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Just last week I had the opportunity to join a number of communications and marketing professionals at a communications forum called “Social Media to Social Marketing.”  During this incredibly interesting and worthwhile day, we got to hear from leaders at YouTube and Facebook about their organizations and the role that each one of these companies is playing in the digital revolution in addition to spending some time brainstorming and discussing the implications of social media on marketing and communications.

We often share thoughts on Intake about technology and its influence on employees and employee communications, but sitting in that room, learning and gaining greater understanding about the potential for us in this area was awe inspiring.    As part of her presentation, Suzie Reider, YouTube’s head of marketing, shared the above video that has been viewed by nearly six million people and is all about the evolution of technology.  I, for one, was floored by the content:

• The Top 10 expected jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.
• The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the average worker will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38.
• One in four employees have been in their job less than a year.  One in two have been in their job for less than five years.
• There are 500 million MySpace users.  If the users formed a country it would be the fifth most populous country between Indonesia and Brazil.
• The first commercial text was sent in 1992.  Today, the number of text messages sent and received each day exceeds the population of the planet.
• It took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million.  It took the iPod three years.  Facebook only two.
• Internet devices in
  • 1984:    1,000
  • 1992:    1,000,000
  • 2008:    1,000,000,000

All of this definitively proves (shouts?) that communications is changing.  Rapidly and exponentially.  And for employee communicators we need to know not just what technology is out there, but how it’s used and how it may make sense for our organizations.

Among the many takeaways I have from the day was provided by Tom Arrix, Facebook’s vice president of U.S. Sales, when he said that trust, authenticity and sharing are – and will continue to be  – key drivers to how we communicate.  As I think of my own clients and what we’re working on together, this is undoubtedly at the cornerstone of our work.  Hopefully it is for yours too.

We’ve all done it – slipped into “business-speak” and used overly complex jargon to explain simple issues. It’s easy to do, but it really can inhibit your communications (read: complicate your conversations).

Several of my colleagues have been working with a client’s communications team to help them embrace a less formal, more conversational form of communicating, all of which makes good sense to me. Why use technical or complicated language to communicate when you can get the same point across (likely more successfully) by speaking in straightforward, concise terms?

Lately, I’ve been trying a lot harder to think about how I say things. And I admit, it’s not easy and I can’t say I’ve been overly successful. Perhaps it’s because while I really like the concept of avoiding business-speak, I have needed to see it in action. Then I did.

I was watching the movie New in Town. For those unfamiliar with the film, in a nutshell it’s a romantic comedy about a Miami executive who is trying to adjust to her new leadership role in a small Minnesotan town. The leading lady, Renee Zellweger (Lucy), faces quite a few hardships along the way, some because she is without her “modern comforts” but others (more apparent to us communicators) because she fails to communicate in a way that makes sense to her audience. While there are examples of this throughout the movie, there’s one that really stood out to me. Having met up with the plant’s foreman and several employees at a local bar, Lucy finds herself surrounded by employees. The past several days have been especially hard (due to miscommunication with the plant employees) and she says to them, “I’m so glad that we’re dialoguing”… to which a voice from the background says “D-word, double drink!” (ala Big Lebowski) and everyone raises their glass. In her effort to “communicate,” she was being overly complicated. And as a result, what she was saying was not heard but instead mocked. While I’ve probably said similar lines and thought it sounded totally normal, hearing it come from someone else really made it clear. It made me wonder, “Wow…How many times have I sounded like that?”

The bottom line is that it’s as much about how you say something as what you say. If you’re over complicating what you’re saying, you might not be getting much of anything across; in fact you may be sending a totally different message. So next time you’re dialoguing (D-word…), think carefully about the words you chose. They may say more than you intend.

A company called CareFusion, a subsidiary unit of Cardinal Health planned for a spin-off, will spend upwards of $2.5 million on a cultural initiative for its 16,000 employees. CareFusion’s CEO, David Schlotterbeck, told The Wall Street Journal that “investing in culture is about improving performance.” He believes that attitudes and behaviors can be directed toward five core goals, including innovation and teamwork.

