January 28, 2008

News flash: As easy as 1, 2, 3

Are you having trouble engaging people in communications? Join the crowd. Whether it’s an article or an e-mail, your communications are an opportunity to quickly deliver relevant information to employees. Instead of long, magazine-style pieces with in-depth descriptions and profiles, employees want and need short, focused news flashes so they instantly know what’s going on. 

How can you develop your communications to pull people to your content quickly and effectively? Use three best practices from the experts: internet news sites. Here’s how:

1. Focus on one message.
   Ask yourself: What is the objective of this piece? Then pick one message and stick to it.
   

2. Include two pieces of information: what is changing, and what it means for employees.
   At the end of the day, employees need to understand what is changing and how it impacts them. To keep your articles short and focused, limit the body of the article to 300 words and use bold subheads and sidebars so the reader can scan the content.
   

3. Deliver the core message in a tight headline.
   Headlines are an opportunity to be cute—or to create awareness about what’s going on at your company. Ultimately, a headline presents employees with a choice: to read more or move along.
   

   We know that cute is fun sometimes. But you need to give employees enough information in the headline so that they can make an informed choice and select the content that is important and relevant to them.
   

Writing short, focused articles might seem easy or even boring in theory, but in practice it’s a great challenge and a terrific skill to develop. If you “news flash” all your pieces, your employees will be more informed and engaged—and ready for the next piece of news.