How much planning has your organization dedicated in enhancing (or, God forbid, establishing) a creative corporate culture?
First, let’s get a grip on the “creative” in creative corporate culture. Creativity isn’t just for design firms, art studios and elementary craft projects. Creativity and creative thought is necessary for all agencies and communication professionals who seek innovative strategies for their clients. Consider your organization’s best and brightest idea—was there not a light bulb of creativity that popped on (even flickered) that lead you down the path of project righteousness?
It’s also important to recognize that culture comes from the people—it is the people. Think about the individuals within your organization—what are their personalities like? Who are they outside of work? What tickles their fancy? All of these things lend to the culture of your organization, and ultimately your agency’s product. Once we begin tapping into these quirks, culture begins to form.
As daunting as the idea of a creative corporate culture may seem, fear not my fellow PR and marcom professionals. If you are one of the bold and daring to take on the challenge of building said culture in the New Year, here are a few tips for your right brain to digest:
1. Get a desk tchotchke, already. Culture is built by sharing parts of our personality with those around us—what better place for that than your workspace? If your personality could be personified by something small that fits on your desk, what would it be? Find that thing, embrace it and share it!
2. Build a community space. Forget the archaic days of water cooler chats. People like to hang in hip spaces—gather ‘round a Wii, create a community bulletin board or have a reading nook filled with industry related publications. As the saying goes, “if you build it, culture will come.”
3. Play games and buy toys. Incorporate games (and yes, even toys) into traditional office activities. Play a round of Apples to Apples before a staff meeting, or leave baskets of building blocks around the office. Using different parts of the brain is important to creativity and improving the overall quality of our ideas.
4. Find a platform and give back. A surefire way to build corporate culture is engaging team members in charitable activities—it feels good to give back, and when you do it as a group it creates unique bonds and fun memories. Find a kooky charitable activity in your town and make a day of it!
5. Eat, drink and be creative. The easiest way to enhance an organization’s culture is eating together. Consider a monthly potluck where staff can bring their favorite fares for teammates to enjoy. Encourage exotic recipes and fanciful presentations—these always create a buzz around the office.
Here are some thoughts on creating content in today’s always-on world. Rather than a how-to guide, these are simply some observations on what impacts the process.
It’s entirely too easy to feel the lure of social networks. The immediacy of Twitter, the connectedness we feel with friends on Facebook, the endless boards of pinned images on Pinterest and the hipster art on Instagram – these are all false idols when it comes to creating content. We’re more likely to be consuming content on those sites. As such, they qualify as distractions.
But just as the martial artist knows how to absorb energy from an enemy’s attack, we too can learn to pivot with these tools. Asking a question on Twitter as I did was a diversion rather than a distraction. While my question focused on the challenge I was having, it allowed me to focus on the conversations instead.
Over on Facebook, you’re probably likely to have surrounded yourself with people who share your hobbies, beliefs, geography, etc., and therefore you may not be inspired by a diversity of thought. Seek out people you might not have interacted with in a while. Change your feed settings from Top Stories to Most Recent. This will mix up your content a bit. You can also create Interest Lists and visit these customized feeds with a specific purpose in mind. These small actions could provide a little variety to what you’re seeing and from whom.
Understand who you’re trying to reach
Kind of a no-brainer, but when you’re tasked with creating content that needs to live somewhere, it’s a good idea to know a little bit about that somewhere and the people who frequent it. It could be your corporate website, a Facebook page, recipients of a white paper or email, viewers of a video, etc. If you don’t understand a little bit about them, you may miss the opportunity to connect with them. Based on previous interactions, what kind of content do they like? Have they indicated other brands or interests that matter to them? What have their comments told you? All of this should help fuel the content you’re making.
Look to industry leaders
There are others who are doing this well. Let them inspire you. About a year and a half ago, Mashable took a look at a handful of leaders in content marketing (How 3 Companies Took Content Marketing to the Next Level), highlighting Mint.com, HubSpot and American Express. And just this week, Forbes ran a piece titled 5 Big Brands Confirm That Content Marketing Is The Key To Your Consumer. Their list was made up of Virgin Mobile, American Express, Marriott, L’Oreal and Vanguard. All respectable brands. But one stood out to me.
Read full article via Scott Monty’s Social Media Marketing Blog
Here’s a few things to remember when you’re creating a strategy:
- Social media thrives on interaction, so make sure you’re giving your fans and followers something they can’t just read off your website.
