Month: April 2011

Forbidden fruit

Earlier this month an internal memo to all staff from Cisco CEO John Chambers found its way out onto the world wide web. The news wires were fizzing. A glance at the early reports on Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal indicates that a key element of the story was that it comprised forbidden fruit.

This was no corporate press release. This was a leak. Precisely what all Internal Communicators fear most. After all, nothing clips the wings of an Internal Communications team like a leak.

Unless of course it is not a leak – but a press release disguised as one.

I have no idea if this is the case here. But I can’t help feeling all is not quite as it seems. The full text of the memo was published on Cisco’s own blog very quickly after the leak. I have read it several times now and I must confess that without knowing the guy, John Chambers could certainly get a job in a top PR agency if his current CEO gig doesn’t work out.

The language, the structure, the sentiment and above all the lack of clarity around certain key points certainly read like it’s been constructed by someone who knows how to handle a quill and bit of parchment.

It reads like it was intended to pave the way for staff to brace themselves for some tough love, while at the same time demonstrate to the outside world that fundamental change was afoot.

But actually the content was not particularly newsworthy in its own right. There was no announcement of specific product or organisational changes. What made it newsworthy and gave the story legs was the fact that it was a leak.

Had it been a simple press release it would merely have been a space holder – a ‘watch this space’ message that would have been ignored because there was no real substance. But with an internal note stating that:

  • we have disappointed our investors and we have confused our employees;
  • we will take bold steps and we will make tough decisions; and
  • we will address with surgical precision what we need to fix in our portfolio and what we need to better enable,

all of a sudden you have a story.

At the same time you overcome the age old dilemma faced by all public companies – how to keep staff in the loop before you release price sensitive news that fundamentally affects them to the market.

So a week later when Cisco announced details of the closure of its Flip Cam business and 550 redundancies, the market was waiting for the news and the internal audience had already been primed.

I can say without fear of contradiction that in my long and distinguished career in Internal Communications I have never witnessed a deliberate or strategic leak of an internal memo.

Sure, I’ve seen exaggeration on occasion, as witnessed just seconds ago with my use of the words ‘long and distinguished’. I’ve seen stuff leaked to the press accidentally and maliciously. But I’ve never seen an intentional strategic leak of an internal communication.

So was this a strategic or a malicious leak?

You decide.

Are you a giver or a taker?

Nothing has had such a transformative influence on the world of work than email. Forget about the Industrial Revolution – history will show that there was life before email and then there was life after email.

Most knowledge workers today spend their working life living inside their email client and they use it organise and deliver nearly every aspect of their daily work. Many of us will see this as a good thing. After all, everything can be done so much faster these days right?

Hold on just a second.

A recent study in Australia suggests that “The average Australian employee spends less than two-and-a-half days per week actually doing their job. The rest of the time is spent navigating a virtual forest of information”.  The same study found that half of the respondents claimed that on average, only about 50 per cent of their emails were relevant to getting their jobs done.

Information Overload (or Information Rage as the above study calls it) accounts for huge inefficiencies and productivity issues in the workplace. For example, the time spend dealing with spam emails alone costs an estimated $17bn to $21bn in lost productivity every year in the US.

Academics, consultants and assorted subject matter experts offer a variety of solutions. Email free days, email manifestos, formal training sessions and ‘how to’ guides and are some I have stumbled across recently.

My personal favourite – and I like to think I came up with this one – is more campaign based. The campaign would revolve around ones acceptance of individual and personal responsibility for being a net receiver rather than a net sender of email.

You simply have to ensure that every working day you send fewer emails than you receive. What could possibly be easier – and imagine the impact that could have if we all did it?

The most recent public declaration of my personal pledge to the campaign was a month ago here on twitter 😉

Tackling social media

A lot of companies misuse and abuse social media. They know they have to do something. They’ve been to one of those crazy overpriced social media conferences and talked to a few agencies and vendors. They keep reading scary stories about it in the papers. They are exposed to the risk of last mover disadvantage and they know it.

