Category Archive

Many moons ago, I set up the UK Usability Professionals’ Association and also co-founded the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF).  At the time, usability was an established discipline coming out of the shadows, and links to internal communication and engagement were clear: It’s about the audience.

Usability has really come a long way in five years, let alone 25.  Jakob Nielsen (love him or loathe him) has recently posted some interesting reading on the evolution of usability and intranets.  The most interesting point to me, once again with an eye on employee engagement and internal communications, is the declining ROI of usability improvements.  While the improvements are still more than worthy of investment, best practice has come a long way; people are adopting it; it’s harder to find a “competitive advantage.”

Just as in engagement and internal communications, today’s best practice is tomorrow’s hygiene factor.   Yet even with the evolution of social media tools that some say have revolutionised internal communications and corporate stakeholder dialogue, much of the deployment of these new approaches follow the old processes; they are simply seen as “new channels”.  The same debate occurred with intranets; revolution or new way to distribute information?

I wonder: is it actually getting harder to squeeze ROI out of our employee communication approaches, or are we just not able to get better solutions through the organisational treacle?

About two months ago I was in the Brecon Beacons in Wales on an BMW offroad motorcycle course.  Near the end of Day One I had what seemed to be an innocuous spill. Alas, I tore a ligament in my right thumb and by the end of Day Two had well and truly detached the thing entirely.

So, as I am now just about able to pick up a fork etc., I got back on the bike for a quick ride.  It was great.  I was riding better, more alert, enjoying more than I remembered before the spill.

I think there’s an important message here, at least to me.  We have to find a way to step away from the things we do, we enjoy, regardless of how “good” we are at them.  Because that distance to come back to things fresh is so important.

Apologies if I wax too philosophical these days - the moral of the story is, I’m away to Morocco on hols and hope my eyes are re-opened to my profession when I return…

Sayonara for now, brown cow…

I feel that there comes a point in one’s career where your head gets too full of information and experience.  This is not necessarily a good thing, because what it means is that your own mental model and view of the world starts to get overly filtered according to all that information.  Where it helps is in identifying issues, opportnities or solutions that others can’t see: The Voice Of Experience.

Where it doesn’t help is when your own starting point lies outside the world view of the person/people you’re communicating with.  I’m sure there are psychological, political, and anthropological terms for this.  Like so many things this is both blindingly obvious and yet amazingly complex as a communication challenge.

For example, in my calico career I’ve spent time in PR, marketing, HR and benefits communication, change management, management consulting, usability, knowledge management, musician, journalism, internal communications and brand management (not all in different jobs I might add).

As a result, it’s entirely reasonable for someone with that background to see knowledge management implications in a brand program, or to identify the organisational process changes implied by an internal communication program.  

The challenge this presents is that this gives rise to perceptions of “overcomplicating the issue” - we just need a newsletter, an intranet microsite, a session on our values, so why are you banging on about strategy links, user experience, process change implications? 

The answer, of course, is being able to turn this complexity into simplicity, which usually takes time.  Taking time isn’t very fashionable these days in a business world driven by deadlines, quarterly results and scorecards.

Two thoughts … first, this all ties in to my ongoing exploration of “the end of internal communications” — i.e., good IC/engagement people require a wide skillset not typically found in the IC practices of the previous generation.

More importantly, second, if you can take time actively simmering things on the back burner, take time in parallel to the daily grind, the simplicity will force its way to the surface.  I’m really pleased to say after about a year of complexity (added to, of course, 15+ years of work-life) I woke up the other morning and in about 62 minutes hammered out an elegantly simple way of explaining the relationship among brand, employer brand, recruitment, and the deep/wide world of employee engagement.

Get in touch if you want to talk about it.

I applaud, admire and respect those who ride their cycles, particulary in Central London.  Fitness, environmental footprint, reduced congestion … there is so much to recommend it.  I sometimes toy with the idea of creating a “Cycle Friendly Motorcyclist” logo or movement to show some solidarity among two wheeled road users.  I like to give them plenty of room and try to make their lives as easy as possible.  (This tends to actually annoy other motorcyclists and cars from time to time, in fact).  At SAS, where I work, we subsidise our pedal cyclists, with pride.

