The Melcrum Blog

Are you guilty of crimes against the English language?

By Nishwa Ashraf, Editorial Assistant, Melcrum

“Wellderly”, “disbenefits”, “under-capacitated” – do any of these words mean anything to you? No, me neither.

Jargon – a fact of life in every business sector from accountancy to zoo keeping, and perhaps arguably more so within the world of communication. After all, language is the essence of communication.

Of course jargon has its place at work. It can provide useful shorthand to get across a specific meaning quickly, but at the same time can turn timesaving terminology into just plain gobbledygook. The Local Government Association (LGA) seems to think so clamping down on what it calls “impenetrable words” after a survey revealed that government departments, local authorities and quangos included redundant words and phrases within public information - words that mean everything to the organisations involved in the conversation but nothing to you and I.

No shock there, but at least the Association is doing something about it and has drafted a 250-word list outlawing meaningless and confusing terms including “trialogue”, “clienting” and “goldfish bowl facilitated conversation”.

Margaret Eaton, LGA chairman, said: “Why do we need to have a “webinar trialogue for the wellderly” when the public sector could just talk about caring for the elderly instead?” Why indeed Margaret? But I have to say, while I enjoy the odd webinar, the rest of the jargon I could happily do without. Jargon can’t be evaded every time, but there are occasions when dressing-up words can be to the detriment of the intended message and isolate your audience. As all communicators will know it rapidly becomes a problem when it prevents employees, or your peers, from understanding the intended meaning and can create barriers to getting crucial corporate messages out in the open.

Whatever your reason for juggling with jargon, if it’s out of place and the audience misunderstands it you can soon get into trouble. Not only will you fail to convey information to your audience, you may also succeed in suggesting a more subtle negative message – transmitting insincerity rather than honesty.

What’s worse, you may never know that your audience has not understood – people rarely admit to mistrust and fear appearing unintelligent. So, are you guilty of crimes against language? I’d love to hear your stories.

Vodafone Twitter account suffers internal breach

By James Bennett, Head of Content, Melcrum

If internal communicators hadn’t realised the power, speed and significance of social media then all you need to do is look at the following photo a Twitter user posted only minutes ago responding to a rather nasty message on Vodafone’s official UK feed. I won’t repeat it within this blog as it’s offensive.

According to @VodafoneUK, that is now having to field thousands of customer tweets complaining about the offensive message, the telecoms company’s Twitter feed was not hacked but the offending message was instead down to, in its own words, “a severe breach of rules by staff”. The message then went on to say: “We're really sorry. Dealing with that internally. Please keep your faith in us.”

The tweet out to customers was at least swift and will have salvaged some pride. In fact many customers have thanked the company for its rapid response, but sadly the damage has been done, spread worldwide and all at the click of a mouse button within a matter of nanoseconds. The tweet may have been hurriedly deleted but hundreds of users chose to retweet the original message.

It is still unclear what exactly happened but this must serve as a warning to all internal communicators whose responsibility it is to carefully manage these channels whatever business they're in.

If you haven't already, sign up NOW to Melcrum's must-attend Social Media Conference for internal communications.

Six days away from largest gathering of internal communicators in Europe!

By James Bennett, Managing Online Editor, Melcrum

We’re now less than a week away from the largest gathering of internal communicators in Europe. A huge turn out of 187 of your peers, colleagues and competitors will be attending the Melcrum SCM Summit in London between 13th and 15th October 2009 listening to and debating with some of the brightest minds in the profession including Best Companies Partnership’s Wayne Clarke, Channel 4’s Undercover Boss Stephen Martin and a host of senior practitioners from some of Britain’s largest and most important companies, organisations and bodies such as HSBC, Vodafone and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills.

If you're not convinced listen to our exclusive pre-summit interviews with some of the events biggest names.

Despite the workshops on 13th October selling out faster than ever before, we have managed to persuade The Tower Hotel to increase its capacity to more than the 150 cap, so if you or one of the team still want to come along, all you need to call us now. You won’t be sorry.

Discussing how to rebuild trust, re-engage employees and increase performance has never been more important than today – an era where both budgets and resources have been slashed in greater quantity and numbers than ever before. And it is you, the internal communications profession, that has the responsibility to change that downwards spiral and bring the UK and the rest of the business world back ito prosperity once again. Never has your role been greater.

As our keynote speaker Wayne Clarke says: “Fifteen of the top 100 companies doubled their turnover and tripled their profit in five years.” And what seems to be consistent among these high-performing organisations? “They all make effective use of line managers to translate and communicate core company objectives, achieve high levels of employee engagement, and ultimately, impact the bottom line,” adds Clarke.

