The Communicator

Sleeping soundly one night, you have a dream: You are twelve years old again, and having a bowl of cereal at the breakfast table. Your mom walks into the room, looks down at you lovingly, smiles… then roars: “Realignment is a critical component of our go-forward strategy!”

Don’t be surprised.  This kind of thing happens in the real world all the time.  

Leading global brands spend millions of dollars each year creating and maintaining unique corporate identities, carefully managing their logos, visual identity and communications vehicles to weave a “look and feel” that their audiences can identify and relate to.

But as soon as they open their mouths, you realize that something doesn’t quite fit. They say something uncharacteristic, or use a tone of voice that you don’t recognize. Maybe your trusted-yet-stuffy auditor tweets you about a ‘sick gig’ he is hosting, or the kid that mows your lawn shows up at your door in a BOSS suit and gleaming Guccis to walk you through a PowerPoint presentation.

The bottom line? Maintaining a consistent tone of voice and writing style is critical to creating and reinforcing a strong corporate identity.

When it comes to websites, many companies do a good job at this. But some take a more haphazard approach in applying their tone of voice to other communications vehicles and channels. In many cases the tone of voice changes depending on the personal style of the company’s writers, sometimes sourced from different disciplines or internal departments.

When working with clients, we always suggest creating a universal style guide to formalize a corporate tone of voice that everyone can adhere to. A well crafted style guide should:

• Complement the brand and ensure that the tone of voice aligns to the mission, vision and overall identity of the brand;
• Be easily accessible to encourage adoption, utilization and adherence by both staff and suppliers;
• Allow for adaptation into other vehicles or geographic regions, recognizing the unique communications needs of other cultures;
• Provide guidance, basic rules and familiar examples to enable users to easily create a consistent voice across a variety of communications channels; and
• Include appropriate approval processes to reinforce and streamline the organization’s review and legal approval requirements.

Besides reinforcing your brand identity, a formalized and well-adopted style guide should result in consistently higher-quality content while reducing the editing and review burden on your communications team.

Time for E2E?

Anyone who has experience with LinkedIn would agree that social media sites can be a pretty powerful professional networking tool. Chances are you’ve used it to stay connected to old colleagues, find like-minded professionals or look for recommended suppliers.

But are there also practical business communications applications for these sites?

In future posts we’ll examine different ways to further your communications objectives using social networking sites like LinkedIn. Today’s post is all about employee engagement.

If we accept the premise that a significant number of your employees use LinkedIn, then it doesn’t take long to realize that you now have access to a robust, self-subscribed, motivated employee and alumni network right at your fingertips… and the truly amazing thing? It’s free!

So how do you harness that network to drive your organization’s communications objectives?

First, remember that these sites are popular largely because they operate outside of the confines of the office. So this means that the usual ‘top-down’ corporate messaging is off the table. This isn’t an opportunity to start spamming your employees’ profiles with the latest company press releases or to invite them to the next “RRSP Planning and You” Lunch & Learn.

It does, however, offer unparalleled opportunities to support less tangible business objectives such as public advocacy initiatives, corporate giving programs or professional development opportunities, all of which create better employee engagement and loyalty.

So where do you go from here? Start by working with your leadership to define your strategy and know exactly what you are trying to achieve. Keep this strategy as your ‘True North’ and refer back to it often to avoid scope creep and to evaluate the effectiveness of your tactics.

Here are a few basic steps towards using LinkedIn to enhance employee engagement: 

1. Create your company’s profile: Keep it simple, short, and on message – and make sure it’s been properly approved before you put it online.
2. Work with company leadership to create and manage their personal profiles: Exhibiting support and participation by executives demonstrates accessibility, transparency and participation, and encourages employees to be engaged.
3. Let your employees know it’s out there and available: Promote your organization’s participation on these sites.  In fact, go one further and offer your employees tutorials on building and maintaining their own professional profiles.
4. Identify an internal ‘evangelist’ network to create and moderate groups: Rank and file employees can make better moderators than leadership since people are more likely to participate on a peer-to-peer level.
5. Formalize an internal feedback mechanism: Turning ideas or issues into actionable items requires organizational support and a formalized process. It won’t do you any good to hear about employee concerns if you can’t do anything about them.

A final word of caution: We are all quick to block senders that seem disingenuous or purely self-motivated. A really fast way to ruin your credibility with your employees is to end up on their spam list with all the purveyors of ED pills and pirated software.

I’m an avid reader of e-newsletters. For the most part, this is an occupational hazard, but every once in a while I find myself captivated by a particular story, intrigued by an innovation, or simply waiting for my BOGO coupon to print so that we can go shopping.

The truth is that e-newsletters could be the most valuable communications tool you have. In general, they enjoy a more motivated audience, provide unique forums to engage customers in an interactive setting, and offer unparalleled cross-selling and business development opportunities. In addition, they can be wildly inexpensive to maintain, with an ROI that would put all of your traditional communications tools to shame.

So it shocks me when I see how many communications professionals have virtually abandoned this little treasure. Overwhelmingly viewed as a tactical inconvenience and delegated to communications neophytes or admins, many e-newsletters have become as much a chore to read as to produce.

However, when managed properly it can be relatively simple to create and maintain consistently high-value e-newsletters. For example, try formalizing the production of your newsletters into an approved business process that accounts for the different needs of content generation, editing and review, layout, approvals and distribution. That way, you can easily manage any variables that arise, while ensuring that you have the appropriate resources lined up against the right tasks.

At the very least, make sure that you actually have some content. Just last week, my local grocery chain sent me an email with a huge banner ad imploring me to check out their unbelievable Weekly Special. OK… <click>…  and how was I rewarded? “There are no special offers at this time. Please visit again soon.” Wow! The only thing unbelievable about that is the wasted opportunity.

We seem to lose our heads around new technology. With no real metrics available, the potential of ‘the next big thing’ is anyone’s guess. In the mad rush to participate, even seasoned communicators dispense with metrics and toss the basic fundamentals aside like a pair of out-dated jeans.

And when it comes to starting ‘blogs’, the truth is that many have been blinded by the euphoria of participation, and have come to consider the very creation of a blog to be an objective in itself.

That is a mistake. In reality, blogs aren’t much different from many other communications channels that we currently have at our disposal such as newsletters, websites or by-lined articles.

Each requires a long-term investment of time and resources, a sustainable pipeline of content and real thought leadership.

For many industries, blogs are a great fit.  Smart organizations are leveraging blogs to showcase their talent, creativity and successes. They are engaging in quality discussions with their audiences, progressing innovative ideas with their peers and opening new channels for employee engagement (we’ll explore some of these ideas in a later posting).

But for many communicators, blogs have evolved into a morass bordering on the inane. Time consuming and interactive, the constant requirements of maintaining a blog can entangle even the best of us.

The bottom line? Treat blogs like you would any other communication vehicle. Evaluate their reach, impact, cost and effort against your objectives. And if it turns out that a blog makes sense, the first step should always be to ensure that you have a long-term commitment from your organization, and the right resources to ensure sustainable success.

And no, the irony of this being our first blog posting is not lost on us.