This is an adapted guest post from Shelley West in our sister program, the Marketing Leadership Council (MLC). Shelley wrote this for the MLC Wide Angle blog.

As part of my quest to know everything there is to know about what our B2B members are doing in the social media space, I spent this past Wednesday in Chicago at MLC’s B2B Social Media Strategy Builder workshop.  It was a great opportunity to interact with and learn from folks in the social media trenches at some of our B2B member companies.  In attendance were more than 40 staff members from over 20 corporations, representing a diverse set of industries and somewhat varied levels of social media maturity.   During the lively discussion, participants shared challenges, questions, ideas, frustrations, and successes.  A lot was shared, but I think two key themes emerged as the most challenging for those in attendance:

Challenge #1:  My boss told me to get our company on Twitter, what do I do now?

Several folks in the room reported that the powers that be at their companies had tasked them with objectives like, “Start a Twitter feed” or “Build a Facebook page.”   But without knowing what that those singular activities were meant to accomplish, marketers and communicators are left without a clear direction.  Very few would move forward with a goal to “Set up an event” or “Advertise in a trade journal” without a clear idea of what those activities were meant to accomplish for the business.  The same holds true in social media.  Social media is not a strategy in and of itself – it should be in service of a larger, more considered business objective.  Think about what business results you want your social media efforts to drive.

And, as I have said in past posts, I feel compelled to assert again that I am not using “social media” as a proxy for “Facebook.”  Social media incorporates a wide variety of channels and initiatives including blogs, interactive forums, user communities, communication tools, and virtual gatherings.  Think big! Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

We all know what it’s like to struggle with creating a balance between work and personal life. But how do you balance work, and…work?

This is a common problem for frontline employees who are asked to carry out corporate social responsibility objectives that are in conflict with their daily workload—they don’t know how to achieve both simultaneously. And, disconnected from the central strategy, employees aren’t given much reason to care. Engage your staff by creating learning moments where they can discover and share with each other how their actions play a role in achieving company CSR goals.

We spoke with Rosanne Bonanno, Senior Communication Manager, and Ellen Witte, Project Manager, both at TNT, about what worked well for them in engaging frontline employees in CSR initiatives:

1. Facilitate Hands-On Learning. Integrate frontline staff’s core job tasks directly into the CSR-related activity to help employees  see connections between their job and your CSR objectives.
2. Infuse Learning with Fun. Make learning fun and sociable to give frontline employees the opportunity to interact with and learn from each other.
3. Facilitate Peer-to-Peer Sharing. Use audience-centric communication tools to effectively reach dispersed frontline audiences, sustaining learning and understanding beyond the specific activity.

CEC members, get more in-depth details on how TNT mobilizes frontline employees around CSR initiatives, and read excerpts from our conversation with Rosanne Bonnano and Ellen Witte.

As part of our ongoing effort to help organizations harness the power of social media, the CEC hosted a discussion a few weeks ago with our Social Media Networking Cohort. The virtual meeting was designed to be an informal discussion where we were able to talk about challenges, test ideas, share experiences and brainstorm on topics surrounding the social media frontier. With over 20 companies participating, it was a great way for all of us to learn what others are doing beyond our own industry, business model, and geography. Here are a few smart tactics, interesting strategies, success stories and challenges that came out of the conversation:

It can be hard work, but create a social media policy…and make it simple.

Whether your company is starting to slowly dip its toes, or has already taken a dive into the deep end of the social media pool, one of the first things we strongly recommend is creating a social media policy. Creating a policy will help protect your company against legal and reputation risks by outlining the Do’s and Don’ts of social media for employees. One participant of our discussion said their greatest successes in the social media space was creating a simple social media policy (that was finally approved by Legal). Originally, they had created a very thorough (read: long and complicated) policy to be the security blanket their senior leadership needed. However, their complicated policy actually handcuffed their employees from fully leveraging social media. Once they simplified their policy and created something everyone could understand and adhere to, the company was much more effective with their social media efforts.

CEC related  resource: Create Your Own Policy.

Want to take control of rumors?  Try blogging.

