The good news is that Steve Crescenzo called me interesting today at the Simply-Communicate masterclass on social media. The (sort of) bad news is that he said he was going to start reading my blog... which sent me into a virtual panic as I have barely posted anything for over a month. Well, at least he has motivated me to get back to it!
Here are some thoughts from today's discussion:
Global communications...
... is everyone's nightmare - and online just makes it more difficult because it is transparent.
We hear great things about this or that company's successful CEO or leadership blog - but we forget that if they are blogging in English for a global organisation, they are excluding many of their internal audiences. The trouble is, blogs do not lend themselves to translation. So, how does a global communicator balance linguistical constraints with the desire to enable dialogue with an English speaking leader?
A suggestion is to introduce blogs at the local level in local languages. These blogs could cover completely different local issues, but could also offer commentary on the English leader's posts in the local language, presented from the local perspective.
From my experience, employees from offices that do not speak English consider their local leaders more open and credible than the remote HQ leaders anyway.
Really simple - what?
I remember a discussion I had a few years ago about introducing RSS feeds to an external website. My very smart, very tech-savvy (geek) colleagues thought it was a great idea, but I told them I thought we should wait a few years because 99.99% of our visitors would have no idea what RSS was. Today most websites have an orange RSS feed subscribe button (
) but chances are most of their audience still has no idea what it means, or how to use it.
RSS is actually a brilliant tool for communicators. External communicators may be ahead of the curve, but internal communicators should be just as excited about it. It enables your audience to subscribe to your content, so they are automatically notified EVERYTIME you publish something new (rather than having to wait for you to tell them).
Once notified they are much more likely to read your content - at no additional time/cost or effort on your part! You can create as many feeds as you think are relevant - so for example - Global News, Global News in German, today's canteen menu, management Q&A's, and so on. Your audience selects the feeds most interesting to them, so you don't have to worry about complex segmentation strategies.
The other brilliant advantage for communicators is that RSS enables other publishers to easily feature your content on THEIR sites, which in turn increases your audience base. This is something that savvy external comms people have been doing for a while. Internal people may not see the immediate advantage to this, but trust me, it is there. If you happen to have more than one Intranet homepage, for example, and you want to provide the same global news stories on all of them, having an RSS feed makes it very easy to do.
The BBC has one of the best explanations of RSS on the web, and an ex-colleague of mine, Anu Gupta, is also a huge guru on the applications of RSS for internal communications.
Working for a good cause
Finally - the past two events I have attended, I have been introduced as working for Amnesty. I actually don't start until the end of next month, but already I have been given a glimpse of what it is like to work for a good cause. The most interesting reaction is that people I have never met before confess how they would similarly love to do something worthwhile with their skills. Many have expressed the desire to move from corporate or commercial organisations into the charitable sector.
Interestingly, I just read an article in Business Week about the increase of professionals who aim to use their "business know-how to effect social change" and who see "a corporate job as the first step in a career working for nonprofits". A quote from IABC's Paul Sanchez noted that the corporates are not very happy about this.
Corporates are starting to fight back, in some cases by offering charitable sabbaticals in which they encourage employees "to keep the day job but work with a nonprofit on the side." At Bain there is a scheme that allows eligible employees to work full-time with a nonprofit for three to six months.
So, for anyone who mentioned this to me today - maybe you can use your talent for good! Why not convince your employer to give you a short sabbatical? I am certain you'd enjoy it, and the right charities would be delighted to benefit from your highly valuable skills.
