warrant longer pieces. And as long as the subject is relevant, employees are more likely to read occasional long pieces that give the writer room to breathe and the subjects room to ruminate than they are short pieces that choke the life out of interesting people and cut the legs off interesting stories.
A challenge: Look for one story this year—an innovation, a hero, a weird and wonderful work site—that deserves 2,000 or 2,500 words, and write it with all the rich detail it deserves. Make room for big photos and informative info-graphics and sidebars. Label it, apologetically, “In Depth.” Then in a prominent box at the end of the piece, list your e-mail address, telling employees you’d like to do more of these “In Depth” pieces, and solicit their story ideas. If you don’t get five or 10 good ones, we’ll eat all the words in this short item, which, at 410 words, is longer than several of the so-called “feature stories” entered into the Ragan Recognition Awards.

[Ron Shewchuk]

Thanks for sharing your impression, David. I agree -- too often we choke the life out of our stories by not leaving room for quotes, anecdotes, interesting details, sidebars and the rest of it. It's no wonder that so much stuff on Intranets is dull as dirt -- there's just no room for any of that when you have to keep everything to 300 words or less.

The key to interesting features is to make sure the subject material warrants the extra length. After reading your comments I feel kind of guilty; I'm editing an employee publication right now, and just recently advised the editorial team to keep their articles in the 300-600 word range. I did it because some of the stories that had come across my desk had been too long -- but that was because the material was not interesting enough to justify the "in depth" treatment.

So in tomorrow's team meeting I'll remind the group that the feature is not dead. In fact, I just talked to one of the contributing writers and pretty much gave her carte blanche to write to whatever length it takes -- the feature she's putting together is about the company's biggest project and it's rich with interesting angles and full of people with cool jobs. If it turns out the way I think it will, I might devote a four-page section to the feature so we have lots of room for text and big, meaninful photos.

I have aften said that the best way to communicate about what's going on in an organization is to tell the stories of change through the front-line people who are experiencing it. To make those stories real usually takes more than 500 words.

[David Murray]

As the old saying goes, if the only tool you have is a 350-word story, every problem looks like a nail.

Um.

[Ron Shewchuk]

True, true.

And if the only thing you can do that will make you look cool and modern is to scrap your print publication and put everything online, lots of communication problems get ignored.