We all know what can happen when a rumor starts to spread about our company. “Well, my friend has a cousin who knows a girl who is married to a guy who works at that company…so it must be true!”  Rumors spread more quickly than ever before and they become so distorted that they can negatively impact your company. To take control of the rumor mill, one participant’s team uses company blogs as a way to either confirm or deny the rumor. They can then take readers to a place where they can get the right information. It’s a quick, easy, and informal way to take control of the situation before anything gets out of hand.

CEC related resource: NI’s Conversation Matchmaking System and Managing Reputation in Online Conversations Read More »

Our latest research on Building a Change-Ready Organization shows that agility is a huge driver of performance. Improving the agility of your workers will give you four times the performance returns than simply getting them to work harder. What drives employees to be more agile? Understanding the company’s overall business context is a vital component that helps employees to embrace new ways of thinking and come up with ideas on how to improve existing processes.

Our quantitative analysis shows that employees’ ability to make connections to company context, beyond their immediate role, increases their agility regardless of what position they hold within their company. However, some industries might find it harder than others to foster understanding of the company for every segment of their workforce. Manufacturing industries, in particular, find it difficult to reach front line, often non-wired, workers who lack access to common communications channels like email and intranet. Frequently, even if the messages actually manage to reach these workers, employees tune them out because they don’t seem relevant or are not communicated in “their” language. Read More »

We had some wonderful sunshine in London this past weekend, and like any good Londoner would, I joined a group of friends for a picnic at our local park. As we were sitting and chatting about subjects from careers to our world travels, it struck me that in my group of six, we had six different nationalities (or dual ones sometimes!).  Now, living in London you don’t really pay much attention to how many international people are around you, and one easily forgets that this multicultural society wasn’t very common a few decades ago. But, as companies operate in more and more countries and hire more and more diverse workforces, multiculturalism has become standard in today’s workplace.

For us in Communications, this presents an exciting, yet difficult challenge, namely coordinating and managing communications efforts & messages in our global companies. In dealing with employees across multiple countries, cultures, and languages, how often have you struggled with questions like:

• How do I reach global employees that are remote from headquarters and sit in four different time zones?
  
• What language do I use to communicate with them?
  
• How do I empower local teams to manage those communications without creating a mess/PR nightmare?
  
• Who are my communicators in each country? Read More »

As part of our 2011 research on “Building a Change-Ready Organization,” we’re finding that it’s especially important for employees to understand business context in order to make smart decisions on their own. What external pressures influence the way our company operates? How does our company compare to competitors? How does changing one part of the business influence the whole?

We’re on the hunt for companies that share context in a way that empowers employees (versus justifying corporate decisions). In the meantime, I thought it’d be useful for us to share some business context on European consumer segments. These three consumer snapshots are drawn from Iconoculture, a Corporate Executive Board program that uses consumer trends and cultural observations to inform companies’ viewpoints. I’d love to know whether you find these snapshots interesting or if they’ve helped you consider a new way of communicating with stakeholders. Does this context help you think differently about something your working on? Would you like to see more snapshots in the future?

UK: Households see drop in disposable income

According to a survey by economic consultancy Markit, 35% of UK households report a drop in their disposable income. 82% of respondents say that prices of goods and services had risen.The survey also reports that decreasing job security is deterring consumer spending. Five times as many people reported lower job security as those who reported a more positive outlook.

What This Means to Business

Economic uncertainty continues to worry consumers; the lessons learned from this recession have created a savvier, more wary UK consumer. Consumers are becoming more watchful of prices on everyday goods and services, and they’re seeking high value, even on low-cost goods. Read More »

Organizations need to constantly adapt to meet the demands of continuously changing business environments. Communication teams are doing their part by driving employee support of change initiatives and keeping morale high. The most common tactics we’ve heard involve building the visibility and credibility of leaders.

We’re learning that companies can’t drive agility with inspiring words from the top. Instead they need to build an environment that encourages action from the bottom up. That’s why the best communicators are knocking down barriers to communication and encouraging employees to embrace and share new ways of thinking and working.

Admittedly, Communications cannot build a change-ready organization on its own. It can, however, play a significant role by focusing on three key drivers of employee agility.