- Add some personality to messages so that your fans know there’s actually a person on the other side of the connection.
- Remember that different communities have different personalities, so don’t just spam them all with the same line. If you’ve done your job correctly, people who belong to more than one social community may be following your account on each, so it is a red flag to see the same line of content on each. That flag says you’re spamming me.
2. Turn blog posts into advertisements.
If you’re blogging consistently, you’re on the right track. But if all your blog posts are about your own product or service, you’re really just advertising. Don’t do this! Provide value for the readers of your blog. They didn’t come to your blog to read about how awesome XYZ service is, although you can definitely link to that service or even mention it at the end of a post. The more in-depth and interesting your blog posts are, the more people will realize that a) you know what you’re talking about, and b) you’re not just giving them a used car salesman-type pitch. The best blog posts get the reader to think highly of the author, which makes them think highly of the company, which makes them remember that company when they have a need for your product or service. Be subtle. Give readers the perception that you’re awesome, but don’t shove it down their throats.
When you think of social media marketing, you may only consider the potential for introducing new customers to your products and services through social interaction. However, social media marketing is an effective way to keep your existing customers happy – and happy customers drive repeat sales that can significantly impact your bottom line.
Here are five easy tips to help you increase your revenue stream from existing customers with social media.
1. Reward frequent purchases
Since it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, why not increase revenue by encouraging your customers to make purchases more frequently? If you sell products, you can entice customers to come back more often, and if you sell services, you can promote add-on services and upgrades.
Offer exclusive deals and specials to your social media community, basing the discount on the customer level or frequency of purchase. For example, you could offer a coupon to your Facebook community, providing them with a discount off their fourth purchase.
2. Encourage more spending per purchase
Another way to increase revenue from existing customers is to encourage them to spend more at each purchase. You may set a goal to increase each transaction by 25%, for example. Once again, create exclusive deals for your social media community. For example, offer a coupon for $40 off a $150 purchase to increase product purchases.
For service industries, consider bundling your offerings together, providing a discount for multiple services that will entice your customers to spend more. You could use Twitter to drive awareness of the deal with a call to action.
3. Continue engaging customers to keep your communities strong
No one wants to see an endless stream of deals and promotions with very little customer interaction or information sharing. Be sure to continue with your engagement strategy as you add deals and promotions to your tweets and postings.
The rule of thumb for an effective content mix is 20% company-related content and 80% relevant third-party content and direct engagement with your fans. So mix in the promotions carefully, and you will continue to have a thriving community.
Here are six rules of thumb that will help you write a sales message that actually helps you move an opportunity forward. I’ve got a few examples below, too, so you can see how to turn a bad message into a better one.
1. Write like you talk.
Sales messages are meant to be spoken. Even when somebody reads the message, you want readers to feel like you’re talking to them personally. Therefore, whenever you write a sales message, ask yourself: “Does this sound like something I’d actually say to a real person?” If not, your message won’t work well.
Before: “Engineers efficiently evaluate and improve their designs using our software tools. We are dedicated to building the most advanced vehicle system simulation tools.”
After: “Engines designed with our simulation software are more fuel-efficient than those that aren’t.”
2. Use common words rather than biz-blab.
Unfortunately, when most business folks sit down to write something, they turn into Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss and start writing in gibberish, stuffing sentences full of important-sounding terminology that means little or nothing. The cure is to use simple nouns and verbs that have a precise meaning.
Before: “We provide ‘one stop shopping’ for all of your HR needs. Through a single relationship, you have access to HR services for the continuum of the employment life cycle.”
After: “We help our clients with hiring, compensation, compliance, and training, so that they can spend more time running their business and less time and hassle dealing with HR details.”
3. State facts rather than promises.
Promises are only meaningful to people who already trust you, and that list probably doesn’t include prospects who aren’t yet customers. In fact, most people view a promise from a stranger with skepticism if not outright suspicion.
It’s more effective to provide a quantitative, verifiable fact that creates credibility.
Before: “You’ll love our dedicated account managers, comprehensive inventory, reliable delivery and competitive pricing.”
After: “Our customers save as much as $100,000 a year when they purchase directly from our account managers.”
Joe Pulizzi over at the Content Marketing Institute recently shared a fascinating video presentation from Coca-Cola about their upcoming marketing strategy.
The short version?
Content marketing has arrived.
For more than 100 years, Coca-Cola has been one of the world’s foremost practitioners of what they call “one-way storytelling.”
(You and I call that an advertisement.)
