The Melcrum Blog

IABC chair takes the plunge

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

Shel Holtz has just published a great post about the new 2008-09 IABC chair, Barbara Gibson, and her dive into social media.

It's big news, says Holtz, as previous chairs have not fully engaged in this way, but Gibson is starting with a splash:

As if a steady stream of posts (16 in July) isn’t enough, the blog also features Barbara’s most recent tweets and a link to her Flickr photostream (with only one photo so far, but it is a photo that tips the cute scale). A recent blog post shares Barbara’s first experiment on Utterz; another shows her in the Lively room she created after hearing about the Google virtual world from Neville. Her “about” page features a TripAdvisor map pintpointing where she’s been. And her profile page links to her LinkedIn profile.

What's most interesting to me is Shel's last couple of points:

Barbara’s willingness to engage the membership—and communicators at large—is refreshing. After all, you can only travel to so many chapter events every year, and even then you’re only connecting with members who turn out for the event.

Given skyrocketing travel costs and the demands on the chair’s time, reaching out through the virtual channels of her blog, Twitter, and other social media tools could provide valuable lessons for IABC and leadership by example for leaders and members alike.

These points resonate with me at the moment because I'm pretty bored of hearing about the "face-to-face is best" argument (or revelation, as it seems to be for many). It's something I wrote about in the last social media newsletter.

Getting out and seeing people is great. Connecting face-to-face with distant colleagues or contacts is great. But a lot of the time, particularly with travel, time constraints etc. mentioned above, face-to-face meetings aren't always feasible. You can't be everywhere at once.

Providing insight, updates, thoughts - regardless of whether it's a short burst like Twitter, a geo-tag on TripAdvisor or whatever - these small-form communications can add up. As a leader - be it head of a team, CEO - why not use some or all of these tools at your disposal as Barbara has opted to do? As Shel has written, this looks to be a great example. It will be interesting to see its long term impact on the IABC, and for communicators in general.

Alex

Afterhours Blackberry use should equal overtime? Opinions are divided...

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

This story has a sense of rumbling inevitability to it.

Last month, three staff at ABC News in the US had their Blackberries confiscated. Why? They were asked to sign a non-compensation waiver regarding out of hours use, but their union - fresh from the US Writers Guild Strikes - advised them not to sign. The station responded by taking away the devices.

Eventually, negotiations were had and the devices were returned, but not before the idea was officially born among US lawyers that there was a class action lawsuit waiting to happen, and money to be made via hypothetical and disgruntled former employees.

Lawyers argue that time spent answering emails after work should count as overtime, or count towards accrued time to be taken when you can.

Of course, this means potentially logging every minute you've spent writing emails, which, as any billable hours lawyer will tell you, is a torturous affair. From CNBC:

To minimize the risk of a lawsuit, attorneys are warning employers to reevaluate their policies. The safest approach, said Jennifer Feldman an employment law attorney at WolfBlock, is to stop giving BlackBerrys to non-exempt employees.

That, however, is not always possible. In such cases, attorneys suggest employers write policies that state non-exempt workers should only use company-issued devices after work when specifically told to.

Another option is for employers to ask non-exempt workers to leave the device at the office at the end of their work day, says Howard Lavin a partner at Stroock and Stroock and Lavan who has advised his clients on these types of policies.

I don't think measuring after-hours use is a workable idea, but that doesn't mean there won't be some crazy lawsuit about it. In most contracts, certainly the ones I've signed, you'll find something like this:

Hours of work are 9am-5.30pm Mon-Fri.

You may from time to time be required to work outside these hours. You may be entitled, at our discretion, to ‘time off in lieu’ for this additional work. Such time off must be authorised by us in advance.

Does that "time to time" cover Blackberry use? [If I had one] it probably would in my book.

Would I bother to record the time spent? Not unless it got stupid, or my company was the type that measures whether you get in at 9.02am one day for a 9am start and moans, even when you get in at 8.45am 99% of the time or, you have to argue for days to be able to go to a doctors appointment without having to take annual leave (I've worked somewhere like that before and never will again).

Surely there are better solutions? I've heard people have lots of success with enforced "Blackberry cut-off times". No answer past 8pm, for example.

On the other hand, a lot of the arguments about work/life balance being skewed, and the justification for letting employees have a bit of freedom when using stuff like Facebook at work, stem from the fact that a lot of people check their emails before they go to bed and as soon as they wake up.

We're connected a lot of the time, let's just get on with it, right?

What to do then? Be on call 24/7 and accept it? Agree on and enforce cut-off times with whoever it is that might want to contact you at 11.53pm on a Wednesday? Or, leave the damn thing at the office when you clock off (as the policy-makers suggest)?

