As we’ve charted developments in the internal social media and collaboration  space, we’ve seen many overinvest in the latest and greatest technology platforms. These efforts, such as implementing internal Facebook or Twitter-esque applications, met initial enthusiasm only then to see early adoption rates plummet and to struggle justifying value created for the business. (Two that have worked well, however, are Sabre’s employee connection center or MITRE’s peer learning platform.)

For the most part, these efforts failed because the platforms were non-intuitive and without an obvious purpose or benefit. Many companies wasted time and effort on employee sharing solutions that simply couldn’t compete with employees’ personal options. Before your Communications team begins experimenting with new social media options for employees, here’s what you need to beware of:

• With significant investment and application of the right principles, companies can create tremendous value from tools that allow employees to connect with and learn from one another.
• Companies should beware of efforts that require significant investment but feel unnatural for employees to use; these efforts will disappoint.
• Communications can leverage existing live and virtual employee interactions to redirect energy towards strategies that encourage peer learning.

The question for communicators is not simply, How do I use internal social media to better communicate with our employees?, but also, How does my organization use social media as a collaboration and learning tool to drive employee performance and productivity?

The Four Fs of Social Media Collaboration

To answer this question, I turn to a framework in use by leading HR practitioners and developed by our sister program, CLC Human Resources. In their research, they simplify the 4 Keys to Effective Social Media-Enabled Collaboration into the easy-to-remember four Fs:

1. Focus: Aligning social media collaboration objectives with business objectives
2. InFrastructure: Selecting a platform that supports these objectives (admittedly a bit forced on the F here!)
3. Filter: connecting individuals with relevant, just-in-time information
4. Facilitate: Managing collaboration efficiently and effectively

Imagine if Communications, Human Resources, and Information Technology (alongside business partners) sat down and used these four keys as a starting point for a productive conversation and planning session about the future roadmap of employee collaboration? We can help you better understand these four pillars and how to use them as a guide for investments at your company by joining our upcoming webinar on Driving Collaboration through Social Media.

Join Us to Guide the Social Media Strategy at Your Organization

Be the champion for productivity-enhancing uses of social media at your organization by joining us on May 18^th for a webinar on Driving Collaboration through Social Media. In just one-hour you’ll learn how to:

• Make the business case for your organization on the benefits of creating a more collaborative environment
• Embrace three key imperatives in their internal leverage of social media to drive more effective collaboration
• Implement easy-to-use toolkits to adopt these practices at your organization

CEC Related Resources

• How to Use Social Media to Create Networks of Support Among Employees
• Fostering Supportive Peer-to-Peer Communication (The MITRE Corporation)
• Internal Social Media Vendors
• How to Work with IT

CEC Related Blogs

• 2 Reasons Why Internal Social Media Platforms Fail
• Discussions Spotlight: Using an Internal Facebook

Is it the carpenter or the tool that creates quality work?  Undoubtedly it’s a combination of both, but at the same time a master craftsman knows exactly what tools he needs to create his work of art.  The same holds true for us communicators – we have many tools to choose from in our tool-box, but figuring out which one to select and for which situation is sometimes a difficult task. 

Well worry no more, the CEC Research team is here to help guide you and your team towards improving your audience understanding expertise.

The CEC Research team has identified six different methods to help you master your audience understanding.   We’ll take a brief look at our list and focus on the strengths and weaknesses of each method as it’s important to understand the limitations.

1. Focus Groups

• One obvious strength of this tool is that it gives you an in-depth understanding of your audience, but at the same time, because this method provides a holistic view, it can be very time intensive.  CEC’s resource to help balance these trade-offs:  How to Conduct Focus Groups

2. Observation/Ethnography

• This method is similar to Focus Groups in terms of the pros and cons. However, this method tends to be even more time intensive and may even require the assistance of a vendor.  How to Conduct Ethnographic Research Read More »

This blog is part of our Building a Global Mindset series to help communicators increase their own cultural awareness and global perspective.