But Coke — in the form of their brilliant VP of global advertising strategy, Jonathan Mildenhall — is looking around and realizing that the 30-second television ad won’t take them where they want to go next.
To do that, they’re turning to the tool that’s quickly becoming the most important strategy for smaller businesses — content marketing.
For anyone who still thinks that content marketing is some kind of fad, take a look at the thinking (and dollars) going into Coca-Cola’s marketing strategy, aimed at doubling worldwide consumption of Coke by the year 2020.
The videos are compelling, but they’re also packed with advertising jargon that can be about as intelligible as Klingon.
And yet, this is a peek into a great marketing and advertising mind — and there are some juicy strategies we can carry off and implement in the real world.
Here are a few of my favorite ideas from Mildenhall’s presentation
The term “content marketing” sounds like a hip buzzword to describe the latest marketing craze, but in reality, the concept has been around since the first newsletters came rolling off the presses.
And if there’s one single reason why companies around the world continue to incorporate “content marketing strategies” into their yearly plans – it’s because it has been working for hundreds, if not thousands of years!
Let’s go over a short recap as to why content marketing is a good marketing strategy to employ for today’s online audience:
- Show You’re an Authority on a Subject – When you offer unbiased and valuable information on a given subject matter, you earn trust with people who visit your blog or website. And as well all know, increasing the trustworthiness of your brand, tends to increase business.
- Search Engine Traffic – Ten years ago, piling on content was a surefire way to grow traffic, but thanks to content farming and Google catching on to other SEO trickery, it’s not that easy anymore. However, the more content you create, the more search engine traffic you will accumulate simply because you will be increasing your longtail search visibility. But more importantly, well written content gets linked to – and backlinks are vital for climbing search engine rankings.
- Build Your Marketing List and Readership – And as you commit to writing great content day in and day out, hopefully you are building up a list of readers whether it’s through Twitter Followers, Facebook Fans or email and RSS subscribers. As your marketing list grows, the more flexibility you have to promote and share offers to your subscribers.
The following resources below will help anyone learn about why content marketing is important to any business and how to get the most of it.
For Beginners
For beginners to people looking for primers on content marketing, these links will get you on the right track.
1. What is Content Marketing – Copyblogger’s introduction to the world of content marketing. If you don’t know what content marketing is, then this is the perfect place to start.
2. The Beginner’s Guide To Blogging & Content Marketing – Learn how to source freelance writers, promote your content, and more with this free e-book.
3. Creating Consistent Content: A Content Marketing Plan – This post will help you create a content marketing schedule and (hopefully) stick to it.
4. Why You Need To Be Doing Content Marketing – This post outlines 10 content marketing goals worth pursuing.
5. The Time For Content Marketing Is Now – A call to arms post on why you need to be jumping on content marketing now. Post also includes stellar examples of content creation done right.
6. The Periodic Table of Content – Types of content broken down into ‘elements’ on a periodic table. An easy way to look at what types of content there are and approximately how long each type of content should be.
7. 7 Content Marketing Myths: Selling the C-Level – It’s not easy to get executives to buy in to new marketing initiatives – use some of the tips in this post to learn how to sell the c-level on content strategy.
8. The Content Marketer’s Guide To Web Content – This is an introductory post to the different types of content on the web with some examples of where + how you can use them. If you ever need a primer on content, this is the post to refer to.
“The On-Demand Brand: 10 Rules for Digital Marketing Success in an Anytime, Everywhere World” characterizes the challenge of demanding attention from a new generation of consumers who want what they want, when they want it, and where they want it. Here are the new marketing rules I support:
- Insight comes before inspiration. Innovative marketing starts with customer insights culled from painstaking research into who your customers are, and how they use digital media. Then it’s time to innovate through the channels or platforms that are relevant.
- Don’t repurpose, re-imagine. Digital quite simply is not for repurposing content that exists in other channels. It’s about re-imagining content to create blockbuster experiences that cannot be attained through any other medium.
- Don’t just join the conversation, spark it. Create new online communities of interest, rather than joining existing ones. Ask why it should be, and why customers should care. Then give them a reason to keep coming back. Keep it real, social, and events-based.
- There’s no business without show business. Remember Hollywood secrets. Your brand is a story; tell it. Accentuate the personalizable, own-able, and sharable. Viral is an outcome, not a strategy. Make people laugh and they will buy.
- Want control? Give it away. Several companies, including Mastercard, Coca-Cola, and Doritos have let customers build commercials and design contests, with big rewards for the customer and for the company. That’s giving up control, with some risk, to get control.
