For Your Approval

Second anniversary

Two years ago today I launched this blog. One hundred and seventeen posts, 263 comments and nearly 25,000 page views later, here we are. Not exactly sure where that is, but we are here nonetheless.

For Your Approval continues to be a great outlet for me to write about employee communications. Although comments are fairly sparse, they are almost always meaningful, and I truly appreciate the dialog whenever it happens. And I know there is a core group of readers out there who might not comment but keep on visiting, which I also appreciate.

In addition to those who read regularly and comment sporadically, my blog stats show that FYA is frequently visited by folks who are searching for info on employee engagement and internal communications, and I'm glad the blog is used as a resource.

I'm particularly grateful for the unexpected connections this blog has brought me. Without it, I might not have met Deakin Lecturer Ross Monaghan, who ended up helping organize a speaking tour for me in Australia last year that is one of the highlights of my professional career.

Later this year I'll do an online survey to find out more about the readers of this blog, what you like about it, and how I might be able to improve it. In the meantime, any comments or suggestions are welcome!

Thanks again for visiting, and thanks even more if you're a regular. I'm looking forward to celebrating year number three.

New media channels are indeed gaining traction

Erik Samdahl of the Seattle-based consulting firm, The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), saw my recent post listing my predictions for 2008 and responded with a thoughtfully targeted blog pitch.

My thanks to Erik for sending along a useful overview of recent research on the adoption of social media into the workplace, which comes in the form of a recent edition of i4cp's newsletter, Trendwatcher: Download trendwatcher_20071102_social_tools1.pdf

The evidence suggests that use of social media inside big organizations is trending upward, but isn't yet ubiquitous. We all kinda know that, but it's handy to have a roundup of statistical evidence to back up our instincts.

The i4cp was formerly known as Human Resource Institute (HRI). Eric tells me his firm "helps companies improve workforce productivity by providing a combination of research, peer communities, tools and technology to corporate executives and HR professionals." Good call on the name change. Human Resource Institute sounds like it might be run by Nurse Ratchet herself! Thanks again Erik!

Guru Ronnie on the year behind, and the year ahead

2007 was one of those seminal years in which technological changes, economic trends, generational shifts and business realities made employee communications people more nervous than usual about our place in the world.

We watched as the foofarah over social media came to a bubbly head, prompting those who were "in" to feel trendy and superior, and those who were "not in yet" to soften their skepticism and wonder if it's time to jump onto the bandwagon -- before it sinks, wheels spinning, into the mud of reality.

We worried that the continued globalization of the world economy would outsource all our jobs to Bangalore. (They can update Intranet sites from there, can't they?)

We felt puzzled and threatened by all those millennial kids coming into the workforce, with their goody-two-shoes Gen Y values and their canny ability to communicate with each other without the help of wizened, cynical intermediaries like us.

And we wondered how much longer we would be communicating about "employee engagement" before it gets replaced by another jargony term for the same vain attempts of large organizations to cope with the existential morass that is the modern workplace.

Well, it's pretty clear 2008 is going to be more of the same.

Woo hoo!

I say "Woo hoo!" because these anxiety-inducing trends are such gigantic, interesting challenges that there's truly no better time to be in internal communications. Never has what we do mattered so much. 

Before I decide what will happen in 2008, let me look back at what I saw coming in 2007. At the start of last year I made a bunch of pompous predictions, most of which were vague enough to keep me off the hook, 12 months later, as I freshly prognosticate again. The only prediction that I clearly blew was the most specific: that Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson would add another 50 episodes to the vast audio bank of their podcast, For Immediate Release. The prolific duo produced twice that, and Shel and Neville continue apace.

So, here are my predictions for 2008:

1. This will be the year that every Fortune 500 company, every government, every big NGO -- pretty much every organization with more than 200 employees -- will have a social media strategy, which will include an employee component. Some will dive in, others will dabble. But this trend will touch EVERYBODY in 2008. In February 2009 the Gold Quill Awards program will be swamped with social media entries, just as it was swamped with corporate Web sites in 1997.

2. Smart communicators will use this sweeping trend as an excuse to start a meaningful conversation with their CEOs about what it will take to connect with employees and build a strong internal community. Others will blindly do stuff just because it's trendy, wasting huge amounts of money and further alienating employees with needless information delivered in new ways.

3. Facebook will launch a sister network designed for business (along the lines of Linkedin, but better) that will become extremely popular, but will prompt many companies to install clunky internal social networks in a vain attempt to keep their "walled gardens" closed to the outside world. In a related trend, employees will start bringing their own wirelessly connected personal laptops to work so they can stay hooked up to their social networks during the day. Some will get fired for this, making headlines and inspiring others to follow.

4. There will be a global shortage of internal communicators. This will be driven by the rise of social media and the increasing desperation of corporate leaders as they try to figure out how to improve employee engagement. Salaries and job positions for employee comms professionals will finally begin to approach parity with external communications.

So, 2008, bring it on! I'm ready, and so are communicators everywhere. It's going to be one hell of a year.