Brazil is one of the hottest countries in the world at the moment, not only as the host of the next World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, but particularly due its rapid growth and rise as one of the key emerging economies – Brazil just recently overtook the UK to become sixth-largest in the world. So it is not surprising that many members ask us about what it’s like to communicate with Brazilian audiences and how to message differently in this market. Brazil is not just the land of samba, football and beaches, but also a country of hard-working people, where relationships are key to successful business partnerships, and where internet and new technologies are rapidly expanding like in other emerging economies.

In our research of the Brazilian culture, wediscovered that internet usage is increasing in Brazil and that social media is extremely popular among online audiences, which means that there is an opportunity to connect with audiences through this channel (and actually 70% of Brazilian companies already use or monitor social media channels).

As communicators, what can you do to become smarter about social media usage in Brazil, and what does that mean for your work? Here are three somewhat surprising trends about social media in Brazil: Read More »

You’ve long championed the need for an employee collaboration platform at your organization. After building a business case and securing resources, you launched a brand new social media platform for employees. However, the sad realization dawns soon. After some days of buzzing traffic, the platform looks deserted with just a few irregular visitors. You’re left disappointed and wondering why employees aren’t taking advantage of the opportunity to connect and share, given that they were clamoring for it.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone! Most companies struggle to not only drive initial adoption but also ensure sustained employee interest when they deploy internal social media platforms.

Here are two main reasons why it’s such a challenge—and what you can do about it.

1)  Limited Visibility: Having limited knowledge of who they can connect to and learn from, employees resort to connecting with those they already know (i.e., obvious connections based on function, title, and proximity), and thus don’t quite achieve the anticipated benefits of networking.

2)  Extra Effort: Due to the complexity of sifting through overwhelming irrelevant content, employees struggle to remain engaged with the network.

Leading communicators realize that it’s not the size of an employee network that matters, but the quality and diversity of connections that impacts employee performance. Moreover, the platform needs to be as intuitive to use as anything else that employees use in their personal life to find answers and stay in touch with friends.

Case in point: MITRE

MITRE developed an internal social media platform “Handshake” that automatically suggests relevant peer connections and aggregates relevant content for each employee based on his activity on the platform.

• Relevant peers are recommended based on shared interests (e.g., submissions around same topic, common memberships, etc.), irrespective of function, hierarchy, or geography, thus helping employees to build diverse, non-obvious connections across the organization. 
• Relevant content is recommended based on the employee’s activities and interests (e.g., keywords searched, discussion forums participation, etc.), enabling employees to quickly view and join relevant conversations.  

CEC members can learn more about how MITRE’s internal social media platform enables employee sharing and learning.  

CEC Related Resources:

• Peer Learning Platform (The MITRE Corporation)
• Principles for Peer Sharing and Learning
• Customizable Business Case for Internal Social Media

 CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Improve Your Performance through Peers
• What Makes Novo Nordisk’s Global Collaboration Effective
• How MITRE Measures the Impact of its Internal Social Network

On Feb 15th, 2012, CEC hosted a webinar entitled “Proactive PR in a Networked Environment”. Mark Hannah, veteran of political communications and agency PR, joined to discuss the implications for PR teams of changes to the communications environment.  Here are some fo the highlights from the session.

CEC: Mark, what’s the biggest change you’ve observed in the PR space in the last 5-10 years?

Mark: Well, there’s been so many! I think the biggest is the model of communication between companies and the people they interact with. Where once we had a one-way, static, command-and-control environment, it’s now multi-directional, dynamic, and conversational. Where once companies had traditional media to act as a filter to a passive audience, increasingly, companies are expected to bypass mass media and communicate directly with stakeholders.

CEC: What’s the best way to influence stakeholders in thisenvironment?

Mark: It’s vital to recognize that push campaigns don’t carry the weight that they once did. No matter how much money a company spends on a campaign, it all pales into insignificance compared to the power of your neighbor down the street telling you about his new car, for instance, and endorsing your product like that. Social media represents the online equivalent of this – you want to reach a point where the content you create gets people sharing your news for you – so it has a ripple effect, and a really rich afterlife.

