Internal Communication with Louise Sturgess

Educational breakfasts

We’ve recently started a series of ‘Breakfast Briefings’ here at Radley Yeldar. The objectives of the sessions are to share some of our thinking around a range of topics and to stimulate discussion and debate. The briefings take place at our offices on the first Friday of each month and run from 8am-10am. Breakfast is also provided, as we appreciate that 8am can be a pretty early start for people on a Friday morning…!

Our first briefing took place last Friday and was focused on ‘Integrating social media into your internal communication strategy.’ As well as looking at some of the current tools around, we also discussed what ‘social media’ actually means and looked at some of the things that need to be considered before you start using it. Although this is a new area for many communicators, Ken Frakes, who heads up our digital media team, pointed out that the technologies themselves have been around for a few years now. We also took a look into what the future could hold….fascinating but frightening!

Our next ‘Breakfast Briefing’ is on corporate responsibility and brand values and how the two are inextricably linked. If you’d like to come along or find out more, have a look at the events section on our website www.ry.com

Louise

To poke or not to poke...

The debate over whether or not to ban the use of Facebook in the workplace continues apace. Last week, Sky News published an article titled ‘Facebook call to ease staff boredom’. The article references research recently conducted by careers advice service learndirect. More than one in three of the 1,000 employees surveyed said that they wasted 25 minutes every day chatting to friends, daydreaming, surfing the Internet or looking for a new job. Those employers who do not think employees should use the social networking site during work time will no doubt see this as being yet more evidence that it is responsible for a whole host of ills in the workplace.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand that sites like these can potentially cause problems for businesses (security risks, damage to company reputation etc.) and I do think that companies should issue guidelines for their people around how to use them. But people wasting time at work? Huge downturns in employee productivity? Surely Facebook can’t be the cause of it all? If employees have reached such a level of disengagement that they are resorting to using Facebook at all hours over and above doing a good job, well, I think organisations need to take a long hard look at themselves to try and understand what the real reasons behind this could be.

Another article in The Times last week also continued the debate, with the TUC coming down hard on the side of allowing employees access to Facebook and other social networking sites during office hours.

The debate is complex in places and I’m sure that it will continue for a good few weeks (or even months) to come and organisations will have to make decisions over which side of the fence they are on. Ultimately though I feel that treating people as people (rather than robots), understanding and respecting that they have a life and interests outside work and trusting them to do their job well are some of the things that create a happy and productive organisation.

And on that note I’m going to see if I’ve had any new friend requests….

Louise

Authenticity Online

Over the last few days I’ve been continuing to ponder one of the questions that I raised in an earlier post: is it OK to ghost write a blog on behalf of your CEO? The question of authenticity in the on-line world seems to be a topic that is causing quite a bit of debate in the world of internal communication and . A recent article on the BBC website also broached the subject in an article that asked: ‘Are my online friends for real?’ A member of Facebook had apparently received a message from someone who wrote “I met somebody the other day who told me that online networking was so important, and he didn’t have the time, he was paying somebody to be him online – to blog, network post etc.” Is this the start of a whole new part of the communications industry.?!

But, returning to the point, there seem to be two schools of thought developing around the subject of blogging – or ghost blogging. For some communicators, ghost blogging is an acceptable practice and some organisations are already doing it. The arguments ‘for’ have been outlined in Shel Holtz’s article ‘Weighing in on the ghost-blogging debate’. One of the arguments put forward for ghost blogging is that, ‘ghost writing is common in business and blogs are just another business communication tool; so what’s the beef with ghost blogging?’. Whilst I appreciate this line of argument (along with others around lack of time on behalf of senior leaders and so forth) I believe that authenticity (in this case being the author of your own blog) is key if blogs are to remain a credible internal communication channel. Yes, it is another communication channel but the content is assumed to come directly from the horse’s mouth, rather than from the horse’s mouth via the corporate communications team.

I don’t think that the debate will close any time soon (if at all) and, as internal communicators, I am sure we will continue to find ourselves in a position where we are having to balance ideals with pragmatism.

What are your thoughts?

Louise

Social media workshop

Last week I attended a two-day workshop on social media. The workshop was organised by Melcrum and run by David Ferrabee. It was a really stimulating and interesting two days (thanks again David) during which we covered blogs, wikis, MySpace, Second Life, YouTube, RSS / web feeds…to name just a few. Most of us at the workshop were internal communicators and the rise of these new technologies certainly poses more than a few questions for us.  Some of the issues that got me thinking were:

• If organisations feel that they are increasingly unable to control content generated by their employees, will they become even more rigorous about the people they recruit? (As an aside, companies are already using Facebook, MySpace and the like to uncover more information about potential recruits)

• Authenticity and credibility continue to be key – especially in an on-line environment where people can easily create ‘personas’

• Is it OK to ghost write a blog on behalf of your CEO?

• Company culture is key. Not every organisation is willing or ready to embrace such a fluid approach to communication   

In my mind there’s no doubt that social media is here to stay (although there’s a conversation that’s been started on myragan.com that asks ‘Web 2.0, is there a backlash coming?). As internal communicators it’s part of our job to understand the potential and benefits of these new tools - as well as the risks.

It’ll be interesting to see how things evolve.  What are your thoughts?

Louise