In today’s uncertain environment, more companies are following the example of CareFusion and investing in programs to align employee behaviors, ramp up performance and attract and retain the best and brightest. Some, like Schneider Electric’s North American operations, are spending millions on Corporate Social Responsibility programs with partners like Habitat for Humanity, to instill pride, create shared responsibility for communities in need, and to build their brands internally. Others are spending significantly on diversity and inclusion programs. Still others are focusing on new business incubation in troubled states like Michigan because the business case is sound and it sends the right message about their brands to employees and key stakeholders.

Months ago, the WSJ and others warned of belt-tightening and cutbacks in cultural, brand-building, CSR and people programs. It’s true that we’ve seen it and experienced it with clients and in our own organizations.

But for the companies that always rate highest in employee and customer satisfaction scores, CSR rankings and in best places to work intiatives — the beat goes on. They maintain their investments in the areas critical to their cultures and their people because they understand cause and effect.

Employees are going to talk to each other, whether their company provides the forum or not. There’s a message-board site created by and for UPS employees called Brown Café. The forum is not part of any UPS network and it operates completely independently of the company. A recent thread on Brown Café, spotted by the gang at Simply Blogging, features UPS employees engaging in a conversation over a racist remark overheard at a UPS facility.

The thread is definitely worth reading through, as it highlights differing reactions to a serious incident from employees in various locations—all without the intervention of HR. It’s also gives a nice glimpse of message board politics, which should be of interest to anyone looking to establish an internal forum for employees.

There are loads of other threads on the site, with topics ranging from competitors’ wages, bad decisions made by management, rants & raves, complaints and company rumors, in addition to normal message board chatter.

In the digital age, people are going to converse with their coworkers with or without the aid of their employer. This is clearly an exchange that HR would want to be involved in, but it took place entirely outside of the reach of the company’s HR and communication managers. UPS would have been in a much better position to remedy this situation if its leadership team was part of the conversation. As it stands, they’re out of the loop.

Another threat posed by deferring online communications to a non-intranet site is that non-employees can easily become part of the exchange (in a matter of seconds, I registered a profile, Erikj13, on the Brown Café forum—imagine what a devious competitor could do if they had access to all of your employees’ work-related conversations).

The challenge for any company is to create a portal where employees can discuss any number of issues—including sensitive topics—in an open, honest environment. Rumors and resentment can often be traced back to inadequate communication. By allowing employees to engage each other through a company intranet, leaders can freely interact with their employees and gauge the mood of the workplace. Managers can then develop a communication plan based on those conversations, rather than being reduced to trolling off-site message boards which are difficult to monitor and respond to, and which could be populated by any number of people from outside the organization.

A woman dies in the streets of Tehran and we watch it on YouTube. Reporters are expelled from Iran in the wake of election irregularites and riots, and we continue receiving news reports and updates through Twitter, on Facebook, through blogs and texting from those inside a fragile nation. One blogger writes, “Since June 13, the start of nationwide demonstrations and protests against Iran’s rigged presidential elections began, a clampdown on many of the leading reformist politicians, as well as journalists and bloggers, has been underway.” But despite those crackdowns, news and updates borne of the new social and digital media find their way beyond censure to a waiting world.

The human condition speaks volumes. What we are witnessing in Tehran, in a poignant and moving way, will serve as a reminder of the power and reach of Citizen Journalists and the tools they have to move stories from their keyboards, Blackberries and iPhones to the computer cloud that connects us all. There’s a dark side to this phenomenon that author Andrew Keen has written about in The Cult of the Amateur, a must read for employee communicators and thought leaders in digital and social media. For me, the stark images of political and social revolt wracking Iran, or US Airways Flight 1549 skimming down into the Hudson River, or the frightening video shot days ago inside a tornado in Aurora, Nebraska, serve as a constant reminder of our globality and how we are all on, 24-7-365.

Once upon a time, we counseled our corporate clients that a crisis can quickly explode from a single location to the larger company and world within hours. Today, with the digital information commons, quickly is slow. Now it’s instantaneous — and there’s no stopping the video, the words, the images or the sounds once they start. As employee communicators, we must know that businesses and institutions are facing a rapidly changing landscape shaped by this new digital world, the global economy that Thomas Friedman has written about in The World is Flat, and the explosion of myriad stakeholder groups.