[Over the short run (say, 200-300 meters) they can make much better progress than a motorcycle, in fact, although at any distance over that the motorcycle will invariably gain the sustained speed advantage, though they hate to admit it...]

Except, of course, for the militant 10% who should have their bicycles melted and poured down their throats.  I admit I sometimes fantasize about seeing how quickly a 167kg 109 horsepower motorcycle can crush a pedal cycle and its self-righteous rider, savouring their look of horrified, indignant surprise as they go down after blocking a line of traffic for two blocks.

Let’s face it: Drivers hate them.  Motorcyclists hate them.  Pedestrians hate them.  Even other cyclists hate them. This probably eggs them on.  I suspect they’re that personality type.

You (and they) know who they are:  the self-righteous, lane-hogging, deliberately-obstructionist-to-make-some-sort-of-statement, aggressive pedal cyclists who aren’t just getting from point A to point B, or “doing their bit” and staying fit — they have a mission.  They have something to prove.  They are on a bicycle, and woe to anyone who isn’t.

Interestingly, although they make up only 10% or so of the pedal cyclist demographic, they make up some 60-80% of the spandex/lycra cyclist clothing market.

From here  

How to engage your employees in your brand, values and culture

Andaz Hotel, London, EC2M 7QN
08.30-10.50am, Thursday 3rd April 2008

These are exciting but difficult times for those involved with creating and implementing communication and dialogue with employees. The importance and expectation placed on internal communications and engagement is growing, and interesting tools such as social networks are opening new possibilities and challenges.

But the big issue in creating successful communications never really changes. It’s about genuinely engaging your people, rationally and emotionally. It takes ideas, determination and creativity to overcome natural cynicism and apathy, to really affect the way people feel about their business and colleagues, and change their behaviour.

This event is designed to provide you with invaluable insights into effectively engaging an audience with brand, values and culture at a global and local level.

To register yourself and/or a colleague, please download the agenda and follow the instructions or call Polly Clark on 020 7243 3232 or email events@sasdesign.co.uk .

Agenda

I ride a motorcylcle daily in Central London, to and from work.  It turns a 1+ hour commute on over-priced public transport, unable to get on a train or tube carriage, wedged against other people in total silence, into 20-25 minutes risking my life twice a day. 

I know which I prefer.

Motorcycles are proven to reduce congestion and have a far smaller carbon footprint than cars.  They have more road presence than pedal cycles so feel safer - I cycled to and from work for about a year and finally gave up.  Pedal cycles and motorcycles share a raft of hazards.  But I’ll save my pedal cycle conversation for a different Diatribe.

Pedestrians.

Under UK law, the predestrian does not have the right of way.  Whether I agree with this or not is immaterial, but it makes sense in  a city like London given its current transport infrastructure.  This does not seem to matter to pedestrians.

The worst places are around train stations and bus stops.  I have very nearly hit, and would likely have killed, more pedestrians than I care to think about.  This is not because I am riding fast, or being aggressive, or not being observant  or am unaware of the road situation.

It’s because pedestrians don’t look around them, (often because they are on what must be a very important call, considering they are risking their life to be on it) or where they are going, and don’t cross where they are supposed to cross.  The phone call, not missing the bus, not walking that extra 10 meters to the crossing and waiting for the light — these things are clearly more important than life and limb.

At night, and in the rain, it is especially bad since on top of all this, they are nearly impossible to see amongst reflections and car headlights — yet this is when they are at their least observant, under umbrellas and hunched against the wind and rain, collar up, eyes locked dead ahead, crossing a major London thoroughfare.

Since starting to ride a motorcycle I have become a model pedestrian.  Because I realise I could get killed, very easily, by simply not following the instructions I was taught as a child.

To pedestrians:  Motorcyclists do not hate you; at least I don’t.  I’m one of you, sometimes, after all.  We are not trying to run you down.  We reserve most of our contempt for certain other road users.  We see you as vulnerable, soft objects that we really want to avoid.  But you do not make it easy for us.  So please: Pay attention.  Look around.  Think: is it worth life or injury to cross here, to catch that bus, to take that call.

Great article in Fast Company.