So far, this week's Hub poll on the story (see right) has seen opinion divided pretty evenly.

How about another perspective. Inspired by the diversity of readers' answers to this question, let's put this into Lucy Kellaway territory and pose it differently:

I'm a career-focused marketing executive with a weight around my neck - my Blackberry. What started off as a way to keep in touch with my team, but most of all my boss, has escalated into messages whenever she gets the whim to contact me.

This is causing me a major dilemma. If I keep responding it's just going to stay the same (or get worse), but I feel that I work long enough hours as it is without answering emails all evening at home or socialising.

Yet, if I bring it up, I'm worried I'll cool the relationship or, worse, open up a leapfrogging opportunity for my own ambitious little toad of a number two.

What should I do?

Marketing executive, male, 33

More on IBF24

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

As mentioned in my original post on the event, KM Review editor Jessica Twentyman also "attended" the 24 hour global intranet webcast conference, IBF24.

Jessica has written more in this month's Melcrum KM Newsletter, and the latest edition of Knowledge Management Review features interviews with IBF chairman Paul Miller,

Read Jessica's latest KM Newsletter here, and download (or subscribe to) the latest issue of KM Review here.

Alex

SCM Summit Australia 2008 - and we still have some free iPods left!

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

For this year's Strategic Communication Management Summit in Sydney in September, we're giving away free iPod Shuffles to the first 25 delegates.

They're going quickly but we still have a few remaining, all you have to do is sign up to the conference (easy!) and they're (PRODUCT) Red shuffles too, which I find a worthy cause.

Now, I appreciate I'm in danger of breaking one of the unwritten blogging rules by writing marketing-esque stuff on the blog, but iPods are a handy diversion that allow me to talk more about the Summit, because we're rapt with the lineup of speakers and sessions this year. In no particular order we have confirmed:

• Jim Schaffer, Jim Shaffer Group (US)
• David MacGregor, Internal Communications Manager, Woolworths
• Kevin Panozza, CEO, SalesForce Australia,
• Rosie Mullaly,  Deputy Director News Services & Manager Corporate Employee Communications, Telstra
• Jenny Burn, Organisational Development and Learning Manager, AstraZeneca
• Helen Taylor, Internal & Management Communications Manager, Shell Australia
• Kellie Tomney, Executive Manager Recruitment & Branding Strategy, St George
• Ross Bernays, CEO, HIP Super
• Cary Frost,  Principal - Communication at Work, Aon Consulting
• Louise Martin, Director, Strategic Communication, Department of Justice (Victoria)
• Alex Gosman, Director - Government & Corporate Affairs, GlaxoSmithKline Australia
• Todd Montgomery, Principal Consultant, Mercer
• Karina Keisler, Group Manager External Communications, Sensis
• Michelle Berardone, Manager Corporate Communications, Powerlink Queensland
• Chris Jackson, Head of Communication, CGU Insurance
• Michael Moore, Manager Corporate & Business Communications, Bristol-Myers Squibb
• Genevieve O'Reilly, PhD, Research Consultant, Bond University

For a full list of presentations you can download the brochure here.

It was a great event last year, with the likes of Angela Sinickas, David Grossman, Peter Eksted at HP, Anna Wills at Alcatel-Lucent, Sue Dewhurst and more, and the Employee Engagement conference in May had some truly excellent presentations. If you're looking for a first class conference for internal comms, and you're in the region, then get in touch to register.

In fact, Melcrum Strategic Communication Management Summits are happening in quick succession around the world, with the Australian event in Sydney, 10-11 September, the US event in Chicago on 23-24 September, and the UK event in London on 15-16 October.

Global intranets, right at my desk

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

If part of your role as a comms practitioner involves looking after the intranet, then I expect you would have heard about the Intranet Benchmarking Forum's IBF24, which took place over Wednesday and Thursday this week.

Caffeine burnt, not carbon
The event, essentially 24 hours of webcast presentations, discussion panels, thought-pieces, case studies and more, brought together some of the best intranets out there including the BBC, American Electric Power, IKEA, Nokia, IBM, Shell, British Airways, SAP, AMP and Sara Lee.

I only managed to log in for a couple of hours but the whole process – audio via phone dial-in, slides via LiveMeeting – worked perfectly. No mean feat considering it was co-ordinated by various members of the IBF team scattered across the world.

