Is blogging getting corporate?

Not sure how I feel about IBM having a set of guidelines for bloggers IBM and those participating in wikis. On the one hand it makes good corporate sense makes personal views and free speech just a little more corporately - controlled. I guess it's an inevitable step, but I hope it doesn't put IBMers off making useful, challenging and informed comment to the world about their working life.

I'm interested in seeing how other organisations follow suit - anyone got any other good examples out there?

Busy when I should be blogging

It's typical. when I'm working on communicatons, I'm generally too busy to blog - but of course that's the time I should be blogging, because that's the time when I'm at the heart of what's going on in organisational communications.

If I step back at the moment and look at the work I'm involved in, it's quite wide-ranging, but so little is now involved in conventional print media. In fact, precisely one project putting together entries for a grad scheme directory.

As for the rest, it's a mix of strategy building, internal comms training, e-zines and web writing (and e-zines linked to inter/intranets).

I'm having fewer conventional meetings too, with many more teleconferences and web chats. My working day, my working timeframe and my working links are all changing - and it's good to see that it's much the same for my peers.

I took part in a fun and useful webchat with CiB this week covering its merger with the ICA and plans to get closer to other organisations including IABC. I hope these plans come to fruition - as I could do with saving on the subscriptions.

Such chats are becoming commonplace now - good when we know the participants already, but I have my reservations when breaking new ground with new people. We don't want to become a race or profession of geeks - and I've yet to meet a webchat that enables me to see the whites of my fellow chatters' eyes.....

Who's using the tools?

The blogs are out there - but how many organisations are making use of blogs, never mind podcasts and other new media to engage their internal audiences?

How many are lifting the quality of their intranets by introducing RSS feeds of what's new, what's news and what's just plain interesting to know?

How many wikis have escaped from the IT departments to provide a useful means for project collaboration - how many, if any, people are using such tools to create their own internal communications?

As ever, I suspect the technology is ahead of the market - at least from my UK perspective. Also, I supect the marcoms guys are going to grab these new tools rather faster and more readily than their organisational comms counterparts. But what an opportunity we have to use new technology to help engage with our colleagues.

We just need some brave souls to take the plunge, sort out the legalities and get up and running.

How far to push

Recently I interviewed a selection of business people for a case study. The case study was around innovation, following the conception to delivery of a new product. The guys who were charged with making the product were very proud of what they'd done, managing volatile liquids; building plant from scratch; widening their knowledge into a related but unfamiliar area - well out of their usual scope of operation. The product had been delivered to spec and on time.

The marketing people were less pleased. The production costs were well above what had been forecast and the speed of delivery was some way short of expectations. For them, the product had made it to the market - but by the skin of its teeth.

So I went back to my client: "It's a great case study," I said. "But it's not that straight upward line to success. If we're to really share what you've learned from the experience, this will need to be warts and all. People have been very honest talking to me, and my text will reflect that."

"No problem." said the client. So I produced the case study, and circulated it for sign-off. The changes began to filter back. Suddenly the issues weren't so bad; the costs were massaged and the trenchant opinions were pared down. I argued the toss where black had turned white - and the compromise was shades of grey. But in the end the agreed text was pretty anodyne.

It may have satisfied those directly involved in the project, but was far less immediately useful for those who would have benefited from knowing the perils and pitfalls of bringing something completely new to world to the market.

So what did I do? I fed back my views honestly but in a tempered logical way. And then I took the money.

I'm looking forward to writing more case studies for this client. I hope I can inch them towards greater openness. But in the end, they will make the decision on how 'honest' they are prepared to be.

I can take the horses to water - but I can't make them walk on it.

Do the do - or help others?

It used to be so simple. Managers came to the comms team when they had something to communicate. Consequently, professional communicators could plan and execute and track the response. Hopefully they'd learn from whatever impact the message had created and use that knowledge to make things better next time round the loop. The downside was that communicators could become bottlenecks or spinmeisters or simply didn't know enough about the deep down detail of the relevant part of the organisation to create the right impact with their take on the communication.

But now, especially with the rise of electronic tools, everyone, anywhere within an organisation can be a communicator. The tendency is to go for the immediate: to bypass the professional communicators in order to grab the immediacy. So, much organisational communication is no longer planned. The consequence can be repeated mistakes, informaton overload (or gaps, or duplicaton) and organisational communication chaos.

So where does that lead professional communicators today? Should we strive for that control over the 'doing' once again, or find another role within our organisations?

My view is that we'll always have some role in developing and maintaining the formalised communication - defining the comms strategy; implementing key parts of the plan; owning the corporate channels. But the genie is well and truly out of the bottle now - and there's no way we should want or need to stuff the cork back in.

We've got to move on: to accept that most organisational communication will be generated away from our PCs. But we have a huge role to play as coaches, mentors, setters of standards and policies and educators on how those within our organisations can get the most out of the tools available to them.

That means us knowing our businesses (not just communications) better so that we are seen to have a valuable input into their working lives and can help them use communication as the powerful business tool it should be. No communicator can afford to be sniffy about others 'invading our space' - that way lies King Canute. Instead, we should welcome the interest - it's not an invasion and work from within to embed effective communicaton as the way we get things done.

