Super Tuesday and Corporate Internal Communications

Sheryl Lewis from ROI Communications, one of the sponsors of today’s event, talked about how Web 2.0 has influenced the election. Barack Obama’s campaign has been particularly empowered by the grassroots democratization of media production. Sen. George Allen’s campaign was killed before it even started by the macaca incident on You Tube.

The application for internal communications in businesses, Sheryl says, is that the millions of people who have been part of the political campaign networking online and that had such an impact on Super Tuesday, are going to work this morning in our businesses. The technology that is changing politics needs to make its way behind the corporate firewall to enable these employees to network and connect as effectively on behalf of our businesses as they have in the political world.

Starting Day Two of ALI Conference

Day Two of the ALI Conference is about to start. Today’s agenda includes case studies from Cisco Systems, Rolls Royce, Best Buy, IBM and American Express. Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club and The Conversation Group will be leading a group exercise. And our conference chairperson, Michael Rudnick, will tie it all together.

I’ll be blogging again as an embedded report from the front lines. Look for dispatches throughout the day here and on Twitter.

Connecting With Your Audience Using Social Networking

J.C. Bouvier of the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Kevin Reid of Issue Dynamics presented this case study. In his previous career, J.C. started Avid’s podcast series.

He took the job with IFAW, a more pragmatic organization than PETA, to  promote the Stop the Seal Hunt campaign, aimed at getting the Canadian government to take action.

Goals:

  • Recruit thousands of new users into IFAW’s existing
  • Generate 10,000s of new messages to the government of Canada
  • Increase fundraising
  • Provide a range of engaging, meaningful activities for new and old users

Campaign Components

Goal was to get 300,000 actions taken.

Evoca is a way to upload and share audio…like YouTube for audio.

Results:

  • Community Members: 98,000+
  • Subscriber List: 5 percent increase
  • Actions taken: 346 percent increase
  • Donations: 56 percent up over previous year
  • MySpace: Doubled number of Friends
  • YouTube: Over 60,000 views

IFAW also has the Stop Whaling campaign, with similar elements.

Lessons Learned from Toyota’s Internal Blog

Dan Miller from Toyota presented on “The Clandestine Birth, Untimely Death and Hopeful Resurrection of Toyota’s Internal Blog.”

Dan started its blog, called “Sound Off” without review/approval by HR or Legal.

His Ground Rules:

  • Consistent Host/Author
  • Post one entry per week
  • Clear feedback guidelines
  • Low-key promotion

They didn’t use real blogging software, but copied and pasted feedback e-mails into the comments.

“Sound Off” was done in by a sexual harassment suit. Dan did a post about this and didn’t express an opinion, but asked for readers to share their opinions. Then he went on vacation to Scotland, and there were lots of opinions that had been shared by the time he got back. HR and Legal called IS and got the plug pulled. The concern about “discoverability” in pending litigation trumped everything else.

On the external side, Media Relations got support from Legal, giving Legal right to approve all posts before they go up. In return, Legal promised quick turnaround on review.

Dan says there is some light on the horizon, in that Town Hall meetings have capacity crowds. On the negative side, internal opinion surveys reveal that many associates are afraid to speak up.

Now he’s trying to get the internal blog going again.

They have engaged with Legal, and while they haven’t gotten a “yes” it hasn’t been “no” either. They are working through all sorts of “what if” scenarios. HR has become an ally. IS also wants to align with them as a way to get support for Sharepoint, which they likely will use for blogging.

Michael Rudnick says his company has focused on training and awareness. As to the discoverability issue, that’s really a red herring.  Blogging may generate more content that’s discoverable, but e-mail already is discoverable.

CDC Connects

Kay Sessions Golan (PDF file), Director of Employee Communicaitons for the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), presented her case study on CDC Connects, the CDC’s On-Line Newspaper and Intranet Portal.

Note: one of the downsides of internal communications is it’s usually hard to benchmark against other organizations. You can’t see their intranets. So Kay showed screen shots from the CDC Connects project.

CDC started its internal blog after having attended a conference like this one. It took about 9 months to get started. They’re using WordPress installed on their servers. It’s “real” blogging software.

Why a blog?

  • These conversation are happening anyway.
  • It allows for respectful, open conversations vs. the water cooler talk
  • It demonstrates trust in employees, and they expect it can lead to problem-solving across the organization.

If you think you’re “controlling” the message now, without a blog, you’re deluded. A blog let you introduce the subject and engage the conversation, instead of having it happen without you.

CDC’s intranet blog is a moderated blog that allows anonymous comments. They did have some trust issues, so they wanted to encourage honest feedback. They were concerned they would get just the “suck ups” – the virtual Eddie Haskells – if they required people to give their names.

This is a little bit risky. Michael Rudnick, our conference chairperson, says the CDC policy is the exception, more than the rule. If employees know that IT can trace comments back to the source, it may diminish trust.

CDC has developed and refined its blog rules over a few months. One of the rules is that the comments need to be “on topic.” They engage in conversations with the negative commenters, asking them to provide specific suggestions for improvement.

They do one new post a week. Categories have included: Business Services, CDC History, CDC Now/Futures, CDC Stays Healthy, Facilities/Scenes, General (the catch-all) and Public Health in Action.

What they’ve learned after 51 posts and 2,400 comments:

  • Most active discussions: on topics that affect daily work life
  • Least active discussions: on scientific or programmatic topics
  • Many managers are reluctant participants
  • Discussions easily wander off topic
  • Appreciated by bloggers
  • Let it evolve and mature.

Kay says they’ve thought about using WordPress for crisis communications. That’s a great idea. I’ve blogged about that previously here. You could do that in WordPress, or in Facebook, or both. If you have WordPress on your intranet already, it takes about 15 minutes to start a new blog to handle this.