- It’s good to play games with your customers. Games are immersive, but shouldn’t be just a diversion. They need to drive home the value proposition. Don’t forget to include a call to action, like leading people to the next step of the buying process.
Video has become an essential marketing tool. It’s a great way to tell your story, show the human side of your business and communicate highly complex ideas in an easy to digest manner. But while video has the power to deeply engage, it also has the power to bore the viewer to tears—and creating compelling video is different than writing, say, a compelling blog post.
Starting a camera and spouting out a thousand words of brilliant prose does not make a compelling video. There are proven techniques and tools that can help make your videos engage, hold attention and wow the viewer. Here are 10 tools that can help you get started.
1. Prezi. This is a interesting take on the slide presentation as it allows you to create one giant and more easily connected idea and then use the tool to zoom, pan and fly all around the presentation to create a really dynamic feel. It’s not the easiest tool to master, but check out some of the incredible examples on the site to get inspiration.
2. YouTube Editor. I like this tool because it’s free, and because you’re using YouTube to host and stream your videos anyway, it gives you some nice editing capability right in YouTube. You can also add annotations and transcripts to your videos making them more SEO friendly.
3. Camtasia. This PC and Mac desktop software is the market leader in the screencapture video world. Screencast videos are a great way to demonstrate how something online works. Camtasia has some nice features that allow you to add focus to areas on your screen as well as annotations and URLs.
This question, “Why don’t they get the strategy?” drives straight to the heart of what internal branding and change communications is all about.
As a senior executive, what would you do? What would you do if you discovered that different business units of your company were essentially working against each other to support their own business and political agendas, rather than the objectives of the entire company? Or, what would you do if you had just found out that, after spending five years in IT planning, deploying 65 full time staff and exceeding $55 million on an ERP implementation, that you were only achieving 40% utilization across your enterprise? Scenarios like these are real and are happening every day, and CEOs and their boards continue, sadly, to ignore and tolerate them.
These matters are urgent and important. But management doesn’t know what to do about them, or how to deal with them. So, all too often, they do nothing.
Why am I drawing your attention to this? I was recently talking to the CEO of a major Fortune 100 company about change management and the importance of communicating with his employees. I was pointing out how companies, who embrace change effectively, making wise use of internal branding and team alignment, perform better, grow faster, and produce higher revenue. His answer has been haunting me ever since. “What you’re selling me on is soft stuff”, he said. “I need to make tangible investments that have a direct impact on results. If I can’t touch it, feel it or talk to it, it doesn’t seem like an imperative investment.”
I tried my hardest to explain, “Most companies who fail,” I said, “do so because they can’t execute. Employees receive mixed messages. They don’t really recognize the consequences of doing things in new ways and changing old behavior. Your employees are tangible assets – in fact they are your greatest assets.”
It didn’t matter. I failed to convince him that effective change management is urgent and critical in today’s business world. CEO’s confide to their direct subordinates, “Why don’t they get the strategy? I’ve only told them about it a thousand times”. But what these CEOs fail to appreciate is that hearing something and really understanding it are quite different animals. Employees need to understand an idea deeply for it to become relevant and important enough to change their behavior. If they don’t get it change will not occur.
This question, “Why don’t they get the strategy?” drives straight to the heart of what internal branding and change communications is all about.
I have a passion for helping companies become high performance businesses. High performance comes from aligning your people, your process and your resources with your company’s strategic vision and its mission. In other words, if you have the right people in the right jobs, working with efficient and effective processes that are repeatable, trainable and coachable, your company can indeed attain a higher level of performance, as measured in throughput, productivity and revenue growth.
Technology enhances process improvement, speed, communications and productivity, ultimately saving money and improving productivity. But CEO’s and boards often make one huge mistake, believing that people management issues will take care of themselves naturally. After all, employees are hired to do the job they are instructed to do. Right? Absolutely not!
High performance actually comes as a direct result of people doing their jobs in the ways they feel are most effective. Success has always been about people, and about their will to set their own priorities – not about technology, policy or strategic initiatives. The job may be reducing internal slippage at Best Buy, or recognizing the importance of keeping prices low and margins high at Wal-Mart or understanding the importance of co-marketing to serve Campbell’s Soup’s retail clients better. But it all comes down to people understanding what is expected of them, being motivated and inspired by that knowledge, and signing on to change their behavior to support the company’s goals.