So they jump in to tackle social media with both feet off the ground and their studs showing.  Little wonder their customers show them the red card.

So where did they go wrong?

They invited a bunch of senior bods from the Communications, PR, Advertising and Marketing teams to form a squad.  All good people – top performers and experts in their chosen fields – after all, this is important stuff.

The only problem is none of them were active users of social media.

And so they kicked off by applying tried and tested old world communications values to a medium they didn’t really get. They applied military style planning to detailed and time bound communications campaigns. Not realising that command and control does not work in the world of social media, the downward spiral of selling and spamming began.

All they had to do was leverage the existing expertise and enthusiasm of the growing band of natural born social mediarites already on the payroll. The people who understand that social media is not a broadcast channel but a place where people converse and create meaningful relationships.

They should have listened to self-styled Community Evangelist at LinkedIn, Mario Sundar, who made the following observation two years ago:

“Your employees, starting with your executives, influence your company’s employment brand more than any advertising campaign that you will ever craft. They do so through their blog, word-of-mouth sites like Twitter, and of course on LinkedIn, where they build their “professional brand” in ways that are intrinsically tied to your company’s brand.”

They do this through natural authentic daily interactions with their personal and professional networks. They don’t sell. They don’t spam. They don’t follow orders. You cannot script them. All you need to do is allow them the freedom to express themselves and allow their natural advocacy to shine through.

These are the people who should be involved in formulating and delivering your company’s social media strategy.

Good news and bad news

It’s 9am on Monday morning. The telephone is ringing.

Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring.

“Jon Weedon”.

“Hi Jon, its James. Have you got a minute?”

“Sure – what’s up?”

“I see there is a link to the Guardian piece on the intranet this morning. Do you really think we should be encouraging staff to read stuff like that? They’ve clearly got it in for us.”

“I agree it’s not the most flattering of pieces. But is in the Guardian. I don’t think we should ignore it just because it doesn’t share our own view of the industry.”

“I’m not saying we ignore it, I just don’t think we should be encouraging staff to read it.”

“Actually it popped up on Google alerts last night. Lots of staff use Google alerts. I guess a fair few also read the Guardian. One thing is for sure, lots of our customers will be reading this today – on and offline. Surely if our customers are reading it, then our staff should at least be aware of it?”

“Yes but it’s full of factual errors and some outrageously biased opinion.”

“Staff aren’t stupid. Just because they read something in the press doesn’t mean they believe it. One thing is for sure though, if we deliberately filter out the bad news and only provide links to the good news, they will quickly realise that the intranet cannot be trusted as a source of news about the company. That discredits the comms team as well as the exec.”

“Well if staff believe half of what the Guardian wrote today that would definitely discredit us.”

“That’s precisely my point. They are more likely to believe it if they don’t trust our internal communications. They will be very unforgiving if they feel they are being deliberately kept in the dark. We should actually look upon a story like this as an opportunity to create discussion internally and help staff understand what the Guardian journo clearly doesn’t”.

“Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Maybe I should write something in the comment section outlining why I believe the newspaper has got it so wrong.”

“That’s a great idea. Maybe you could get Bob to write a few words from the Legal team’s perspective as well…”

“Steady, let’s not get too carried away. I’ll have a word with him and see what he says.”

“I think that would really be appreciated by staff. Can I take it that you are happy for the Guardian piece to remain on the Intranet then”.

“Um. Yes, I guess so.”

So this is not an actual transcript of a recent conversation I hasten to add!

I merely use this technique to illustrate an issue that I have encountered several times over the years – an issue which I suspect internal comms people and intranet managers everywhere have experienced at least once in every company they have ever worked for. That is, a perception among one or more senior executives that internal communications is just about pushing good news around the company.

Of course we should celebrate success at every opportunity. But we should be big enough and brave enough to acknowledge criticism and even failure.

Because for any internal communication to have value, it must first of all be honest.