And yet, when I worked on the agency side, the worst question anyone could ask was ‘how can we make a viral video about x, y, or z?’. Viral isn’t a strategy, it’s an outcome.

• CEC members: learn how stakeholders receive and consume information in a networked environment. Read More »

Do you work in PR? If so, chances are you’ve experienced some pretty significant changes in the last 5 years. PR teams report that the ongoing progression of social media has created an environment in which stakeholders expect more direct interaction than ever before – no longer is it enough to rely on traditional media outlets to tell your company’s news. The implications for PR teams have been significant, as they come to terms with new means of monitoring stakeholders, and creating new types of content.

What Changes do PR Teams Need to Make?  

Even 10 years on from the emergence of Social Media, many

Click to Enlarge Image

PR teams remain optimized largely for success with traditional media (see Figure 1). The CEC has spent time recently identifying the changes that leading PR teams are making in order to succeed in a networked stakeholder environment. What is needed from an individual PR professional? What new skills are required? What’s the profile of the perfect PR hire in this digital age?

From Specialists to Generalists

It’s no secret that journalists have been forced to diversify their skill sets. We’ve seen a similar shift in the profile of new hires on corporate PR teams as well. Members that we’ve spoken to have told us that the new breed of PR professional is a generalist, rather than a specialist; for instance, where once you could probably get away with being ‘just’ a great writer, now you need to be able to do much more. One member told me that they’ve just replaced the person who managed their photo archive (narrow scope) with someone who can simultaneously manage all things visual – video, PPT, images, and so on (broad scope).

Skills Required for PR Success

The skills required of new-to-role PR professionals have broadened, and diversified:

Perhaps the greatest difference between “old world” and “new world” that we’ve noticed is the importance attached to media monitoring. The new breed of PR generalist (who has used their web-savvy to self-teach critical skills) takes full advantage of the opportunities presented by social forms of media, using data to inform all of their outreach, and to bring their other skills to bear.

Metrics

Most of the companies we’ve seen measure performance according to the volume of messaging – the number of news releases distributed, the number of Facebook likes, or the number of Twitter followers. The CEC hopes to see a marked shift in the MBOs used by PR teams, to reflect the impact created by proactive outreach, rather than its volume. Instead of measuring the quantity of content distributed, why not measure the number of stakeholders who act on that communication? This could be as simple as the number of stakeholders who re-tweet your messaging, or as concrete as the number of people who buy whatever product you promoted – either way, it’s the number of stakeholders that do something based on your outreach, rather than simply the number of people that hear/read/see it.

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you:

• How have the requirements of new PR staff changed?
• How have the skill sets on your team changed?
• Most importantly, where have these changes been driven from? Are they coming from the PR function itself, or are they being driven by external pressures?

Resources from the CEC

• Role Profile: Media and Press Relations Specialist
• Proactive PR in a Networked Environment
• News Releases in a Networked Environment
• How to Build a Leading Online Newsroom

Are you responsible for PR, Media Relations, Public Affairs, or similar? If you are, then the chances are that how you do your job will have changed significantly in the last 5-10 years.

On Wednesday 15th February, the CEC invites you to spend an hour with us looking at how PR professionals need to adapt to succeed in a stakeholder environment that has undergone significant change.

Where stakeholders once received information from a finite number of media outlets, they now get it from a huge range of sources – particularly in the online space. Where once they got news at fixed times in the day, they now get a constant stream of information through 24 hour news channels, or via their social connections on media such as Twitter. As the stakeholder environment becomes increasingly dynamic, many communicators are finding individual outreaches to have diminishing impact.

Creating content that ‘flows’

Many PR teams have responded by pushing the same old company-centric messages through a new range of channels. Instead, leading communicators are creating stakeholder-centric content, designed to flow naturally across stakeholders’ informal networks.

Join us to discuss:

• The skills required for PR success in the social age
• How to identify channels with the greatest impact
• How to create content that provokes dialogue and discussion

You can register for this webinar here – we look forward to having you on the line!