The Arthur W. Page Society, in its seminal white paper, The Authentic Enterprise, tells us these converging forces are requiring us to be even more transparent than ever.  Where once we carefully timed and cascaded messages, we no longer control them. Where once we targeted specific audience segments, today everyone can see everything at the same time. Where once we devised and controlled the channels, today they now “belong” to everyone in this digital explosion.

So what does it all mean?

To build trust, the Page authors tell us, we must go beyond shaping perceptions to defining companies. We must build new networks of relationships. We must move from the classic caricature of the public relations professional shaping perceptions to actually creating a new reality. We must place corporate values at the heart of our work. And we must, above everything else, seek to build trust in a world that has soured on hype.

In You Can’t Go Home Again, author Thomas Wolfe tells us, “Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.” When we do, we’ll know that things have truly changed and we will not return to that place we once knew.

Lee Iacocca, the auto legend known for his leadership tours with Ford and then Chrysler during the ‘80s when he secured more than $1 billion in Federal loans to rescue the company, has told the Associated Press that the successful merger of Chrysler and Fiat is not assured because there may well be “a cultural clash of some kind in different languages. But they’ll bring people together and hopefully it will work.”

How soon we forget the merger of Daimler and Chrysler in 1998, when legions of American and German managers battled the same issue — aligning cultural differences — unsuccessfully. There were stories of employees shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic weekly in an effort to make the $37-billion acquisition successful. But it never happened. In 2007, the Chrysler unit was sold for about $7.4 billion to Cerberus Capital Management, with Daimler citing high labor costs and the more-nimble Japanese car companies as factors leading to the failed merger.

Michelle Krebs, writing for Edmunds Auto Observer has said that the DaimlerChrysler merger was doomed from the beginning because it was presented as a “merger of equals.” In truth, it was never that. Daimler was the acquiring partner, and Krebs says employees felt like they were “treated as a stepchild, not like a partner.” Krebs further writes that the egos of men who were made rich off the deal drove it, rather than compatibility. And she says the relationship lacked commitment, vision and the leadership to make it work. “Employees didn’t know what the relationship was supposed to look like in the end,” Krebs wrote. “Leadership didn’t draw the picture, nor did they encourage the two companies to mesh.”

What lessons do we learn when worlds collide? That those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and how we go about translating, aligning and building commitment for a compelling mission, vision, goals and the values of the organizations involved, is critical to the success of a merger.

It was interesting to read this week that the new CEO at Procter & Gamble, Robert McDonald, will expect his organization to develop much leaner and more efficient ways to build its brand. A report in The Wall Street Journal indicated that P&G is expected to continue with a marketing approach it styles as “the brand franchise leadership model,” in which it pulls together the best and brightest people from its advertising, marketing, public relations and digital firms to work together under a single leader. The idea is that this unified approach will yield greater collaboration, new synergies, lower costs and winning results.

This model has produced incredible results with best-in-class companies for many years. Its origins are with the Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) program at the Medill School, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., where many of the best marketers and communicators in our field have completed their graduate studies over the past two decades. What I value most about the IMC program is that it places great emphasis on the “holistic brand” — that is, ensuring that those who seek to market, position and extend the external brand don’t overlook the internal brand.

Fourteen years ago, the brand manager for one of the great credit card companies contacted me and said she had a challenge. Having brought her agencies together to devise an integrated approach to building the brand with consumers, she realized that no one had answered a critical question: “How do we mobilize our people to deliver on the ‘ethic’ of customer service that the card promises?” Our employee communications team was introduced to the larger team of advertising and public relations resources, and we created an integrated approach to helping employees understand what it would mean to “live the brand” through consistent, clear actions that matched with promise of the advertising and marketing that customers were seeing and experiencing.

Brand franchise leadership is not just another pretty model. In our world, it’s essential — and it works!

For many in business, nothing strikes more fear into the hearts of leaders than two little words: change management. Leading successful change efforts can seem daunting at best, impossible in the least. There’s an overabundance of philosophies, models, strategies, mechanisms and theories that too often contradict each other, making it hard to know what to do or where to start.

