3 posts tagged “iabc”

The Yankee Chapter of IABC offers lots of great programs for people to interact and network. One of the traditional get-togethers is the MetroWest Luncheon series which is organized by Susan Ethier. Usually a small group of corporate and independent practitioners meet for lunch and a lively discussion in a Natick restaurant.

Last week's topic was called "blogging" and sure enough we needed to add on another table. Anything related to social media draws a crowd these days.

Three of the attendees - including me - have a blog. One runs an internal blog for her company and the other blogger had just recently relocated to this area and hosts his neighborhood blog on the Worcester Telegram & Gazette platform.

The reservations about starting a blog - be it for a corporation or by a communications consultant to promote his or her expertise - were loud and clear: "I've got no time!"; "Who would read our/my blog anyway?"; "It takes a lot of time and resources to maintain a blog." Of course - all of these are legitimate considerations. This is why setting up a blog - especially an external corporate blog - requires preparation. One attendee wondered whether there's a Blogs"R"Us where you can get everything you need to start a blog. It sounds like a great idea but the major blog platforms and their (and other) tools are about all we get in terms of help. Everything else corporations or independent practitioners need to figure out for themselves.

A blog is a brand-building tool that can greatly enhance your reputation. It's not the right tool to promote a product as one attendee suggested.  Use it to show your company's expertise and blog about topics that are relevant to your business. A blog also presents another valuable vehicle when you need to communicate. Overall the recent JetBlue crisis was handled well but the company failed to its blog to apologize, explain and move forward.

While the blogosphere is almost saturated, there's still room for corporate blogs as many Fortune 1000 companies have been slow in warming up to blogs. Many of course have severe regulatory and legal issues to deal with. There's also still room for certain expert blogs as some areas are not represented very well in the blogosphere.

Blogs are almost mainstream. However, as the IABC MetroWest Luncheon shows, there are still a lot of questions and misconceptions - and room for education.

I've taken a bit of a break over the long weekend from my social media RSS feeds and Google Alerts. Oh my - when I wanted to catch up I was inundated with of posts, discussions and conversations about "social media" and what's right and wrong about it. 

At the Communications 2.0 workshop which I held for the lively Connecticut chapter of IABC last week, the audience was less concerned about which terms I used to describe the new tools and technologies. As one participant put it: "Social media really means a paradigm shift for us communicators." He hit the nail on the head! Marianne Richmond also put this very eloquently in her post on "something different is happening."

The workshop participants were all ready to explore and participate in the opportunities social media provides for communicators. Some were a bit sceptic and there were lots of questions, of course. Some already had experience   implementing certain social media tools and shared their stories freely with the rest.

What struck me was that there was no one among the attendees who refused to see the shift that is taking place. That is definitely a change from a year ago or maybe even six months ago. Social media will become mainstream - not tomorrow, but the day after.

Yesterday I attended an IABC luncheon in downtown Boston. The Yankee chapter of IABC is a great organization and very committed to providing forums for members, lapsed members (that's me!) and future members to come together and share thoughts, ideas, strategies and tactics.

A lot of the people I talked to work in internal communications. I asked about the use of social media in their daily work and the primary answer is still: "Well...we've got an intranet". Intranets are great but they offer so much more beyond being a repository of company information.

Here's what companies should consider for their intranets in 2007 (if they haven't done so already):

• Newsfeeds: allow your employees to customize their company news by using RSS
• YouToo can do what YouTube does: incorporate video in your intranet. This doesn't mean that every employee should be able to publish his or her own amateur video on the company site. Use semi-professional video to communicate news on your intranet as it reaches more employees than pure text.
• The same is true for Vodcasts or Podcasts which proof to be a valuable alternative to announcing company news such as a new benefits program, the opening of a new facility or an upcoming tradeshow the company exhibits at.
  
• Consider a blog for internal communications especially if you work in an environment where an external blog faces all kinds of regulatory and legal hurdles that you can't get past. One of the attendees yesterday suggested an Editor's Blog to solicit ideas and content for the employee newsletter. What a great idea!
• If you've got employees in various locations collaborating on writing a publication, a series of white papers or other forms of content, consider offering a wiki as part of the Intranet.
• Multi-cultural global corporations can also benefit from their own social networking component. Intranets usually have an employee directory, often with pictures, and sometimes with an attached skill profile. Why not allow all company experts on a certain topic - no matter where they are located - to form their own little community.
  

If you want to know what makes an intranet a great intranet, check out Jacob Nielsen's Best Intranets of 2007.