May 08, 2012

How communication's breakneck pace affects your program

On Thursday I’m leading a workshop on “7 trends that will rock employee communication in the future” so, as you might expect, external communication trends that are affecting internal communication have been top of mind. That’s why this Adweek piece, The 140-character-or-less campaign, caught my eye.

Naturally, I only had a few minutes to skim it (who has time to read these days, after all?) but even a quick scan spoke volumes about how quickly communication moves these days—in the presidential campaign, for sure, but on nearly every topic. Consider these snippets:

“It took a mere one hour and 24 minutes for Mitt Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom to mount a Twitter offensive against Hilary Rosen after the Democratic strategist’s incendiary remarks on CNN last month about Romney’s wife Ann never having worked “a day in her life.” And, as writer Charlie Warzel puts it, 84 minutes may be too slow as the campaign moves forward.

“Part of the reason for Twitter’s accelerated importance in the zeitgeist of political coverage stems from its stunning growth over the past three years. Last March, the company announced that it had achieved 140 million active users, up from 100 million last fall. Every day, Twitter hosts roughly 340 million new tweets.”

While it took Twitter “three years, two months and one day to serve up 1 billion tweets; it now does that volume every three days.”

As Charlie Warzel puts it: “Welcome to the digital democracy, where Twitter has become a veritable particle accelerator for news cycles and political battles. The social media platform has given way to a ceaseless torrent of inside-baseball minutiae and partisan nitpickery. It is the home of meaningless scooplets and high-profile dustups. It is, for better or worse, the center of the political conversation, and it is transforming the way political campaigns and those who cover them do business.”

You can bet this “particle accelerator” (I love that term) is already influencing employee expectations about internal communication. If you ask employees in most organizations, they’ll say that internal communication is too slow, too late and too long. “Why can’t communication be more timely and accessible?” complain employees—like Twitter, like political coverage, like external media.

The question for you: How can you pick up the pace of your communication?

Posted by Alison Davis at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2012

Somewhat satisfying survey

On my way to a speaking engagement last week, I decided I needed markers and flipchart paper to make sure my interactive session was . . . well, interactive. So I ducked into a Staples store to snag the supplies.

I found what I needed (plus some colorful pens I had to have), then checked out. As the sales associate handed me the receipt, she circled the section that read, “Your opinion counts . . .” and encouraged me to take the survey because “you can win $5,000.”

(Separate topic: Does anyone ever win the $5,000?)

So yesterday afternoon I took the survey. And discovered that Staples uses a really odd multiple-choice scale.

For each statement question (like this: “An associate showed me where to find what I needed),” the choices are these: Extremely satisfied, somewhat satisfied, Satisfied, Somewhat dissatisfied, extremely dissatisfied, not applicable.

Here’s the problem: “somewhat satisfied” seems so much worse than “extremely satisfied.” Come to think of it, extreme satisfaction is a state that would be very difficult to achieve in an office supplies store. Actually, it’s barely attainable in any retail store. Maybe Nordstrom? Tiffany, if you had an unlimited budget?

So I answered “somewhat satisfied” because the associate did answer my question but he didn’t knock my socks off. But here’s the annoying part. My response triggered a follow-up question: “You answered ‘somewhat satisfied.’ What improvements could we have made to make you ‘extremely satisfied?”

Such a straight line. If Staples hired George Clooney to help me with my supplies—that would be extreme satisfaction. Anything less, and my satisfaction is merely “somewhat.”

My point, of course, is that in measurement, the words you use to define your scale really matter. And “extreme” can be appropriate to describe bungee-jumping, but it’s probably not appropriate for most other experiences.

Posted by Alison Davis at 08:07 AM | Comments (1)

April 17, 2012

Why trends in (external) media matter to internal communication

Last week I was a panelist at an IABC New Jersey program on the future of newsletters (in a social media era), and one participant asked the speakers this question: “What do you read to keep current on communication channels?”

It could have been a Sarah Palin moment (“Newspapers? No, wait . . . I’m sure I can think of one.”) but luckily my brain became unstuck and I began to list some of my go-to sources for inspiration. Beyond the usual suspects (IABC and PRSA continue to have valuable content), I realized that my most valuable information comes from experts in marketing and external media.

Why external media? Because, unlike Las Vegas, what happens in external media doesn’t stay there. Instead, the challenges and successes that occur in media and, even more importantly, the way that people experience media, all have an impact on internal communication. After all, employees bring their expectations to work.

That’s why this post on online media site GigaOM resonated with me. According to author Matthew Ingram, the future of media equals “many small pieces, loosely joined.”

What’s happening in media today, writes Ingram, is that the old concept of a media bundle—all the news and information in one package, like The New York Times or CNN—is eroding. Ingram quotes Meinolf Ellers, the managing director of German multimedia agency dpa-infocom: “The more we see the bundle losing market share and reaching the end of its lifecycle, the more we have to work on smaller, fragmented products that, not each by each, but overall, can compensate. That’s the strategy.”
The future of media, then, is not a collection of neat bundles, carefully tied with string. Instead, Ingram predicts that media will be more like a phrase that David Weinberger, co-author of the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, came up with to describe how the Web works: He called it “small pieces, loosely joined.”

“This is the idea that the Web allows for individuals and small groups or entities to have almost as much power as—and in some cases more power than— established players,” Ingram writes. The future for media, then, might resemble more of a community: “a membership approach, where new features or ways of packaging content or experiences related to that content are offered to readers. So live events, for example, which both the Texas Tribune and the Atlantic have been using to their advantage, or e-books, which are a different way of packaging content, can be remarkably profitable, even if that content has already appeared on the Web for free.”

How does this affect internal communication? Consider these three concepts: individual channels are losing importance, the value of unique and useful content continues to grow, and what will matter most in the future is community and the opportunity to connect and collaborate.

Intriguing, isn’t it?

Posted by Alison Davis at 02:48 PM | Comments (1)