Metrics & measurements show clearly that this is so…. Here are a few factual illustrations of the value and necessity of investing in the soft stuff.
- Last year Pitney Bowes launched a major external branding effort. They were redefining the scope of their business from a mail meter firm to “Engineering the Flow of Communication”. In addition to an outstanding advertising campaign, they sought to educate each and every employee as to what “Engineering the Flow of Communications” would mean to the company’s bottom line and business success. Results show that the internal brand immersion program was a big success. Where only 29% of Pitney Bowes employees had understood the brand, soon over 70% said they did (40% among customer facing employees). Among the sales force, the understanding rose from initially 11%, to a whopping 65% who claimed to use the new brand to open doors with C-suite customers rather than as was usual in the past, going through the mailroom.
- With Sam Walton as a mentor, Wal-Mart learned early that it was critical to enroll employees to care about the customers. From its research, Wal-Mart found that if it took the time to educate employees about how the company worked, and to communicate basic instructions to them about how to perform their jobs, the company would not have to nag them constantly. Eventually, they would figure out what to do on their own, and customer-caring behavior would become the operational standard across the company. This would save billions of dollars worth of time and energy. The results are obvious – Wal-Mart has become the largest retailer in the world, with gross revenues and profits higher than many countries’ GNP.
- After HP acquired Compaq the company sought to create a unified brand that embodied the cultures, employees and products/services of the two companies. Their efforts culminated in the launch of a new marketing campaign and tag line: “Invent”. They added additional attributes (such as brand equity, employee commitment and understanding to the traditionally non-financial, creative elements of the brand (such as corporate reputation, brand perceptions, customer experience and messaging). HP created a brand model that would compute and correlate their contribution to growth and shareholder value. By pushing the right buttons and doing these analytics, HP was able to compute how internal & external brand attributes contribute to performance and shareholder value. Wow – powerful stuff!
Your people and their customer facing experiences and behavior are indeed assets. As with all your assets, you must manage them so they become drivers of employee commitment and customer satisfaction. These in turn ultimately drive shareholder value. It’s time to start managing the “soft stuff” as if it were a financial asset-because it is. The result of doing so will contribute to above average share growth in strong markets and protect you against market downturns. It will build the kind of employee commitment that helps to justify premium price protection and customer loyalty.
So–is this soft stuff when all is said and done? Clearly, NO. But a lot more education will have to happen before CEOs understand its impact, and before they can stop wondering why their people just don’t get it.
High levels of job satisfaction don’t necessarily translate into an engaged workforce.
That’s the key finding from research by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which found U.S. employees are generally satisfied with their jobs, but only moderately engaged.
The results show that, overall, employees are fairly satisfied with key attributes of their jobs, including:
- Relationships with co-workers (76 per cent).
- The work itself (76 per cent).
- Opportunities to use skills and abilities (74 per cent).
- Relationship with immediate supervisor (73 per cent).
But other aspects of the work experience were seen as falling short, and had considerably fewer respondents reporting satisfaction. These included:
- Career advancement opportunities (42 per cent).
- Career development opportunities (48 per cent).
- Communication between employees and senior management (54 per cent).
- Job-specific training (55 per cent).
- Management recognition of employee job performance (57 per cent).
Here are four ideas that will help you become a more inclusive leader:
1. Let Them Build It. To construct and convey key messages, smart leaders don’t always rely on professional communicators or on elaborate messaging campaigns. Instead, they recognize that often it’s front-line employees who know best how to tell a given company story. (For an example of a grassroots project that resulted in an employee-generated book, see our earlier post on that topic.)
2. Lead by Following. The notion that senior executives might maintain a blog or a Twitter feed — one that employees, along with other company stakeholders, can follow — is fairly commonplace. In some instances, though, leaders reverse that equation: In a bid to share the digital limelight, they invite rank-and-file employees to become company-sponsored bloggers.
3. Send a Messenger (Not Just a Message). People today are skeptical of slickly produced brand messages. They’re skeptical of slick official spokespeople, too. Leaders who want to build public trust in their company brand, therefore, often recruit employees to serve as brand ambassadors. Training people who work for a company to speak for that company is a marketing practice that doubles as an engagement-building practice.
4. Lose Control. It’s hard to break free of the mindset that treats communication as a control function. But many leaders find that ceding control over what employees say on company channels — on an intranet discussion forum, for example — means gaining a new way to tap into the talent, the insight, and the passion of their people. They also find that self-policing by employees works to keep such discussion from going off-track.