I’ve been thinking about the internet, intellectual property law, no such thing as a new idea.  Rake (who apparently edits Hillary Clinton Quarterly) recently commented about my thoughts on this and spurred some thinking…

We’re told that you can’t legally own an idea.  But in some ways it looks like we are heading that way.

WPP trademarks Voltage(TM).  A company trademarks Digital Engagement(TM) … years after Unilever used it internally. Another claims Employer Brand(TM). Granted, trademarks generally only protect the mark for use in a certain disputable context (e.g., business process etc.).  And the expression of an idea, as we know from copyright 101, is protected from the moment of creation. 

There are more patents on a new Audi than it took to put a man on the moon.

There are those who think that that’s pretty neat (especially the chaps at Audi).

The internet makes so much information available and increases transparency in wonderful ways.  Yet it also acts as a pretty powerful tool for the technocracy/digeratii.  If your search engine results are higher, you basically own the idea (regardless of IP laws, when you think about it).  Or do you? Or can you?

My thought is this: whatever you think you invented or thought of, you probably weren’t the first one there (unless, of course, you were Philip K. Dick). But if you have money and lawyers, you can buy the idea and protect it.  And if you have good search engine optimisation, you can go one better.  So the value of an idea is

(I) = T +[(reg) * (seo)] 

where I = the economic value of the idea, T = the inherent value of your idea, reg = the value of registration and seo= the effectiveness of search engine optimisation.

I’m sure this topic has been covered elsewhere in greater, better detail by far wiser heads than mine.  I haven’t wikipedia’d or google’d a thing this morning, and I won’t, either.  Get it?

Copyright (c) 2007 by kpk.  All Rights Reserved.  All Reservations Righted.

Now, why don’t we start doing this sort of thing with employees?

This is Yahoo! using film students and anyone else to create their advertising … http://youtube.com/watch?v=0qY8L9NTHo4

READ THIS OR ELSE!

plus

interesting stuff overall about social design/innovation

Mike W and I had a conversation a while back that was about the blogosphere really being about echoes.  Few truly new ideas are presented - but it’s about them spreading like echoes or ripples on water.

This is different from an amusing thing that I got the other day.  The MD of a former employer dropped his “contact list” an email asking “Do you have any ideas for my upcoming blogs that would interest you?”

Maybe it’s generational, but how can you not get it by such a stunningly wide margin?

Oh well.

And finally, people should remember social networking started when the guy with the cave hooked up with the guy with the fire who knew a guy with a stone axe.  It got so named in the 1950s.  Ditto social media (cave paintings) and even social computing (I at least encouraged an international holiday resort call centre team to share experiences, tips and destinations online back in the 90s. It was just using the web to share knowledge back then).

Curmudgeon have I become?

Perhaps.  But please can people stop the hype, the posturing, and claiming invention or ownership of things that are as old as the hills?  (FridayI saw some WPP company had put the TM sign after the word “Voltage.” And it wasn’t a typographic treatment.).

I have a bridge over San Francisco Bay I’ll sell you, cheap.

I just came back from beautiful San Francisco after taking part in the IABC Blue Ribbon panel … some 20 or so of the world’s leading communication professionals trawling through more than 200 finalists for the 2006 Gold Quill awards from IABC.

What a great group of people!

What a wonderful, fun city!

We did work hard over the two days of judging, spending about an hour with each finalist, in pairs. Some complete alignment of thoughts, and some spirited debate.  And I didn’t go to bed before 2.30 am on any of the nights…

I don’t want to reveal a thing, but a couple observations…

• There is a lot of “really good” communication happening out there, but it is getting harder to “wow” … I wasn’t genuinely inspired by anything I saw. Maybe best practice is stuck?
• No matter how hard we try to make it subjective, it isn’t. One judge’s 6 is another judges 4. This is clear not only from the Blue Ribbon panel I experienced, but also from the range of finalist entries we received.
• My entries for 2006 should have moved forward. I would say that, though, wouldn’t I? But seriously, I put in an entry for a major government engagement and branding project with audience segmentation … messaging … effectiveness objectives and measurement … and analysis and brand architecture solutions that blew the doors off (I mean, Italian Job style) anything I saw as a Finalist in San Francisco. I’ll be interested in the feedback I get from the judges. If that sounds like sour grapes, so be it. I know what is good and what isn’t … and am understandably curious as to this result.