Still learning

Ok, I've just changed my settings and now anyone can post a comment on this blog - it'll be interesting to see if anyone else is watching.....or if I'm just talking to myself. Still, nothing new there!

Bizniss Speak

What is it with corporate communicators? So often we arrive at work as normal people, switch on our PCs and forget the rules of dialogue. Normal language is replaced by a weird hybrid comprising management speak, jargon and a skewed formality that we'd never use when talking to you face to face.

I can understand having to unmangle Byzantine word structures when editing source material from line and project managers for speeches, presentations and the like, but I'd expect more from people who's job is to get people talking within and around their own organisations.

We spend our working lives preaching the benefits of putting yourself in the receiver's shoes when it comes to organisational communication, but too often merely ape how we perceive CEOs should speak. In doing so, we're in danger of missing the connection with our audiences and creating barriers rather than breaking them down.

In the 80s and 90s there was a drive for using plain English to communicate - but often this missed the point too, over simplifying what needed to be said, and creating a patronising 'nanny English' that underestimated the intelligence of those on the receiving end.

It's that intelligence that has to be the start point for finding the right words, the right tone and the right emphasis for communications designed to engage, involve and inspire.

Our audiences are generally bright and well informed. With so many information sources vying for their attention, our words have to grab them. To grab them they need to resonate; to be familiar; to be in the parlance they're comfortable with.

People don't talk in management speak or over-formally with their families or friends. So why should we impose it at work?

It's my party.....

Weird. I turned 41 today and the level of static, surprise and expectation was just a fraction of 12 months ago.

Last year, 40 was a milestone and one where I felt the need to put an ocean between myself and the day-to-day realities of life. So on April 7 2004, I sat in a baseball stadium watching the Yankees edge out the Devil Rays. Back at the appartment, the phone kept ringing and e-mails regularly clocked up wishing me joy on entering my fifth decade.

Today? Lovely cards and presents from the immediate family and aside from that......nothing.

Still, I got a fortune cookie yesterday saying the '40 is now merely the middle age of youth while 50 is the youth of old age'. Not sure it made me feel any better, but it's nice to have nine years of breathing space before even contemplating getting older!

Service behind the smile

I hate service that's insincere, inattentive and impersonal - and managed to receive all three wrapped in one beaming Aussie package yesterday.

Now we tend to drop into cultural stereotypes when looking at face-to-face service, be it in retail, restaurants or even in our own businesses: - Americans are buzzy but insincere, Germans are frosty and efficient, the French are superior (or at least think they're superior to those they're serving), and the Aussies score for being naturally warm and friendly.

Yesterday at a chain restaurant in Oxford, we were greeted with warmth in abundance - and left vowing not to return to this particular establishment for a fair while yet.

First thing: we explained we were in a hurry (daughter number one was playing in a concert and we were grabbing some dinner in between her rehearsal and the performance). So we waited 10 minutes to order. We asked for a jug of water, it never arrived.

Twenty minutes went by, no food arrived. Then beaming waitress announced to my daughter that they'd run out of popcorn chicken and could she make up her platter with more of the remaining offerings - we said yes. Time passed. Daughter number two's plain pasta arrived, drenched in sauce. Son's meatballs were cold, wife's prawn salad arrived with three prawns. They should have been hot; they were cold. One wasn't even cooked through. Daughter number one's chicken platter arrived with no chicken at all.

The waitress asked if everything was ok - I said no and explained what wasn't, said we'd run out of time and asked for the bill. Five minutes later it arrived - no deductions, so therefore no tip offered. Wife, son and daughter number one ran for the exit and the concert. Daughter number two mixed eating and wearing her ice cream. I was keen to go. Waitress asked if I wanted an ice cream. 'No thank you' through gritted teeth. 'Another drink?' 'No thank you' (with a sub text of 'piss off and let me get away NOW!'

She then waylaid us by the stairs to wish us a 'great evening'. I wonder if some people are thick skinned or just thick?

Anyway, rant over. The homily for the day, if there is one, is that if you're going to offer service with a smile, make sure you've got the skills, product and timing to deliver beyond the grin.

What do we want of our professional organisations?

I'm based in the UK and belong to the UK's largest internal communication professonal organisation. But it's dominated by publications professionals and is in danger of retreating up its own cul-de-sac if it doesn't grow up soon and embrace the real challenges affecting communicators today.

Now I find that the IABC - the American-dominated organisaton also for internal communicators is having a similar period of angst.

Is it time that organisations such as these realised that internal communication means much more than glossy magazines and the corporate intranet?

I want to be part of an organisation I can be proud of. I want it to challenge my thinking and give me opportunities to learn from the experts and debate with my peers. I want it to stretch my knowledge and engage me in debates around change and progression in organisations where great communication can make the difference between success and mediocrity. I want my organisation to be thought leading not self-serving. I've held out hopes that IABC may fill this spece - but now strangely it seems that CiB may take the lead if it can sideline a few dinosaurs who still stand in the way.

Of course I can carp from the oputside or work from the inside to make a difference. While there's a large part of me that absolutely hates to be part of a committee of any kind, maybe it's time to work within one or both of these organisations to effect change.