For an inclusive leader, the term “employee communication” takes on a provocative new meaning. For generations, that term has referred to communication aimed at employees. Today, by contrast, more and more leaders are seeking ways to leverage the value of communication performed by employees.
Based on interactions with recruiters, friends who have worked there, and Amazon employees in the working world, a couple of things stand out, and I’ll contrast with eBay where I worked:
- It’s a very customer driven company; everything they do is with the goal of improving the experience for the customer (we were more revenue focused in the short term).
- It’s an anti-PowerPoint culture—all of their products are ideated and communicated through written stories/long memos. I recall their recruiters saying every product starts with you writing the press release for the final product, because if you can’t articulate that well, then the user won’t be able to understand it either.
- It’s a very innovative culture, where people are encouraged to do things differently from how others are doing things—note this is different from Facebook (move fast and break things) or Google (most elegant, scalable way of doing something)—in that different may not fit either of these criteria, but if it’s better for the customer, it’s okay.
Before a company can communicate well externally, it needs to communicate well internally. Companies that focus on honing their culture and employees via communication and education can create brands with a purpose. Brands need to start trusting the voices of their valued employees. In essence, brands need to become social.
Take, for example, this site, the AT&T Networking Exchange Blog. Bill Strawderman and Trish Nettleship spearheaded this blog in order to bring the digital voices of their employee ambassadors in the public sphere as part of the company’s effort to help foster authenticity. In an eMarketer article, Nettleship said, “The idea is to build that thought leadership and engage customers earlier in the research process, as they’re starting to learn about these technologies and how they are going to help their business.”
While it’s been over 12 years since the publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto companies are still trying to humanize their businesses. Internal communication among employees is critical for external communication to start the process. Despite the reality at most companies, these firms need to remember that people don’t think of a brand as a series of departments. Rather, they think of a brand as a whole entity.
The concept remains difficult for many brands, but companies are made up of people. Real people. Brands need to start tapping into this golden opportunity to elevate their brand relevance in a world where a person or business’s reputation can be destroyed in a mouse click. There’s liquid gold in the voices of employees, but few brands realize this unharnessed potential.
The technology decisions that businesses should make are not trivial. In his 2005 book, Dealing With Darwin – written at the dawn of the enterprise 2.0 movement – Geoffrey Moore discussed the dynamic between systems of record (SORs) and systems of engagement (SOEs). Think of SORs – enterprise software platforms and tools – as investments that will get a bigger return when the next generation of technology (SOEs) are implemented. If you are a CIO, you will not need to blow up what you have already built (nor should you). But you should find a way to integrate and fit the new technologies that have been purpose-built for human engagement.
If you want to evolve you need to kill PR. Why? Because there is too much head trash about what public relations means. I think it is unrealistic to expect that others outside the profession, including most bosses and clients, will ever see it more than publicity, free advertising, or press releases. Your job is about to get harder than it already is, and dragging that old description around is just dead weight. If we want to evolve I think we need to kill “PR”.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a “PR is Dead” post. In fact, the idea of relating to the public is now as important as ever. Your smart practices on quality communications are extremely valuable, but I think to stay fresh you will need to shift your view of yourself from a company communicator to that of a communities facilitator
The Pinterest frontier as yet unexplored is the territory of internal communications. The fast-growing social network is a natural for companies that sell visually pleasing products or promote a lifestyle brand. Brands like Nordstrom, Whole Foods Market, Bergdorf Goodman and even Chobani Greek yogurt have started Pinterest boards directed at their consumers. Ann Taylor launched a brilliant Valentine’s contest that motivated Pinterest users to pin Ann Taylor clothes and accessories to their own boards.
Now Pinterest has the potential to become a powerful employee engagement tool as well. At Tribe, we’re beginning to recommend its use internally, particularly for brands with predominantly female workforces, such as retailers for women’s apparel.
One of the trickiest communication issues for such retailers is communicating with the employees on the sales floor. They’re separated geographically from corporate and from other stores, yet it’s essential to loop these employees in on what the brand represents.
After all, the sales associates are the ones who interact with shoppers. You can have fantastic external branding, but if the customer experience doesn’t live up to that branding, you’re sunk. Especially in this economy, retail customers want to feel like they’re getting what they’re promised.
Every once in a while consultants are challenged to put their ideas into practice. Such was my experience this week. Colleague Shel Holtz, ABC and a co-host Neville Hobson, ABC, host a podcast “For Immediate Release” twice a week. This week, Shel invited me to join another measurement guru, Angela Sinickas, ABC as the featured guests on their regular podcast.