Watching a presentation by Abigail Lewis-Bowen (former intranet Manager at IBM), we heard about potential future trends for the intranet, including:

The rising importance of the intranet: while global business integration continues to expand, environmental challenges will restrain commuting and air travel. Work therefore will become both more globalised and also more remote.

The mobile intranet will grow as bandwidth costs drop and device interfaces improve, along with mobile intranet applications that leverage semantically enabled data.

Virtual, collaborative work technologies will thrive and improve, including a growth in telepresence.

Increasing environmental awareness will foster the concept of the "Ecoprise", where companies will use the intranet to drive a culture of corporate responsibility and sustainability, and adoption of related tools and applications.

A presentation by the team at AMP was next. Their Vignette 7 installation features a formal and informal web, with formal content being official, informal being the conversational type of content found on one of the many internal blogs.

I posted about this session on Twitter, tagging everything "IBF24". You can see the whole stream here.

AMP goes formal and informal
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the AMP presentation was the fact that the internet and intranet teams are discussing how they can work and unify efforts and developments. With a common concern and challenge being that the pace of internet development is leaving corporate systems further in its wake, this is a typically pro-active strategy from the AMP team.

24
Given the IBF's growing presence (the organization's Asia-Pacific region launched earlier this year), the event's regional turnover was a nice twist, even meaning quite a few people stayed up well beyond bedtime as the clock ticked round. While I only got a couple of hours, I understand KM Review editor Jessica Twentyman heard a fair bit more and will have interviews published in the near future, and there's plenty of blog action around it, not least the IBF24 site and NING network.

Paul Levey also kept a blog throughout the event, and feedback overall seems very positive.

Face to face is best, but this is pretty good too
This type of event is a great idea. You get a lot of the value of an international conference, with little of the effort or cost.

Of course, nothing beats face to face events. Melcrum's own Intranet 2.0 Forum at Disneyworld, Florida, had great reviews, and the UK's event is next week (get more info here), but hearing about stuff like this in audio and visual channels is a good way to deal with the realities of a globalised world.

Do you need some Presentation Zen?

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

A notice for anyone on this side of the world who's done a bit of public speaking or simply wants to know how to avoid death by PowerPoint.

Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, is hosting a talk in Sydney on Friday 4th July, courtesy of the StepTwo Designs team.

In a 2-hour slot, Garr will:

Challenge the conventional wisdom behind PowerPoint and Keynote slides, particularly targeting [the aforementioned] "Death-by-Powerpoint" and "sliduments" that are so prevalent in today's business environment.

Instead, he will encourage you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr will dispel popular myths about what is an effective presentation and offer up effective alternatives and approaches for designing and delivering better presentations. All throughout the seminar, the common themes are restraint and clarity in preparation, simplicity in design, and naturalness in delivery.

This will be Garr's only public presentation in Sydney while he's here and he won't be back for a while.

I'll be there and places are filling up fast according to Catherine Grenfell at StepTwo. If you're interested, don't waste a minute in booking and head to their site.

Fancy your five minutes of fame?

That's the Q I asked back in September 2007, asking to hear from all of you about your success stories in communication, initiatives of which you're proud, projects you turned from caterpillars into butterflies and other fruitful ideas you put into action.

As a result, we've heard some outstanding stories on the Melcrum podcast series. For example, from Michele Egan of World Bank (the winner of our greatest comms achievement competition 2007). We also heard from Richard Bartrem of WestJet Airlines about how video storytelling helped to sustain employee engagement and drive his organization on to the Top 100 Employers in Canada list. And this time last year we ran an IABC 2007 special from New Orleans, including Barbara Fagan-Smith of ROI Communication who told us about The Gap's unusual "Moose" sessions.

So, if you haven't already, please share with us your comms achievements. We're always keen to hear about any interesting people, projects, strategies and events. So, please drop the podcast team, Sona Hathi (right) or myself, Annie Waite (left), or Alex Manchester in Australia a line if you'd like to tell the comms world your story!

Look out jargon-lovers, the Beeb's playing bullsh*t bingo

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

Do you love to "go forward", indulge in a bit of "blue-sky thinking" or, "collect low-hanging fruit"? Then you'd better not read this article over at the BBC - 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate.

The collection of comments was inspired by a typically brilliant Lucky Kellaway column, also published yesterday. If you've read Kellaway's FT column before (or saw her at SCM UK in 2005), then it will all be familiar. I doubt you could ever get bored of it though – after all, there always seems to be new phrases to call "Bingo!" on.