1. Build connection
   Agile employees need information that empowers them to make the right decisions, on their terms. We’ve found that the type of information matters. Typically, information shared with employees is event-centric: “We have a new CEO. Here’s what this means for you.” However, the best communicators are providing information that builds an understanding of the company as a whole—things like how it operates and what constraints and risks it faces. Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

When it comes to rolling out Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives, it’s not enough to have senior-level sign-off. While 90% of CEOs aspire to embed CSR strategies into business operations, only 50% see their companies as effective at execution.

Where does the performance gap come from? Typically what’s missing is frontline buy-in.  The common approach to rolling out a CSR strategy is a two-step process—crafting a strategy and getting buy-in at the senior level and then moving straight to roll-out. This process doesn’t cater well enough to getting the frontlines on board.  As a result, employees see CSR initiatives as extra work on top of their already full schedules.

To get support across all levels, Ford added a step to the planning process that focuses on involving middle managers early on. We spoke with John Viera, Global Director of Sustainability and Vehicle Environmental Matters at Ford, about how they increase frontline buy-in by:

1. Educating middle managers on CSR strategies at the senior level.
2. Asking questions to surface manager resource constraints.
3. Sharing manager feedback with senior leadership.
4. Refining objectives and resource planning for roll out stage.

CEC members, get more in-depth details on how Ford embeds CSR initiatives at all levels, and read excerpts from our conversation with John Viera.

By Rebecca Canan

Every week we get questions from CEC members about internal social media. Who does it well? How do they get employees to actually participate? Have they been able to tailor and use SharePoint?

These are all great questions and well warranted. Indeed, we’ve found that “peer support”—defined as the opportunity to access and share ideas and best practices with peers—is a major driver of building an agile, highly motivated workforce. Communications can directly increase peer support by providing internal social tools that map to employee needs and preferences.  However, this isn’t always easy to do.

I recently had a chance to talk to a few members of the Communications team at UniCredit, an international financial institution with more than 161,000 employees. The team there is committed to this idea of peer support and is in the midst of launching a company-wide platform aimed to increase collaboration to reach concrete business results and “IOR,” which stands for Impact of Relationships, and isn’t exactly the reverse of ROI as it may seem. :) Find out more about the team’s effort and their “obsession with usability” in the interview with UniCredit’s Head of Corporate Culture, Monica Poggio, below.

CEC: Ciao, Monica. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us. Our CEC members are VERY interested in internal social media…it’s great to speak with a company – especially one in the highly regulated financial services space – that has a success story to share.

Let’s start with a quick overview of what you’re doing with internal social media…why did you decide to offer it to employees? What need is it meeting among your employees?

Monica Poggio (UniCredit): UniCredit’s banking group is the result of many mergers and acquisitions. These began in the 1990s, with several Italian banks, followed by additional banks in Germany, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe.

Within the context of this series of integrations of many banks, we have striven to develop our identity by promoting a common culture and ensuring consistent Communications across our Group. We believe this process is critical to our success and enables us to generate valuable synergies.

For these reasons, UniCredit introduced OneNet, an internal social media tool accessible to all colleagues. Based on a Web 2.0 platform, OneNet is designed to:

• facilitate networking, knowledge sharing and online collaboration within our organization

• offer user-friendly new features and Web 2.0 tools that facilitate and accelerate internal processes.

Read More »

It’s baseball season in Chicago and hope springs eternal on the North Side.  But as the Cubs chase the impossible dream of a World Series, communicators confront their own impossible dream – how do we measure the un-measureable: the value we create from all the stories that didn’t get written about us this year.

So it wasn’t until opening day that I realized the goal is similar to the efforts of advanced baseball statistics, which try to more completely capture a player’s value by comparing his contribution to a replacement. The only difference is that in baseball a replacement still generates some value whereas in communications the replacement actually reduces a company’s value by allowing negative coverage. But while baseball statisticians can’t add up the hits of a replacement that doesn’t actually play any more that communicators can count the articles that were never written, they know they get pretty close by merely calculating the average or expected value of the replacement. So if communicators can focus on just an expected number of mentions, we can similarly develop a more accurate representation of our value.

Read More »