Role of Communicators in New Ways of Connecting
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The role of the communicator is to listen, engage, and respond to internal social media as a new way of communicating that brings new expectations. Communicators should listen, experiment with sharing and teaching on internal social platforms to hear from others, engage in discussion, and allow others to be heard.
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Role of Communicators in New Ways of Connecting
- 3. What is the role of the communicator?
- 4. New ways of communicating = New expectations of communicators
- 5. Internal social = a way to hear, engage, respond and be heard
Editor's Notes
- I’m the session post-lunch so my role is to wake you up! - I want your questions - I’ve kept this presentation very short - The one thing I want you to leave with is an understanding of the size of the opportunity this all presents you personally - You’re an employee so this is about youI’m Mike and I lead Yammer’s Customer Success team in EMEAFor those of you who don’t know what Yammer is: - ESN - Free to use - Now part of the Microsoft family - CIPR Inside now have a network for this event as wellFor those of you who don’t know what a Customer Success person does: - Our team helps to guide organizations through the journey to more open and collaborative ways of workingQuick straw poll: - Who has an ESN in their organization? - Who’s thinking about one? - Who knows how it can benefit internal communications?So, one of the biggest things we’ve learned about ESN is that it’s all about the ‘what’s in it for me’. So I’m going to explain what’s in it for you.I’m going to share some examplesThen I want to hear your feedback
- Your role as a communicator is to help people understand, deliver and execute on the leadership’s strategy.Get people to understand their role in the strategy, help them execute it and use that to inspire othersYou generally do this through teaching people how to communicateIt’s a critical role, everyone says engagement is important (70% people not engaged in their jobs)
- Historically very broadcastNecessarily so, due to expectations of people and the tools that were availableGreat for dissemination (you know everyone’s heard you), but have they understood?Who replies to all company mails / voicemails?When you’re standing behind the megaphone it can be difficult to understand whether people are just aware there’s noise or whether they’re listening.It’s also difficult to get them to engage with you, your message or the action you’re trying to get them to engender.What internal social does is enable you to adapt your role from one where you’re holding a megaphone a lot of the time to one where you’re enabling people to engage with your message.This is both a benefit and a neccessity. Let’s explore why.
- Firstly, the benefit.Previous tools have been point-to-point that don’t scale well (like phone), or few-to many broadcasting (newspaper, tv, radio, intranet)Social networking is the first communication tool that enables many people to communicate with many people.Nothing previously has really lent itself to broad-based discussionThe introduction of things like enterprise social networks mean there is now a channel where conversation and feedback can become visible to organisations. This isn’t just comms. What ESN fundamentally does is connect people to each other and things within a business in order to get things done faster.There is a great piece of research by the MGI that explores this in a lot more detail, called the Social Economy
- That’s a fantastic thing for internal communicators because it allows you now to see, influence and participate in that conversation.That is probably the single biggest change in the way internal communication works since the invention of the telephone.The main opportunities:There is the ability to take people on a journey:from the idea of hearing that you're saying somethingto listening to what is being saidto responding and adding value to the conversationand ultimately enabling them to create messages themselves which you can shapeThere is great potential to then scale the impact you have as an internal communicatorAs an IC, you have a huge amount of specialised knowledge and experience abouthow to deliver messages effectivelyhow to get people engaged in thingshow to communicate a strategy in a way people understandYou now have a channel through which you can scale yourself hugelyYou’re going to get a huge number of people asking ‘how can I communicate more effectively?’ They’re not asking about technologyThis is more control and not lessConversation is visible and joinableSo why is it that i need to next. if i think that's interesting and i can see the relevance, what can i do now?
- ListenTake a view of what’s already going onSee how you can helpSee what you can learnBecome a part of the communityExperimentLook at some simple things to do that play to the strengths of the platformGood shapes of communication to look for are:Things that typically have a bottleneckThings people are clogging up email withThings that rely on a gathering of likeminded peopleThis doesn’t have to be within your organizationConsider the following which also workEmployee forumsSpecialist communities of practice (e.g. Your intranet manager)Sports and socialTop 50 / top 200 discussionCommunications channel during major eventsEncouraging people to make their own newsletter with ‘news of the week’ run on the FridayStart really smallShare- Offer to share the success storiesTeachTake ownership of spreading the word to others
- What this comes back to: This is an amazing opportunity for an internal communicator. What you've gotta do is take full advantage of that opportunity before the next thing comes along because it's not far away - five years ago Yammer didn't even existThis is competitive advantage.One of the things we often hear in Internal Comms conferences is the conversation about where we as Internal Communication people sit and how relevant we areThis. This is relevance. This is the single biggest opportunity your business has to communicate more effectively. This is you. This is what you do. This is what you are for. And if you don't take this opportunity then someone else will - so take it. If you don't take the opportunity, IT will try and do it, and you can become part of the 70% of IT-led projects that are unsuccessful. There are studies that say organisations that take on this method of communication and do it right are more effective that those that are not and therefore you want to be in the group that get this right because the world is changing so rapidly and communication is changing so rapidly that you will cease to be relevant if you are not doing it. As I mentioned previously:You become the person who builds and then divests themselves of things for every new thing that comes into the business[Run process -> Divest process ] - Person that does this for every new thing. So that is the same as a business leader This is your opportunity to be a leader - take it. Do it.[Yammer pitch] – we think we’re successful because we allow people the room to do what I’ve just described, and we’ll help them if they ask for it. So come talk to us.Questions? Come and talk to us for some practical guidance and steps. Very broad topic to do justice