Mainly, though, it was such a pleasure to hook up with some very capable, smart, funny, switched-on and most of all passionate people. I’m glad I’ll be going back!

Saturday night. Whiskey Macs. No, the f*cking iPod doesn’t negate this.

I painfully leave out Leon Payne. I clingingly drop, with more disappointment than any other left-off artists … I abandon Patsy Cline. Then Sarah Vaughan gets knocked off (and I will burn in hell). Woody Guthrie … more sentimental than anything, but he’s gone. And Squeeze gets squeezed. How could I leave off Pet Sounds? The Beatles? Hank Williams … let’s not get started.

It’s my list. And it’s today’s list, not yesterday’s or tomorrow’s.

Like life, these things change. IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER, Desert island disks:

1. smitten – the martinis
2. blood & chocolate – elvis costello
3. surfer rosa – the pixies
4. mutations – beck
5. here be monsters – ed harcourt
6. ram – paul mccartney
7. priest = aura – the church
8. california – mr. bungle
9. the convincer – nick lowe
10. has been – william shatner

Just spotted that Brand Engagement on the Wikipedia was empty, so I made a semi-valiant first stab.  So, in the spirit of the social convergence CGM blogospheroid, go forth and be fruitful.

As Max Kalehoff notes, since it’s a loaded term it might not work out, but what the hell; I started the wikipedia entry for SOMETHING.  (and it was a shame that Giant African Land Snails was taken already).

The Giant African Land Snail, or GALS, (see this site) is an amazing creature.  I was duped into taking a couple home from a party years ago and have had a big pair for abour six years now.  And a second generation snail.  A couple have died, and they create 100s of eggs every couple weeks that I distribute around parks and open spaces in London in the hope of a GALS epidemic that never seems to materialise despite my apocalyptic vision.

Sid and Nancy, my main snails, have been stalwart (if slow) companions for a long time, and my then-fiancee, now-wife fell in love with them too.  They are gentle, sweet, fascinating, harmless and slimy ceatures that love a good bath now and again.

Take care.

Truly love your intranet: set it free.

If the pace of change in social media and collaborative working continues, intranets as we know them will rapidly become a thing of the past.  At the same time, those responsible for corporate intranets need to ensure that past and present investment in the platform pays off.

Most organisations have invested heavily in a range of online approaches to sharing information, webcasting, completing tasks and collaborative working.  And it’s pretty clear that we are near a tipping point in the development of more collaborative, real-time working methods.  Looking at experience across more than 60 public and private sector intranets, the reality is that a small minority of them deliver performance results anywhere near their potential  — even award-winning “high performance” intranets developed by leading companies and under the guidance of effective intranet managers and their teams.

There is hope, however.  Intranet managers can learn some lessons and insights from three rapidly converging areas of thinking and activity:

• The Open Source movement
• “Globally Adaptive Organisations” and “The Wisdom of Crowds” and
• The emergence of consumer-generated media.

The Open Source Movement and Wikipedia
Wikipedia shouldn’t exist. It simply doesn’t sit comfortably with how most of us assume the world works.  If you were told five years ago that it’s possible to make a world class knowledge resource as good as the encyclopedia Britannica using amateur volunteers, any one of whom is free to edit at will, chances are you would have said “That’s impossible”.  The entity itself is so counter-intuitive, that organisations need to take notice of this entirely new way of constructing and sharing knowledge.  Mitch Kapor’s podcast about this is a brilliant and inspiring description of the dynamics at play.  In essence, Wikipedia explodes several myths about authority and control somehow ensuring quality, or small numbers of experts being required to accurately create the tight content on a topic.

Globally Adaptive Organisations and The Wisdom of Crowds
Navi Radjou’s inspired article for Forrester Research presents compelling evidence that more collaborative, networked and (scary!) altruistic organisations can deliver stunning results by turning traditional hierarchies and decision-making frameworks on their heads.  James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds presents a similar idea — given the right circumstances, a diverse and independent group will arrive at better, more accurate solutions than a small number of experts.

