nuance intelligence

How internal communications used to get done in big organizations: “Craft” a message with input from (and often, ONLY from) senior management. Disseminate. Expect all managers on down the line to also disseminate. Repeat.

The big problem with this approach: It doesn’t work.

Corporate communications professionals wrestled with this problem for years. The dreaded communications ‘cascade’ persisted. Then, the advent of social media changed everything. Suddenly, not only did we have new tools with which to reach out to employees and other stakeholders, we had a world that was waking up to the possibilities inherent in new media. Media-savvy consumers tuned into more channels and learned to glean information from many sources, and to contribute their own ideas through those channels.

So, no need for the ‘cascade’ anymore.

Now what?

“From Lincoln to LinkedIn: The 55 Minute Guide to Social Communication” is the answer to that question. In clean, concise and frequently funny language, Mike Klein has written a primer explaining how social can change your communications practice for the better. Hint: ‘Social’ started way before Al Gore invented the Internet (sorry, international readers…that joke was for my American peeps.)

“Lincoln to LinkedIn” offers a strategic approach to putting the social communication to work for your organization in a structured and productive way. Not ready for Twankerbook yet? No worries. Klein points out that “one can run an effective social communication campaign with a phone, an email account and an excel spreadsheet” and shows you how to do it. Social media and social communication are not synonymous, and Klein makes the distinction clear.

Among the concepts that I loved: Klein’s assertion that internal information campaigns can’t truly succeed without engaging  ‘tribal leaders’ and leveraging their influence. ‘Tribal leaders’ are the people (and you probably know who they are in your organization) who might not run a department, or run anything at all, but who have outsized influence on a group of people.  Here’s the connection with Lincoln, arguably America’s best President of all time and a phenomenally skilled politician who understood micro-constituencies as well as he understood message. No, these aren’t modern concepts, but they’re key to understanding how communications can actually change people’s minds and change their behavior. And the ‘tribes’ idea isn’t new, but Klein makes it relevant to the way business is actually done.

Who should read this book? Leaders of medium-to-large organizations. Anyone who does corporate communications for a living, or is thinking about doing it. This is also an excellent purchase for community managers – enterprise social media needs to get more strategic, and this book is a great place to start. HR has a vested interest in making sure that internal communications campaigns succeed, so this is a book for you guys, too.

Disclaimer: Mike’s a friend of mine and he gave me an advance digital copy of the book.

Really, what’s the difference between communications and marketing at this point?

As social media grows and influences business, the distinctions between marketing and communications continue to erode.

Once upon a time, the way we broadcast our messages was very distinct: paid versus earned media. At that stage, marketing dealt with advertising and direct-to-customer, tradeshows and collaterals. Public relations dealt with the media, with executive communications, and sometimes covered investor relations, too, in public companies.

Social media, blogging, and viral communications have changed the landscape so radically that it’s clear the professions are converging. So do you just merge the two?

Maybe. I think that B-to-C companies are going to have a different answer to that question, in many cases, than B-to-B enterprises. That’s because there are other lines blurring out there, too. Internal communications and IT have developed a much deeper connection since the advent of social media – how else do you get all those cool enterprise-level social media tools set up and managed properly?

It’s not all due to social media, but I think the changes are largely due to the proliferation of channels available to us, and the decline of influence in a couple of channels that used to be the mainstay of marketing (television and newspapers.)

I hope it’s a happy marriage. They should have plenty to talk about.

I answered a question on Quora recently and it got me thinking about what companies using social media tools internally really need in terms of analytics.

So, your company decided to try out Chatter, or maybe you built a wiki. And naturally you want to measure your ROI. There are lots of great analytics tools out there, right?

Not so fast. What do you want to measure?

A successful social media ‘campaign’ within an enterprise can have outcomes quite dissimilar from those resulting from a successful external social media campaign. There are tools out there that do a great job of measuring transactions, sure. There are even good tools for measuring some subtler stuff, like reach and influence. But if you’re using social media tools inside an enterprise, you probably want to measure their effect on culture and performance. That means collecting and analyzing a different data set that the one you’d seek if you were, say, trying to figure out how many more widgets your Facebook page helped sell…or even, how much your brand awareness increased as a result of your Twitbookspace campaign.

What if you want to measure how your new tool or platform is doing driving internal collaboration? Or knowledge-sharing?

You can measure knowledge by quizzing participants on topics. But what if they’re sharing knowledge on topics you haven’t already identified? And how do you track increases in collaboration?

There’s a ton of room in this field, dear reader – are you entrepreneurial programmers listening? Sure, Jive bought Radian6, clearly someone is already thinking about these issues. But as far as I can see, there’s still plenty of opportunity out there to develop tools to do this kind of analysis. Because, as Rick Ridder likes to say, “If you can’t count it, it didn’t happen.” (I used to work for Rick. He’s forgotten more about research than I will probably ever know.)

