Recently in conversation with Suzy Welch, the business writer wife of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, we asked her how important she and Jack rated internal communications in organisations at present. Her answer was short but telling: "It's everything. It's the most important job right now." If you remember that this was coming from the partner of one of the most celebrated businessmen of the modern era who earned the nickname "Neutron Jack" - in reference to the neutron bomb - for eliminating employees while leaving buildings intact, it begins to illustrate the seismic shift that internal communications has undergone over the last year. Everyone, top to bottom in organisations, is looking to internal communications for answers.
While the biggest worldwide recession in living memory rages on, it's being met head on by social networking (blogs, wikis, Twitter), which is experiencing exponential growth both inside and outside of the workplace. Suddenly senior executives have a new way of talking to their colleagues and staff. During the Presidential campaign these techniques allowed Obama's team to bypass the media and go directly to voters.
Well, just as the web has reduced the role of newspapers, Web 2.0 inside the enterprise allows senior management to bypass the Internal Communications function in the workplace. Why? Because internal comms professionals are proving to be surprising laggards in the uptake of social media tools. It's going to happen anyway, so here are ten tips to make this a good thing rather than a necessary evil.
Start a CEO blog
Not every CEO should blog - in fact it's an exceptional CEO who can pull it off. But the rewards are huge. CEO of UK supermarket chain Waitrose, Mark Price, started blogging to share his determination to shed some pounds. The poor man was attending a dozen tastings and three corporate dinners every week, so a public diary of his consumption would encourage him to eat parsimoniously. But the real benefit was that he could describe to his staff (or Partners as they are called at the firm) what he gets up to during the working week. Suddenly his diary - and his observations on what he found in his travels - was open for all to see and comment on. The result? Hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of goodwill created internally and externally as journalists picked up his comments.
Be Yourself
In these credit crunch days the biggest challenge facing any business leader is trust. Trust is not created - it's on loan from the people you deal with. So if you are going to start blogging make sure you do it in your own words; that you are as open as possible. Bypass the lawyers and certainly do not expect a junior in communications to do the heavy lifting for you. Readers' bullshit detectors have been honed over years of being sold to. Your fake blog - or 'flog' as they are known in the trade - will be smoked out in no time, putting you in a worse place than when you started. Strive for the authentic voice in all that you do.
Go on YouTube
A new communications manager at Blendtec was bemused to see R+D guys feeding broom handles into the company's blenders as part of the testing process. He filmed this dramatic process and put it on YouTube. Then the MD of the kitchen equipment manufacturer got involved and www.willitblend.com evolved. Tom Dickson has blended glowsticks, 50 marbles, skis and notoriously a just released iPhone to answer the eponymous question. The result - around 15 million downloads just for those items. Wonder how many blender sales that has converted...
Start a CEO Forum
If you don't know what to blog about then let your audience do the talking. Take a lesson from Sun Microsystems and Motorola and start a CEO blog. The software is all but free and you can get advice and a blog policy off the net. The result - an unfettered channel for employees to raise issues with their leader about everything and anything happening in the organisation. The upside is that CEOs get a direct line to the issues that really affect the frontline and customers. The downside? Well most CEOs worry about the hundreds of posts they will have to respond to. The reality? They get about 10 a week and most of those can be answered by referring to the functional head responsible.
Break down the walls of the organisation
Internal and external communications are dissolving into each other. Anything that is published inside an organisation can and will find its way onto the web. That cheesy video, the unfortunately phrased email, the defamatory comment about a competitor or even where they live can have drastic repercussions. Ad executive James Andrews twittered on arriving in Memphis "True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say 'I would die if I had to live here!'" Client FedEx were not impressed as his comments were retweeted round the company.
Just do it
The best way to get comfortable with social media tools is to just start using them. One of your interests will have a thriving forum - whether it is a sport of travel. Just register and start using the technologies. It's not about the tools; it's about the applications that make people's lives easier or more interesting.
Start Twittering
Start a Twitter account at www.twitter.com and enter a wild new world of micro-blogging. This is the equivalent of telling the world about the passing thoughts that catch your interest during the day. You will soon join a community of like-minded people interested in what you are interested in. This is not a fulltime occupation. Just dip in and out when you have a thoughtful apercu or time on your hands. Don't review them historically like email - just swim in the conversation of the moment and feel connected.
Engage your public
Once you have launched yourself into the world of Web 2.0 remember that it is an enhancer not a substitute for real life. You must engage your public. Offer them something for free. A place on a course, an invite to an event, a bit of advice. But make a physical meeting your end goal.
Talk millennial
Anyone born after 1980 is Generation Y and has been brought up in a world that is always on. They work differently to Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. They do not value putting in long hours of slog when they can find the answers faster and easier on the web. And during meetings they will be multi-tasking into their Apple Macs rather than meeting your eye. Get used to it - they are the future.
Drink your own champagne
Corporate communicators can be quite standoffish about social media. Like some journalists they see it as an attack on their role as professional communicators. So in many companies it is the engineers who are better at using these tools than the professionals who are supposed to be advising managers on best practice. So train up your communicators first and let them become social media ambassadors for the rest of the organisation.