Details
Title: Proactive PR in a Networked Environment
Date: Wednesday 15th February
Time: 7am PST / 10am EST / 3pm GMT / 4pm CET

There has been a rapid growth in available communications channels in the last couple years.  This channel explosion places an unprecedented pressure on the communications function to design a strong channel strategy to use these efficiently and effectively.  All of these new channels present an opportunity for communicators to reach out to large audiences and spread information and messages with rapid speed. But it also takes lots of more of communicator’s time to navigate these channels and measure and evaluate how effective they are in their usage.

While many communications teams have a dedicated channel and/or social media person on the team, every communications professional (regardless of your specialization) needs to have a good grasp of channel management. As part of my new project focused on designing a channel audit diagnostic, I have spoke to several of our members to figure out what types of channel related metrics (data) would help communicators use channels in more efficient and effective way.  Here are some of the challenges faced by our members that we are hoping to help them solve with the new channel audit diagnostic:

1. Tracking Usage

Most communicators I spoke to have a good idea about the overall channels usage in their company. They can tell what percentage of their mailing list typically opens their newsletter; how many people listen on to their webinars; or how many people showed up for their CEO/Employee roundtable. However, while lots of communicators know their absolute numbers, they can rarely benchmark themselves to other comms functions in other companies to see how well they are really doing in these metrics.

2. Measuring Comms Effectiveness

While usage numbers are important, high usage is not the same as high impact and effectiveness.  At the end of the day, what really matters not how many people read your blog, but how many of them actually went and took action or modified their behavior because something you said really resonated with them. Many of the communicators I spoke to express a desire to be able to determine better which channels are more/less effective in helping them drive real behavioral change-related outcomes among different groups of stakeholders.

3. Impact of Channels on Employees’ Productivity

A big part of modern communicator’s job is not just to use channels effectively, but also to ensure an organization-wide efficiency in channel usage across the company.  Not all channels are created equal when it comes to boosting employees’ productivity, and some can even be detrimental to it (30 Facebook updates a day, 20 corporate-wide emails in over-worked employee’s inbox). Consequently, communicators need to worry not only about their own channel effectiveness, but also focus on guiding the employees and other functions on how to use channels to their advantage in productive manner.

I would love to hear your thoughts on some of the new challenges you face due to the channel explosion, and what measures/metrics you have in place to track one (or all three) of the above.  As well as how are you making all these new channels work for you!

And make sure to check out some of our great channel-related resources:

Channel Selection Tool

Social Media Latest Outlook

Mobile Technology Latest Outlook

3?  Just a measly 3?  C’mon, already. I mean, when you think of every foot that’s been unceremoniously shoved into its corresponding mouth during this entire year, how could you possibly limit the list to just 3?

But, as a communications professional, I will attempt to fulfill the mission as assigned by the stern taskmistress who runs the show here at the Insider…starting with:

#3: The Governor of Texas Can’t Count to 3
Gaffe: During a November GOP debate in Washington, DC, Rick Perry (the ever-so-momentarily leading contender to challenge President Obama) stated in no uncertain terms that when HE becomes president, his first order of business will be to eradicate three federal agencies: Commerce, Education, and…uhhhhhhh…the, uhhhh….

Lesson: (eesh, where to start?) If you’re gonna be specific, you’d better be…well…specific. If you’re gonna make inflammatory, controversial statements, you’d better be able to back them up. If you’re gonna prove that you’re smart enough to be the next President of the United States, you’d better be able to count past two. Read More »

The end of the year is often thought of as a time for reflection — and getting things done.

As you close out the year and get revved up for 2012, check out some of our top tools and templates. In the last year, your CEC external communications peers have been using these guides to do their jobs faster and more effectively.

You can also check out our top internal tools.

CEC’s Top Four External Communications Tools

1. How to Write News Releases for a Networked Environment

• What it is: Use this guide to ensure that your news releases are strategically focused, designed to appeal to key audiences and optimized for multimedia use.
• Why it’s cool: The media landscape has changed drastically in recent years. This toolkit will help you stay ahead of the curve by improving your news releases subject, style, media content and format. Read More »