So, get on it, IT people…we need more ways to figure out what kind of difference we’re making with these cool new toys.

So, your company now has a Twitter account as well as a blog and you’ve figured out that it takes effort to become an effective voice on this channel. You (or your boss) want to see the ROI of your Twitter efforts, and you don’t want to spend half your working time checking eleven different sites. There are about a bazillion Twitter tools out there that you could use to manage your stream, measure your success, and keep track of your followers.  So which ones do you use? And can you integrate your tracking efforts with other tools?

What I like about this particular collection of tools: you can do all the really important stuff, and it’s a good basic list for a lot of different kinds of Twitter users, from corporate communications people to small business owners.

HootSuite is a great place to start.

and their logo is the cutest!

HootSuite comes with built-in analytics (basics are free, upgrades are low-cost.) It allows you to schedule and publish messages to multiple social networks (including Twitter), monitor results and efficiently participate in conversations. Their mobile app is unbeatable, and you can quickly check your direct messages and learn about your followers.

Buffer

Buffer – Sure, HootSuite lets you schedule your tweets, but…one at a time. Buffer helpfully sets up a schedule for you and sends your ‘buffered’ tweets out on that schedule. Perfect for someone who wants to set up a Tweet queue and then ignore it for the rest of the day. Plus, Twitter users are much more likely to unfollow someone with multiple tweets in an hour, so make yourself more effective and spread ‘em out.

TweetEffect – A neat tool that shows you exactly how loveable (or unloveable) each of your tweets were, based on the number of follows/unfollows you racked up right after sending them. Proof that your followers really ARE irritated by seeing you post a breathless comment and a link…to your own press release.

Tweepi – A big ball of Twitter-management goodness, all in one place. See who you’re following who isn’t following you, and ‘flush’ the non-followers. Use lists compiled by other relevant Twitter users to build a better following for your company.

PeerIndex – More than Twitter, but you can orient it toward Twitter-data. PeerIndex offers a pretty sophisticated look at how your overall web 2.0 influence stacks up by analyzing your impact across a number of channels, including Twitter, your blog(s), Facebook ,LinkedIn, and Quora. Choose your Twitter peers for comparison to focus this tool on Tw-impact. A little hiccupy – for example, it never reflects my Quora activity – but still good.

What are your ‘must-have’ Twitter tools?

Are you one of those people who is OUTRAGED when Apple sells out the  iPad2 at the store, leaving you to buy one from scalpers at an exorbitant markup?

I can’t really get too worked up about scalping, myself. It seems to me that if the scalpers are willing to go to the trouble of standing on line all night to get their hands on the devices before they run out, they should be able to profit from it. Yes, it’s a drag to pay more, but did you really want to spend the entire night camped out in front of the Apple store? The scalpers actually added value. Pay up.

Part of the beauty of social media is that it makes it so easy to collaborate – on a wiki, on a document, even a co-authored blog. Enterprises that are trying to leverage Web 2.0 business tools need to figure out how to handle the ‘added value’ issue. Traditional companies are used to giving one department, or employee, or a well-defined set of participants, the ‘credit’ for a finished work product. But in an age when they are launching tools that lean towards crowdsourcing, better ways to allocate ‘credit’ have to be established.

People won’t want to add value if they’re seen as ‘scalpers’, just profiting off someone else’s work. So are you going to adapt your culture to a more collaborative model, where ‘credit’ is not as important as being engaged? Or are you going to build widgets into your social business suite that will track engagement and participation, so that credit can be spread equitably among all those who contribute to an outcome?

Jive does this brilliantly, and delivers the results in a way that ‘credit’ is given quite democratically. Search for a topic within Jive, and the search engine will return names (and profile photos!) of individuals within your organization that have contributed productively on that topic in the past.

What other good widgets are out there that allocate credit for collaboration?

I started this discussion on Quora awhile ago, and it's gotten some very thoughtful replies. Note that Jive's SVP Product Services weighed in, too.

If a company starts using an enterprise-level social business suite (think Jive or Chatter), what happens to the intranet? 5 answers on Quora

If a company starts using an enterprise-level social business suite (think Jive or Chatter), what happens to the intranet?

Why are so many big-company people, in every function, behind the curve in adopting social media and putting it to work in a business context?

Think about who the early adopters were: small businesses. New businesses. Entrepreneurs, consultants, agencies, non-profits, self-published authors, gamers. All these folks were out there experimenting with Twitter, building Facebook pages, blogging away, tinkering with all the new tools that popped up.

Meanwhile, corporate policymakers (yes, that’s YOU, IT and HR and corporate communications and C-suite!) were busy blocking access to social media or setting up their systems to tell internal users accessing those sites that their activity would be monitored.

Big Brother is watching you.

