jca’s Com blog-notes - communiquer.ch

Here are a list of useful links (and extracts) to articles dealing with communication problems in organizations. They are good complements to previous posts on the same topic:

• Corporate blogging rules: when it comes to setting rules about corporate blogs, I like this way of seeing things
  

  1. Don’t blog about something you are privy to (upcoming products, organizaional structure changes - good or bad)
  2. Don’t talk about other companies unless you have permission to do so & when/if you do, those facts are correct.
  3. Be courtious & Professional: if you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t say it at all.
  4. If you think you will get fired for saying it, you probably will.

• Internal comms vital for innovation:
  

  The study, called The changing face of marketing and communications in today’s creativity economy, shows that 70% of high-level managers believe good internal communication is fundamental to promoting innovation among employees

• The next frontier in employee communication:
  

  The key benefit of social media tools is to help employees actively participate in creating and sharing information.

• Poor communication stopping business change:
  

  More communication is needed to overcome resistance from middle managers and employees to lean business innovation, according to a survey of 2,500 businesspeople conducted by the Lean Management Institute (LEI).

• Bad communication wastes employees’ time, survey says: research shows poor office relations and unnecessary e-mails soak up workers’ time.
• Your Communication Style Makes You or Breaks You: how to improve your e-mail communication with your clients by following some basic rules.

While looking for examples of successful implementation of wikis inside organisations, I read an interesting article on CNNMoney.com about “Boosting teamwork with wikis“.

This show the real benefits on teamwork a company can get from wikis. I also describes the obstacles to overcome in order to implement it successfully.

Below are a few quotes from the article that are relevant in my opinion to understand the problem :

“The biggest reason that we’re switching is that the wiki is easier to use,” says Rosen. “If employees see a better way to organize or present information, they can just go ahead and do it with a wiki.

As with many contentious entries on Wikipedia, the two sides edited each other’s decisions repeatedly until they came to a compromise: The orders could go in both categories. “It forced everybody to learn about each other’s job,” says Rosen. “That benefits us in the long run.”

Finally, don’t forget to visit Wikimatrix to help you choose what wiki’s good for you!

English Summary : everybody working in a complex organization knows how it is difficult to manage information circulation between people and each layer of the system. A few articles quoted below cover the problem and Wikis could be part of the answer to the problem…

Quiconque travaillant dans une grande organisation sait à quel point il est difficile de faire circuler de l’information de manière efficace au sein d’une structure complexe. Si l’e-mail nous a donné la vitesse, il nous apporte également la quantité (sans forcément la qualité), la redondance, le désordre… et au bout du compte, l’impossibilité de gérer efficacement cette circulation d’information.
Un graphique saisissant nous permet d’appréhender la puissance d’un Wiki au sein d’une organisation dans le sens où il centralise l’information de manière unique pour éviter les redondances. L’efficacité d’une Knowledge Base n’est plus à démontrer. Ainsi, dans l’organisation dans laquelle je travaille, le mise en place d’un référentiel avec plusieurs contributeurs a considérablement réduit le nombre de mails envoyés concernant les mêmes demandes répétitives.

De même, certains s’interrogent sur l’utilité d’une interface comme Facebook au sein de l’entreprise. Même si ce genre de modèle ne peut évidemment pas s’appliquer à toutes les organisations, c’est une nouvelle étape à laquelle nous devrons nous préparer.

Pour la fine bouche, un dernier lien nous présente l’utilisation des “social medias” pour faire du marketing…

Bonne lecture !

Et pour aller plus loin :
- What is a social media : two practical guides ?
- Online collaboration tools and ressources
- How we use twitter for journalism

In Time magazine in March, I read a very interesting article about the birth and 50 years of life of the peace symbol. In my opinion, this is a good example of how a very simple and powerful logo / symbol can become the icon of several generations taking “advantage” of the recurring wars of the 20th Century.

Looking at the history of the different intrepretations of this peace symbol (footprint of the American chicken, Mercedes-Benz icon, … for example) also shows how its meaning and use completely escaped his creator…

Long live “Peace and Love” !

While attending a seminar on Advanced Media and Public Relation (by Dr. Tom Watson at IUG), I had the opportunity to read about a study on blogs in corporations.
The “Makovsky 2006 State of Corporate Blogging Survey” is very interesting in many ways. Nearly all (96%) the Fortune 1000 senior executives were polled about blogs and their answer are summarized in the quote below :

The survey revealed that only a very small number of top executives are convinced to “a great extent” that corporate blogging is growing in credibility either as a communications medium (5%), brand-building technique (3%) or a sales or lead generation tool (less than 1%). In contrast, most executives are somewhat or not at all convinced of blogs’ growing credibility in these areas, (62%, 74% and 70% respectively). Moreover, nearly half of senior executives polled do not have corporate policies pertaining to blogging, although 77% believe that their organizations should have such policies. Clearly, we are seeing a snapshot of the beginning of a corporate activity and a medium which is set to grow rapidly and which will become increasingly important to corporations around the world. Companies that do not recognize this trend and take action to capitalize on it will miss out on valuable opportunities. They will also put themselves at risk of being blindsided by unfavorable publicity.

Then, another study is also relevant when writing about corporate blogs and that is “Weblogs and Employee Communication” (Wright and Hinson, 2006). This report explains how employee blogging has become a dynamic new medium to communicate with internal and external audience and has changed many aspects of employee communication. Below are a few quotes from this study (check out “why employees blog” and “Are employees’ blogs good or bad?”) :

The potential impact of blogs on public relations and corporate communications is phenomenal. [...] The rise of the blogosphere has the potential to empower employees in ways not unlike the rise of labor unions in the late 19th and 20th centuries. [...] Although employees who blog are writing both positive and negative things about their organizations, it appears that the positive outweighs the negative.