Voices

In a world where everybody has a voice, those people working in corporate and employee communications face challenging times as they struggle to get their voices, or the voices of the people they write for, heard above the hub-hub. This is being brought into sharp focus on intranet news sites. More progressive organisations already allow comment on stories, or for people to submit their own stories. Up to now this ‘user generated content’ has generally been kept separate from the corporately provided news. And where an external view of company news is brought into the site, this is also kept separate.

I think this will have to change. Commenting on corporate stories; external views on the same stories; even the ordinary people providing their own interpretation of a news story are all going to be legitimate content on internal company news sites. All of that content will need to be aggregated around the story itself, not be consigned to a series of contributor-based ghettos, as it forms the context for the conversations which are so important. Conversations are a component of engagement. Corporate voices are not.