My own pet hate, "cascade", gets two mentions in the Beeb's list:

39. "In my work environment it's all cascading at the moment. What they really mean is to communicate or disseminate information, usually downwards. What they don't seem to appreciate is that it sounds like we're being wee'd on. Which we usually are."
 LMD, London

40. "At a large media company where I once worked, the head of human resources - itself a weaselly neologism for personnel - told us that she would be cascading down new information to staff. What she meant was she was going to send them a memo. It was one of the reasons I resigned - that, and the fact that the chief exec persisted on referring to the company as a really cool train set."

Angela Sinickas has said on many occasions that "cascade" as an internal communication metaphor or process is completely flawed anyway, as information doesn't cascade down through managers nice and evenly, in sequence, throughout an organization, like some hideous DIY waterfall feature in a garden pond:

"My experience and client survey results show that cascading as a way of broadcasting new information is not effective.

In fact, companies in my survey database who purposely use cascading as a way of broadcasting new information are the ones with the largest percentage of employees hearing things on the grapevine. This is because as soon as the first VP/director conducts the first meeting, those people leave their meeting and talk to all their friends whose managers have not yet had a meeting.

My experience shows that employees at all levels have higher information levels on key company topics in organizations where they rely on mass communications to provide consistent and timely information to all employees, FOLLOWED by face-to-face meetings to discuss the context of the company information for each work group and how it might affect them.

I would recommend using e-mail newsletters to those with online access and posting PDFs of the same information on as many bulletin boards as possible to reach employees without online access."

"Cascading" is bunkum, as are most of the other terms on the list.

So, with all that in mind, what's your favourite - or least favourite - piece of "office-speak"?

The flip side to a Facebook crackdown

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

It's easy enough to go about banning Facebook in the workplace because of productivity fears. This typical, generalising policy is in place in many organisations and there are numerous pieces of "research" to help justify your actions. But, is Facebook really a problem? And, looking at it another way, what are the ramifications of banning Facebook?

If the latest survey from Telindus is to be believed (see the Internal Comms Hub news story here), some 39% of workers aged between 18-24 would consider quitting their jobs if their employer put a full ban on social networking sites - and 80% of the 1,000 surveyed do access such sites at work.

In a clear statement to employers wondering what to do, almost half of workers believe it would be better to restrict personal internet usage to lunch or out of work hours, rather than ban access completely. Surely this is a better option than banning it outright?

Shel Holtz has another angle on this continuing story which we've covered a lot in the last 18 months. According to the latest analysis from the US Labour Department – and despite rapid growth in Facebook's popularity (did you see it recently matched and surpassed MySpace as the biggest social network? See image below) – productivity in the US has actually increased faster than expected in the first quarter of 2008. That's despite lots of job cuts, a horrible economic climate and lots of uncertainty - and millions of workers having access to Facebook/the Web at work.

According to many consultants and pundits, wasn't Facebook going to cost businesses billions in lost productivity? Yup, that's what quite a few said. (Example 1 and Example 2 for starters.).

So, what's the deal here?

Telling Sky News Online, Telindus managing director, Mark Hutchinson said, "The key to appreciating the younger generation is to understand that they communicate in a totally different way. To have a phone on your desk is alien, they use YouTube and Facebook on a daily basis."

Exactly, and that comment also reminds me of a recent quote at the Enterprise 2.0 Forum from David Backley, CTO at Westpac (one of the four major banks in Australia): "People coming into the workplace are not demanding these tools [social networking, blogs, IM etc], they're actually expecting them to be available."

IT departments are scared of social media. Businesses are scared, (as they were when the individual telephone on a desk was introduced, as Shel Holtz often says). But in the long term, by putting heads in the sand and creating a nice iron curtain around your employees, your company is going to look quite unappealing next to the competitor who is making more of an effort to understand the increasingly varied demands of the 100% networked employee. All you're actually doing is demonstrating a complete lack of understanding about this new "stuff".

Conversation, dialogue, social networking, blogs, personal sites, personal publishing, easy-to-use software... this is how things are going. We're not going to go back to how things were 10, 5 or even 2 years ago.

Consider the threats and risks, but spend an equal amount of time weighing up the opportunities and potential advantages, because you can keep pining for the "good ol' days", or you can wake up and smell the internet coffee.

Facebook's rise and usurping of MySpace as the world's #1 social networking site (image via Tech Crunch)

New Black Belt Dojo Guest Blogger: Jeffery McMillan - PwC Russia

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

Sue and Liam have a new guest blogger over on the Black Belt Dojo and it's Jeffery McMillan, Internal Communications Assistant Manager for PwC Russia.

Jeffery is an Alumni of the Black Belt program and recently had the fortune to host PwC's global CEO, Samuel DiPiazza. Read Jeffery's first post here.