The emergence of consumer-generated media
The third related strand is how technology has allowed individuals to become influential and assertive creators of media, in a social upheaval that is radically challenging and transforming the entire media and communication industry.  We needn’t go into the rise of blogging and the marvels of YouTube.

What can intranet managers learn from all this?
The most important learning to take away from these converging phenomena is that a document management system or CMS isn’t going to do anything to address this.  And that’s a very painful thing for most intranet managers we know to have to think about — because most of them have just been through the throes of massive CMS implementations.

It’s a truism that you should never build an intranet that’s bigger than your ability to manage it. The irony of this is that the rise of CMS and DMS has come about due to the assumption in virtually all organisations that content and documents needs to be managed.  In fact, only some content needs management — for example, HR policies, regulatory, health and safety, legal stuff.

And this isn’t radical, lunatic web fringe thinking.  IBM is taking steps to be a globally integrated enterprise where expertise can be flexed dynamically to meet customer needs.  Proctor and Gamble have made resources available to thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide — so  its product success rate has risen above 90%.  Its R&D proftiability has improved.  The British Council, ARM Holdings, the BBC, and investment bank

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (among many others) are all actively using social software such as wikis successfully.

Conclusion
The most critical challenge for intranet managers and their users won’t have anything to do with the technologies themselves.  Instead, the greatest conflict happening is balancing this with a much bigger challenge — the fact that command and control management structures are going to be with us for some time to come.  Convincing senior managers and executives that it’s OK to let everyone edit and contribute to things they know about is the hardest part.

Some tips to succeed:

• Spend time building the case.  Take some of the above examples, and more coming out every day, to show this is “mainstream” good practice — not pie-in-the-sky theory
• Make it personal. Find out some personal interests of your decision-makers and influencers and get them onto Wikipedia.  Tell them no one had to pay a thing for any of this, and anyone can edit it.  When problems arise, they get fixed fast anyway.
• Start small.  Pick a small community of expertise and set them loose.  Do enough of these and you’ll swiftly build momentum and the right culture.

—–
Mike Williams (Senior Consultant - Digital) and Kevin Keohane (Head of Engagement Consulting) work with leading organisations as part of their role at global brand agency Enterprise IG.  They wrote this article online using Google docs and spreadsheets without a face to face meeting (apart from some pints round the pub where wikis were the furthest things from their minds).

The concept of internal marketing is based on a false premise that one can treat employees like external customers.

“Internal marketing” is back as an employee communication approach. The concept is simple: use basic marketing approaches to communicate to employees in the same way that these methods can raise awareness, interest, intent and action with consumers.

The explanation for the revival of internal marketing is also simple. Marketing Directors are increasingly delivering a range of internal communication tasks. The logic is that if an organisation is trying to deliver a differentiating customer experience, then who better to get employees lined up than the people responsible for defining the customer experience? The fact that the Marketing function often has greater influence than does Internal Communications adds weight to the idea. With the importance and power of brand rising rapidly on the corporate agenda, the case is compelling on its face.

But there’s a basic problem with the whole idea. The nature of the employment relationship is essentially different from a consumer relationship. The psychological, emotional and rational processes at play in joining, working within and leaving a complex social system, where one spends at least one third of their adult life, are slightly more complicated than the processes at play in considering even a significant investment such as a car or a home – let alone a snack, an ISA, a mobile phone or a university education.

This is not to say that some of the methods, practices and tools that prove valuable in marketing don’t have an important place in an effective internal communication effort. In fact, internal communication people can learn a lot from marketing approaches such as developing “the big idea,” defining the essence of a brand or value proposition, identifying, prioritising and segmenting stakeholders, and being more creative and inspirational in their overall approach. However, the internal marketing approach generally fails to consider important parts of the equation - for example, the human capital, organisational development and behaviour change elements. Probably most importantly, marketers have only recently realised the importance and power of interactivity and active listening in a world where consumer power is paramount.

Most marketing practice is based on crafting a message, packaging it and delivering it to an audience — and then gauging what happens and modifying the next round of activity accordingly. Internal communication, at its best, goes beyond so-called “two-way” communication models, and creates an ongoing dialogue that both reflects and shapes the place where this conversation occurs. ‘Internal marketers’ can learn a lot from their internal communication, human resource and engagement colleagues. For example, internal communicators are now able to draw a line between their efforts, the effect of these efforts on the customer experience, and the resulting financial impact. Their marketing colleagues have yet to make this link between their efforts and consumer behaviour.