Turns out the good folks at TIME magazine have made it easy for us: In a recent article about how Barack Obama used behavioral scientists in his campaign to get the vote out, author Michael Grunwald shares the four best strategies for managing change. Now I don’t truly believe that change management can be that simple. But I do think these steps represent a great, practical summary of the best change management strategies out there. 

Though written from more of a macro, social change perspective, these stategies are still just as applicable inside our own organizations.

Make It Clear - Studies suggest that better information - about energy use, our diets, our mortgages, our credit cards - can help us make better choices. Public outreach and celebrity spokespeople can help; strict rules requiring disclosure and clarity can help more.

Make It Easy - We are an inertial species. We are much likelier to save for retirement or be organ donors if we are automatically signed up to do so as a default and have to take action to opt out. We’ll do almost anything - even things that are good for us - to avoid extra paperwork.

Make It Popular - Nothing drives behavior more than the power of conformity. Research shows that homeowners are most likely to save energy, weatherize or recycle when they think everyone else is doing it. Now we need healthy living and financial responsibility to become social norms too.

Make It Mandatory - Sometimes nudges aren’t enough. When government really wants people to behave in a certain way, it can make it the law - through mandates for efficient appliances or health insurance, or limits on carbon emissions or financial leverage, or outright bans on drugs or exotic mortgages.

One of the best things about my job is that I get to work with really smart people who challenge and inspire me. I love working with talented communicators from our great client companies like Dow Chemical, McDonald’s, Kraft and others. But the people who influence me the most every day are my colleagues at Insidedge.

Three of my colleagues have written insightful pieces on engaging employees in the new PR News Employee Communications Guidebook, and I want to brag on them a little bit:

• The leader of our New York office, Allen Putman, offers helpful tips about the foundation of any successful employee communications program – research – in his piece, The Listening Roadmap.
• Matt West, a key member of our core team in Chicago, shares practical advice on how to use the power of storytelling to help employees understand where their company wants to go and how they can help it get there. Check out his piece, Engaging and Forging Bonds With Employees Through Storytelling.
• Our leader, Keith Burton, draws on more than 20 years of counseling clients to provide strategic guidance on successful approaches to internal branding in his article, Internal Branding: Fluff or Necessity?

Take a moment to read these articles. They’re well worth the time. You might learn something. I know I did.

It’s been heating up all over Europe in the last week. Given the soggy tradition of the British summer,  I’m definitely not talking weather.

What’s hot here now is the award season. From film with its electric Jolie-Pitt combo in Cannes to communicators in Stockholm.  And while it’s always a fun, if slightly cringing experience to don one’s frocks and dickie bows to peer curiously at the competition while glugging back the table wine, there’s definitely merit in industry awards.

I’ve talked here before about PR not being ER. That doesn’t mean it’s not a bloody painful business though! For the UK Insidedge team, last year was one of exciting extremes.

We walked out of comfort zones and into ones that frankly, at times, scared us.

We travelled the length of Africa to rebrand a company. We shielded our eyes from the dusts of Arabian deserts to train communicators. We swallowed greasy pizza and worked late, late, late into the night to deliver beautifully crafted newspapers to the desks of 15,000 employees.

We persevered. We learnt new skills. We were creative and committed.

And so the age-old adage, “hard work pays off”,  does pay of.  Kind of.

At the end of last week we were rewarded for the pain. Four awards representing some of the most prestigious in our industry.

For our work with Zain, the best change/merger campaign, 2009 from Communicators in Business, which we also picked up best Corporate Image campaign for (European SABRE, 2009).

Orange news, the newspaper for Orange UK won best news magazine (Communicators in Business 2009).  This labour of love was also awarded Gold for being best publication overall. Judges praised it for being, “like a breath of fresh air in the internal magazine world”, and which “was streets ahead of the other entries”.
There were congratulations from startled competitors in established publishing houses, as well as from clients, colleagues and teams.

Our desk now proudly features three diamonds (glass ones!), some certificates to frame and a space for one in transit from Stockholm.

Each serves as evidence of a brilliant team with great spirit. Here’s to setting more high standards in the future.