By Rebecca Canan

Nearly every day, I get to talk to members about CEC’s major research initiative for 2010, and over the course of the past couple months, this has summed up to A LOT of conversations!  I’m asking them about external stakeholder outreach…how the media landscape is changing…how this is tangibly affecting their teams.  Really rich and interesting conversations.  THEN, the conversation turns to media monitoring.  It goes something like this:

Rebecca: So, how do you monitor conversations about your company? How much do you spend?  How do you USE the information?

CEC Member: [Yawn.]  [Then rattles off responses like a robot.]

Now, I’ve got nothing against robots (er, total tangent and perhaps inappropriate, but I actually think robots are HILARIOUS).  That said, I sense that members waste a lot of money on robotic “going through the motions” in this area. To them, monitoring is simply a part of the Communications function.  A box to check off.  Something that has to get done and does not necessarily require much reflection.  It may be the obsessive analytic in me, but I think that (1) communicators typically lack a deliberate and integrated objective for monitoring and that (2) they don’t use the information spit out of their monitoring machines.  Alas! Read More »

Frustrated by employees who refuse to use the intranet? Tired of writing news stories that employees never read? Ready to give up on the intranet altogether and revert back to email blasts? (Someone out there raises a hand.)

Believe me, after 50+ conversations with CEC intranet managers, I can tell you that you’re not alone. I’d also suggest that the right approach to improve usage rates takes a page from the Marketing handbook: think of employees as your intranet’s customers, and learn more about what they want from this product. A great technique is a user profile exercise—describing clusters of employees based on how they currently (or could) use the intranet to get their jobs done.

Last week, Rick and I hosted a webinar on this topic, alongside a truly leading-edge practitioner—Jamie Parry, Manager of Intranet and Electronic Media at Chevron. Jamie talked about Chevron’s process for clustering 62,000 employees into 10 primary groups—such as “New Talent,” “On the Road,” and “International: Unwired”—whose goals and behaviors on the intranet are similar. From that analysis, Jamie is focusing on the most important intranet improvements that will drive intranet usage among these groups. Pretty cool, huh? If you want to try something similar, here’s a quick guide to his process: Read More »