The pace of change

Melrum asked me today if they could reprint an article of mine first published in one of their reports 'How to use social media to engage employees'. It was first published in summer 2007 and I've just re-read it and realised that, although things have moved on a bit, it's not a hugely different picture than it was two years ago. This illustrates quite nicely my assertion that change in business communications always seems to take longer than we all expect. I think one of the contributory factors is the resistance and reluctance we face from the traditionalists who still far outnumber the progressives in the employee communications industry.

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.

Retro Communications

I came across this post on Lee Smith’s Talking Internal Communications Blog. I think what Lee points out is that, as communicators we tend to flock to the new channels and act as though the old channels are dead. Of course, they aren’t and as we begin to understand the new channel – or in this case the new world(!) – the place of the old channels in the overall landscape clarifies. I think that’s what’s happening with retro communications. The nature of face to face and audio may change – it’ll probably become less formal as social media drives more familiarity and accessibility via conversations – but they’ll still be an important element of the communicators portfolio.