So of course the wise and ambitious stayed away from all that stuff at work. When they went off the clock, they mostly got interested in social media as a toy.

Cut your team some slack, and give them some extra time in their day to experiment, and to investigate the potentially useless as well as the obviously useful. Then remember the social media gap the next time you  think about setting up an annoying, small-minded policy.

1)      Knowledge is crucial for success, so share knowledge. Wikis are amazing knowledge-sharing tools. Be sure to encourage users to log in or sign their contributions in some way…anonymity breeds carelessness.

2)      There’s a Powerpoint deck around someplace on that topic. How many duplicative presentations, white papers, sets of instructions and so forth do you have cluttering up your servers? How many people enjoy re-inventing the wheel? The reason wikis are a cool place to store stuff like this is that once people get into the habit of checking the wiki on a topic, they will begin to remember to load stuff on the wiki…and then you have an efficient way to share without everyone having to try to remember who made that presentation on accounting trends last August. It’s right there in the wiki, under Accounting!

3)      That wicked smart but really quiet guy in the engineering department has a brilliant idea. Not everyone is an extrovert, and some of the world’s great introverts are more comfortable speaking up digitally than live and in person at the company town hall meeting. Wikis let you capture those ideas and share them broadly.

4)      It’s about time you tiptoed into social business. Wikis are social media tools if you build and manage them correctly. “Correctly” means everyone gets access and everyone can edit and comment, not just the management team. Even better, wikis are directed collaboration tools, as opposed to chat rooms or other vehicles that encourage ‘social’ but don’t have a clear business purpose.

There are probably more reasons your company needs a wiki. Got any additions?

Executives have their internal communications staff churn out talking points and Powerpoint decks galore. They allow themselves to be quoted in internal newsletter articles. They issue carefully crafted comments about values, initiatives and current directives. But when they go out in the field, they find that none of it has registered. Worse, employees are talking about other stuff…and they aren’t terribly interested in what the head office has to say about it. What happened?

Often, the problem is that the company’s internal communications infrastructure is stuck in Media Age 1.0 and their workforce is happily living in Media Age 2.0. Employees get their daily news from blogs, digests and RSS feeds. They keep in touch with their friends via Facebook and Twitter. They’re getting information virally in the real world, and your company is still doing top-down communications?  No wonder there’s a disconnect. So how do you bring your company’s communications up to date?

Turn off the Waterfall. Let’s face it, ‘cascading’ communications is over and done with. We did it back in the day when we didn’t have many ways to get ideas spread throughout big, dispersed organizations. Cascading often didn’t work as intended. Managers adapted, ignored, and even ridiculed carefully crafted messages. So let’s lower the curtain on cascades. Big organizations have lots and lots of tribes you can work with, and plenty of tribal leaders with whom you should be collaborating to get the word out, instead of expecting managers to regurgitate something the CEO fed them. Start with the fundamentals – building and contacting your internal network. Which groups exist within your organization, and who are their leaders? Not ‘managers,’ leaders. Who organized the softball team? Who is the person everyone calls when they are getting a cross-functional team lined up? Who leads the Friday prayer breakfast? You need them. Get to know them.

Get back to tactics. My vote for the most over-used word in internal communications is ‘strategic.’ Yes, we all know it’s really important to be strategic and to have a strategy and to work at a strategic level. Frankly, strategy is usually not the hard part. Good internal comms pros can scribble out a strategy on the back of an envelope and get it mostly right. What’s changed hugely in our field is the range of tactics available to us as we execute those strategies. Now that we can use all the cool stuff in the social media playbook, I think it’s time to take a step back and look at tactics in general. The tendency is to use the shiniest, newest toy we’ve got. Sometimes, though, a flyer stuck to the inside of the bathroom door is still the best tactic. The most elegant strategy in the world is worth diddly-squat if you can’t pull it off. So, spend more time considering tactics and less on showing the executive suite what a high-level thinker you are. Who are your employees inclined to listen to? How do they prefer to learn new information? What can you learn from the people on the front line?

Research. Speaking of the people on the front line, the annual engagement survey is not the only place and time they have opinions. Most of your folks are asked for their opinion on everything under the sun daily in the real world.  Surveys are ubiquitous, but at the office most employees only get asked to offer their thoughts once a year, and often only in a ‘fill in the bubble’ format. How about doing some qualitative research? Or doing surveys on issues that are typically only considered formally by the executive suite? How about open-ended questions so that your people can tell you what they really care about?

If you can make your company’s internal communications infrastructure broader, stronger and multi-directional – a better mirror of the information networks that keep the real world humming – you have a much better chance of recapturing the attention of your employees.

…then do I have the tool for you. Have you tried Wordle yet? It makes a nifty word cloud out of your chosen text, and can even create one from a .url. Here’s what the nuance blog word cloud looked like today when I Wordled it.

After you make your own word cloud, you can upload it to the public gallery.