 

The power of dialogue

One of my favorite blogs is Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine. He's a veteran writer, political agitator, social media evangelist and an insightful commentator on all the changes that are happening in conventional media.

His recent post about Dell and its foray into blogging is a great case study in how a company is embracing social media and engaging in a meaningful dialogue with its customers.

It's an inspiring story (one that's not over yet as Dell struggles to turn itself around), and it makes me wonder whether the same kind of changes will happen in big companies as they learn to listen to, and interact with, their employees. As employees become increasingly disengaged and companies struggle to reconnect with them, will internal blogs be part of the solution? I hope so, but I worry that it will take years, if not decades, for us to figure out how to use these tools. And I wonder who will be the first to hit a home run.

Or has someone hit it already?

Delightful connections

One of the greatest things about writing a blog is that it makes so many unexpected and delightful connections with people from all over the world.

My most delightful connection yet happened a few weeks ago, when Ross Monaghan, a lecturer at the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deekin University in Geelong, Victoria, Australia, connected with me through this blog. Ross is co-editor of an innovative podcast/blog called TheMediaPod, which describes itself as an "experimental and collaborative page written by public relations and journalism students and teaching staff at Deakin University."

The connection with Ross turned into a correspondence, which has now turned into a dream come true for me. Ross just let me know he has included my handbook, Writing and editing the Internal Publication, on the prescribed book list for his second semester unit, PR Writing & Tactics. There will be about 300 students in the unit.

When I wrote the book, I had a vague hope that it would some day be used as a teaching tool for communication students. Thanks, Ross, for the huge honour.

On a lighter note, here's another unexpected and delightful connection. Kommunicat, a blog based in Poland, recently featured a post in which the author, Kamil Borowiak, summarized (in Polish) a recent blog post from For Your Approval.

I was, of course, interested in how my words had been interpreted, so I ran Kamil's blog post through a free online translation site, with interesting results. Here's an excerpt from the translation:

"Here word is key community. Correction of mood caused is important challenge for communication in today's times pitiless reduction of cost, bureaucracy, deep change of brand value and very often bad management. They trust from one part of firm employee (staff) not up to the end."

Got a nice ring to it, don't it? Thanks, Kamil, for making the connection.

 

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.

Baby's first year

I posted the first entry in this blog one year ago today. Woo hoo!

With 64 posts, 145 comments, four trackbacks and 11,225 page views under my belt, I certainly can't claim to be the most popular blog on the Internet.

But (sour grapes aside) it really doesn't matter how many visitors you have; it's whether the blog means something to you and your readers. And I can tell from watching the traffic, and seeing the people who link to my blog, and reading the excellent comments and conversations that we've had over the past year, that this blog does mean something to you.

So thanks. It's been fun so far.

Thank you David, for showing me how a great blog is written.

Thank you Shel, for telling me I should have my own blog. You were right.

Thank you Shel and Neville, for For Immediate Release. Your crazy hobby keeps me interested and engaged in the new world of social media.

Thank you, Ricky, for leading the way into the blogosphere and sharing your adventures with the world.

Thank you Craig and John, for being there with great comments and helpful suggestions.

Thank you Kate, for being such an understanding wife, and such a superb and funny writer.

And, finally, thanks to everyone who ever clicked their way to this tiny corner of the blogosphere.

So here's to the second year of For Your Approval.

I'm glad you approve of this blog, and I look forward to earning that approval and carrying on the conversation in the months ahead.

Les Blogs!

No, not the conference in Paris -- Les Potter has a blog!

Les is one of the icons of the communications field, and he has mentored thousands of communicators (including me) through his active involvement in IABC over the years. I'm grateful that Les has decided to share his wit and wisdom in a blog, and I urge you to join me and welcome him at Les is More.

An enlightened advertiser

Advertisers are taking blogs more seriously these days.

I'm delighted to welcome my blog's first and only advertiser, CNW Group, Canada's best known information distribution service. I've used CNW for almost 20 years now and I've watched the company grow from a basic wire service to embrace all the newfangled ways of reaching audiences, including webcasts, conference calls and multimedia news releases.

Now, with a pilot program I'm proud to be associated with, CNW is reaching out to the PR blogging community with a clever ad that educates people about CNW's many services through an entertaining little online game/contest that will give players of Space Invaders a nostagic twinge.

I encourage you to click on the orange square to the right of this post and check it out. 

Crescenzo Unplugged

My old friend Steve Crescenzo likes to call himself the Winston Churchill of employee communications. Like Churchill, he's a blowhard, has a rapier wit, enjoys a drink and a cigar now and then, and likes going to war once in a while. And, of course, he's also a great speaker.

I imagine many of the readers of this blog have attended Steve's conference sessions and read his blog. But if you haven't heard Steve speak, here's a chance to get a taste of the man in action (that didn't come out right, but anyway....).

Visit a link to Steve's interview with Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz at In Session, the IABC conference blog or, if you have iTunes, search the podcast section for "In Session" and you can download it from there.

Steve's commonsense approach to employee communication is refreshing and enlightening, and his energy, enthusiasm and humor are enough to give even the most burnt-out, cynical communicators some inspiration and hope.