For the past year, I have been advocating that communication and management leaders need to include blogs, wikis and podcasts in their arsenal of communication channels. Blogs have been a relatively easy sell. They have increased in visibility, value and usage. Wikis are still a bit of a mystery but there is a small awakening there. Podcasts, on the other hand, are still in the incubator. The innovators and the early adopters of new ideas are just beginning to warm up to the concept.
Podcasting evolved with the birth of Apple’s iPod and the ability to publish audio files on the internet. A podcast is simply and audio blog. The audio files can be accessed on the internet and aspiring broadcasters can self-publish or ‘broadcast’ radio style programming using the internet as the distribution channel. Unlike regular radio, the podcasts can be accessed, downloaded and played by anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Podcasting began in the fall of 2003 and really became a growth phenomenon in late 2004. Shel and Neville launched “For Immediate Release”(FIR) in January 2005. Their listening audience has been growing in leaps and bounds. Their focus is on issues and innovations in communication and public relations. Shel brings a North American perspective from California and Neville from Amsterdam.
Each podcast is accompanied by a detailed guide to the content of the podcast – about one hour in length. Each topic has a time code so that you can select pieces of the broadcast rather than listening to it all in one sitting. Every person, topic and organization mentioned in the podcast is listed in the notes with links to relevant web sites. “For Immediate Release” is a model for others considering getting into the field.
It will only be a short time before enlightened organizations start using this new channel for communicating with customers, suppliers and employees. It has huge potential with its advantages of immediacy, convenience and consumability. It is the ultimate commuter’s communication channel as you sit in the bus, train or traffic jam listening to a podcast that you have downloaded in to your iPod before leaving home or the office.
So how did Angela and I do on our podcast? Well hear for yourself. The podcast was published in the June 22, 2005 edition of “For Immediate Release”. You can find the podcast at http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz with the detailed podcast notes. So you can listen to it all, select the parts that interest you or just see what this new communication channel is all about.
There is a link for comments at the end of the notes just like a blog. Give us your feedback and let us know what you thought of the issues we discussed.
Tudor Williams
Perspectives and tips on the current state of the U. S. workplace and the people in it:
American Mania: When More Is Not Enough
Peter Whybrow MD
Norton, 2005
(The author links psychiatry, anthropology, economics, neurobiology and genetics to explain the root of increasing incidents of depression, obesity and addictions in our ever-faster-paced American society. Possibly this is the dark side of “hard fun”…)
Contagious Success: Spreading High Performance Throughout Your Organization
Susan Lucia Annunzio
Portfolio, 2004
(New global research that supports the idea that high performance (the ideal organizational form of “hard fun”) depends on the same things no matter where you are.)
Getting to the seventh person first
Paula Bartholome
http://www.parallax-perspectives.com/newsletters/summer2004.html
(Lead article in my enewsletter about the positive culture of an organization doing a mundane job, web hosting, and how they have “hard fun” doing it. Includes tips on creating such an environment.)
Story Power for Teams
Paula Bartholome and Evelyn Clark
http://www.parallax-perspectives.com/images/Story_Power.pdf
(A brief article on how communicating with stories can facilitate moving a team through the stages of development and on to “hard fun”.)
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace
Gordon MacKenzie
Viking, 1998
(A joyously fun read! All about maintaining creativity in bureaucratic environments.)
The impact of incivility on employees and workplaces
http://www.civilityworks.com/resources.html
(Several articles [research and anecdotal evidence] on the corrosive impact of uncivil behavior in workplaces. It’s difficult to imagine anyone being able to have “hard fun” in such places…)
Last year, a friend who works in corporate communication for a major local company advised me to keep my ears open to the topic of “offshoring” — the latest cost-reduction trend of sending service jobs to other countries. “This is going to be a big issue for communicators,” she warned.
I was aware that some companies already were exporting jobs, but sure enough, I began to hear more and more about it. More stories about “offshoring” appeared in business publications, more talking heads with creased brows lamented it, and I even saw more discussion in the public-relations industry press.
I have paid close attention to the topic, but two things keep bothering me. One is that the only thing new about “offshoring” is that it primarily affects white-collar and service-industry jobs. Exporting jobs as a cost-cutting measure is nothing new. It has been going on for years in the manufacturing sector, but white-collar managers essentially told their blue-collar employees to suck it up and get used to the global economy. Now that those white-collar managers are seeing their jobs disappear, the practice has a new euphemistic name and urgency assigned to it.