While internal marketing may well be based on a false premise, the emerging truth is that no organisational silo – marketing, human resources, internal communications or IT — owns the whole solution. Best practice engagement is about making sure that these disciplines work together in a complementary manner to deliver the right result for the organisation.

I’m borrowing so much content from Max these days you might as well go there first.

But this is amazing. Yahoo! is building online social media sites around brands first, THEN selling space to the brands once critical mass is achieved.

Was this done by an edgy ad agency? A brainy brand consultancy? A VC-infested startup?

Nope. Yahoo! strikes again in the “it ain’t rocket science and no one else is doing” stakes…

This article in the 24.11 NYT about word-of-mouth and brand…  potentially an interesting approach to balancing consumer power and getting market insight … that hearkens back to Nielsen TV diaries…

 Another good post about “jumping ong the “brand” wagon with a great quote — brand is about “being what you are, intensively.”  I Like that a lot. http://www.infinitedial.com/2006/12/what_does_branding_mean_in_a_p.php 

I think this guest blog Hobart65 and I did is so good it merits another cross post.  I’m sure there’s a blogging etiquette  term and violation here somewhere…

Hobart65 and I have the honour and pleasure of contributing a guest blog to the Nielsen Buzzmetrics “Engagement by Engagement” blog (Pete Blackshaw, Max Kalehoff From Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Sandra Parrelli from Nielsen BuzzMetrics).  This is really a must read  blog site.  We’ll wait to say what debate erupts…

Cool

http://www.brandrepublic.com/login/index.cfm?fuseaction=Login&resource=BR_News&articleType=news&article=604724 

You have to love consulting. It has its David Brent moments. Someone once said “Never allow anyone to film consultants or creatives at work” and I couldn’t agree more.

We’re working with a client who are undergoing a global change to their IT function. The function has been through several initiatives and names, etc., so are keen to re-align things with the new global brand etc.

After several long conversations and debates with some of the finest minds available, the staggeringly sensational and nigh-Utopian name for the IT function has been agreed and a paper is being written on the relative benefits, merits and risks/issues with the new name.

The new name for the IT function is (wait for it):

IT

Check this out - http://notetaker.typepad.com/cgm/2006/10/listeningcenter.html 

I’m as usual being (slightly) sarcastic — this is a really good post on the Consumer Generated Media site.  But it does re-inforce my point in the title of my blog: internal communications professionals have known for a long time the value of user-centred (employee-centred) approaches and the value of quantitative and qualitative measurement.  Suddenly The Marketers are jumping on the bandwagon.

Pete acknowledges that these ideas aren’t new and it’s great to see them coming into the debate/discussion. See Regina’s similar POV here http://blogs.bnet.com/hr/?p=378.

Remember, I work for a branding agency so I’m part of the marketing world here too.  To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, “I’d rather be on the inside of the tent pissing out than on the outside of the tent pissing in.”

 Anyway, this brings to mind two LATERAL THOUGHTS.  One, that the whole “pitch process” agencies are put through (and let’s face it, rush to respond to) has NOTHING to do with listening.  The client says “We need an X” and all the agencies pitch up with an “X” credentials presentation.  Sometimes with some creative stuff.  A far cry from consultative selling — all about listening to what the challenge facing the client is and how the agency can help provide the best solution.

Two, the key question I ask when I interview new consultants: What are the three most important skills a consultant needs?  I run away fast if at least one of three answers doesn’t have something to do with “listening” or “asking effective questions”.  Expertise and experience are fine things, but a good questioner-listener can usually beat the expert.  Asking and listening = more information and intelligence, which leads to greater insight.

 IMHO.

[old blog dead. new blog begins.]

I went to Marc Wright’s simply-communicate Masterclass on new social media, presented by Steve Crescenzo of Ragan. As always Marc is spot-on with his trendspotting!