One of these days — and I hope I live long enough to see it, but I doubt it — business managers everywhere will realize just how condescending they often appear to the people they manage. This is a communication issue because an inappropriate attitude and tone can create huge barriers to open communication between bosses and employees.
The other thing that keeps bothering me is that “offshoring” would be considered a big issue. This is not to downplay the significance of exporting jobs as a workplace issue, but it is only a communication problem when business leaders try to dance around it. Telling people that some of them might lose their jobs is not fun. It’s not easy. The discussion won’t make managers the object of employees’ affections. However, people deserve to know why jobs are being sent to other countries and they deserve the opportunity to express their anger, fear and disappointment.
I was talking recently with an employee of a local company who described a new manager in her department. She contrasted the former manager’s style of keeping everyone in the dark with the new manager’s style of frequent and open communication. The former manager’s approach led to mistrust and dissension. The new manager’s talk of the reasons for upcoming layoffs was not easy to hear, but employees appreciated the honesty and candor.
One of my favorite newsletters for communication executives, The Ragan Report, recently published comments from an unnamed computer programmer for a high-tech firm that was planning to export jobs. She wondered about the degree of employee backlash to “offshoring” and then described why she believes it is not the best solution to her company’s problems. She described the amount of time it will take her to train workers in other countries, to overcome time and language barriers, and to adjust to the cultural differences.
I found the programmer’s points to be interesting, but I couldn’t help wonder how much more useful her ideas would have been if she had the opportunity to express them to the leaders of her business.
Startup cultures are often defined by personalities of their founders (hoodies and hackathons, anyone?). Growing beyond the original crew means that those initial quirks either become more defined or diluted, depending on how tightly leadership holds on to them. So how to preserve that scrappy vibe and the can-do vision that will continue to attract the best and brightest so your business can grow? Fast Company talked to culture mavens who are working at that right now to get their best advice.
Grow the Staff, Not the Teams
As part of its due diligence process, CityGrid hunts for startups with a strong sense of company culture, even if it’s only shared among three people–the size of Urbanspoon’s staff was when it was acquired. Still based in Seattle, Urbanspoon’s ranks have swelled to 70 people and counting, but true to its roots, the vibe is still casual. There are no corporate titles listed on the Web site and all headshots are candid photos of staff tucking into a favorite dish.Nortman says that’s due to a CityGrid-wide practice of keeping the size of teams and meetings manageable. “Even if you become bigger, you should size your teams so they have a clear feeling of ownership,” she offers, “That’s instantly more important than a boss telling you what to do.” Likewise, Nortman advises hammering out how many meetings will be required to make any decision and then determine how many people should attend. “You want to make those decisions and fail quickly instead of waiting for 17 people to say yes,” she adds.
Keep the Lines Open
Teamwork was so important to cofounder of Foursquare Dennis Crowley that when the company added its first eight people, he hired friends he knew could foster the kind of open sharing that continues to be a core value, with 135 people now working in three separate offices.Susan Loh, head of talent at the social check-in company says that to keep the lines of communication open, Crowley started holding office hours once a week. “Anyone can sign up for a 10-minute time slot,” she says, to bring their ideas and feedback straight to the boss. For those not based in New York, video technology such as iPads in the conference room are available for virtual face-to-face meetings.
Foursquare also has an internal email blast called Snippets that allows everyone, including senior management, share what they are working on. “It’s not about what meetings they have scheduled; it’s what’s keeping them up at night and calls to action,” Loh explains.
Pay People to Leave
Culture isn’t passed through osmosis at the water cooler. When Clate Mask, CEO of Infusionsoft, talks about the early days (in a garage) of the sales and marketing software company, he references family and fun as often as he cites innovation from within, faster execution, and fierce loyalty. He admits it’s been a challenge to keep that “one big happy” feeling as the company grew to 300 employees, but is on track to beef up to 1,000 in three years. “We believe we can keep this forever as long as we are intentional. We wanted to dispel the notion that you can’t scale culture.”To do this as Infusionsoft adds about 10 to 15 people per month, each new hire must go through a two-week intensive orientation. When that’s complete, they are offered $5,000–to leave (a practice made famous by Zappos). “It’s expensive to have the wrong people,” Mask says, “This gives the individual an opportunity to assess if they are really committed.” So far he’s gotten no takers and says Infusionsoft’s retention rate is 90 percent.