During the session I was impressed by the level of confidence and knowledge in the audience — a lot of interaction (or erection, depending on how fast Steve was talking…) was quite challenging and seemed (almost) unexpected to the presenter (who is very good and managed it with finesse). And what this morning’s session brought out for me was that we often as professional communicators think that someone else knows more than we do or has “the answer” sort of tucked away up their sleeve, and if we know the secret password they might slip it to us.

This theme (going to seminars and reinforcing what we kind of already know) has been happening to me, and other senior-level collegaues, enough over the past couple years that I think it’s worth talking about. I think it’s the state of our profession — internal communication, more or less — and has everything to do with economic cycles and convergence.

What the hell am I on about?

Up until 9/11 there was a tremendous groundswell and quite a bit of velocity built up in the areas of Open Space Technology, Real Time Strategic Change, the democratisation of communication and decision making in the workplace, and new technologies. Then we all more or less hit an economic brick wall, spending in “soft stuff” was shut down, and a lot of ideas and practitioners “bounced off” that wall themselves. So now that “employee engagement” is back on the radar, suddenly we’re seeing these tools, approaches and philosophies being brought out of the dark corners they’d been stashed in. It’s a bit like deja vu … learning maps, corporate storytelling, collaborative decision making, bottom-up communications… and I can’t have been THAT far ahead of the curve.

This is good, because these “old” (time wise) ideas are back in fashion, and as great tools they should be rolled out, but in some ways it’s why the state of the profession hasn’t actually been pushed forward in a corresponding manner. So while we are all excited by blogs and wikis and tagworld and “clouding” … in many ways they are just “more” technologically enabled versions of what was, five years ago, the cutting edge of “good communication practice.”

An example — about four years ago I was called to do a strategic and usability evaluation of an intranet for a global travel/tour operator. They had typical interface, architecture, usability and CMS issues, but I also was amazed at how the people in their call centres relied on informal social networks to share information about destinations. Each “pod” of four callers had lists and papers of people from other parts of the business who knew about resorts and places to stay, and used them to help customers. Great idea, but a bit random and patchy in its implementation.

I suggested they build a part of their intranet to do just this — allow call centre operators to upload, share ideas and thoughts, comment on (in real time) destinations, local restaurants, etc. It was a huge success and helped them increase their customer satisfaction and loyalty — because people could make more informed decisions about their holidays and the call centre staff came across as amazingly knowledgable.

So fast forward to a seminar on corporate blogging / wikis are “the new big thing” … getting your employees to share information and have open dialogues online. Granted, the technology is a bit more swish now, but it’s just an example of what I think many “good” internal communicators experience; you can lead the way, but someone else will invent a name for it!

If this is sounding anything other than observational, I apologise. The point I’m trying to make is, we often as people and professionals undervalue what amazing things we do for our organisations or our clients. It’s quite empowering. We need to make more noise.

Wait a moment.

I didn’t answer my own question - why the provocative title?

In short, I thought the concept of “internal marketing” had died a death five years ago (around the time of, um, yes, 9/11). People were growing up in their approach to internal communications and stakeholder engagement, and moving away from “message packaging,” corporate-message delivery, campaign-based one-way communications. But it seems to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the moment. Probably this is because of the state of the communications/marketing/engagement industry — where margins are driving marketing organisations to say “we can do internal comms too!”.

I agree that many of the tools and approaches that make marketing effective (particularly segmentation and consumer insight) are transferable to the internal stakeholder landscape, but treating employees and close organisational stakeholders in the same way as you treat external stakeholders and customers is a dangerous game. The relationship is fundamentally different. Yes, democratisation of information, consumer media yadayadayada is making those lines blur, but there is still a thick line between employees and non-employees. “Selling” your story to your employees and stakeholders is a major step backwards to old-style, top down, “Exec knows best” communicaton and is in my view a recipe for disaster.

Again, we can adopt the marketer’s tools, but in my experience marketing-led internal communications that don’t align Human Resources, Internal Communications, IT and other key players generally fail to deliver what they aim to achieve.

Just the same, “best in class” internal communications … isn’t really just about internal communications anymore. I’m not a big one for inventing names (I resisted my job title - Head of Engagement - until I was told (ahem) Sir Martin Sorrell insisted). Perhaps there are better battles to fight?