We look forward to seeing you next week. Don’t miss out, be there!

Diary of an internal communicator - Week 4

By Rachel Allen, Head of Communication, London Overground Rail Operations (LOROL)

Rachel Allen has just started in her new role as the first head of communications at London Overground Rail Operations Ltd (LOROL) a company launched in November 2007 and train service that links 20 of London’s 33 boroughs. Rachel is the first communications professional ever to be hired by LOROL. Previous to her joining the company did not have a communication plan.

Read her article on creating an internal communications strategy from scratch on the Internal Comms Hub.

Over the last four weeks Rachel written an exclusive diary for Melcrum revealing first hand what it’s like to create and implement an internal communication plan and strategy from scratch, the people and challenges she’s faced along the way and the highs and lows she’s come across on her exciting new journey. It's made for fascinating reading for any professional communicator out there.

Here is her fourth and final entry:

Tuesday 1 September

How did it get to be September already? I can’t believe I am now into my fourth week at LOROL. Today I wrote a guide on delivering effective team briefings and how to encourage people to take part in discussions. I finalised the content of the team briefing for this period and issued it along with the guide and a revised feedback form.

A few employees have already contacted me to say they think it is a ‘vast improvement’ and they think it should be easier to brief. I’m really pleased with their comments as I created the new format using their feedback from the past few weeks. I’ve been invited to go along to various meetings to see how people deliver it to their teams, so I’m putting dates in the diary to do that. The first one will be at Willesden depot on Monday which should be interesting. I’ve been promised a ‘proper tour’ of the facility there  so I'm looking forward to that.

Wednesday 2 September

My desk is full of logos today! I’ve got the proofs of all the colour variations to look through to decide which ones to use and where they should go and what the rules are. I’m really happy with the work that’s been done so far. I also met with another designer today who’s been doing some work for us, it was good to meet face-to-face and talk through our ideas together. I met up with a friend of mine last night for dinner and we ended up discussing social media and its impact on internal communications. I found myself looking up the dissertation I wrote earlier in the year to refresh my memory on some of the theory I had read. There are so many things I would like to implement here. I need to be patient and take it one step at a time!

Thursday 3 September

We had an HR team meeting yesterday afternoon and discussed our objectives. I'm starting to think about introducing long service awards and a recognition scheme. Many employees have worked on the railways for years and have a real pride in their work. I think it's important the company has a scheme in place that not only celebrates worthwhile contributions but also honours these long-serving employees. I'm researching other organisations at the moment to see what works well to help me decide what will be appropriate for us, based on information I've picked up over the past month and input from people in the organisation. I think it's important to get this initiative up and running as soon as possible so will be tying it into my overall communications strategy through consistent messaging. I'm planning to do this by sharpening up our values and aligning the recognition scheme to them. I think this is important and I hope it will engage employees because I will ask for their input to help me decide how best to recognise them.

Friday 4 September

So here it is - my final diary entry. I've found the past month has flown by and has been fascinating. I've been made to feel so welcome here, I've met some really interesting people and have also received lots of emails from readers of this blog offering me their advice, support and encouragement.

The past four weeks have seen me undertake a huge learning curve, with lots to take in - which is to be expected when you start any new role. While my diary ends here, the hard work certainly doesn't and I now have lots of ideas of how I would like communication to be at LOROL based on what I've discovered. I'll be intrigued to look back at this diary in a few months' time to see where I'm at and how many of my plans I've already managed to implement. More than anything I've come to realise the importance of having a good network of communications professionals. Knowing that there are people I am in touch with in the industry that I can bounce ideas off and brainstorm with is invaluable.

I'm looking forward to going to Melcrum's Strategic Communication Management summit in London next month to hear from the experts there, increase my knowledge further and add some new people to my network. Hopefully I'll get to meet many of you there!

Rachel

Email activism, laziness, informal networks, and a whole load more

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

Since I chimed in one of his blog posts way back in 2007, fellow Sydney resident and pom Matt Moore and I have chatted frequently about social media, enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management. Matt is a knowledge manager at ASIC, soon to be independent consultant, and formerly IBM and Oracle, also being internal comms manager at the latter.

Last week, Matt invited me, Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon and IBM social media evangelist Luis Suarez onto a podcast interview, the focus of which was to be Luis's email detox program and the topic of email overload in general.

I don't think he calls himself one, but in my mind Luis is an "email activist". Someone taking the bull by the horns and shooting down unnecessary emails, demonstrating where and how you can defer conversations and host them on different channels - be it instant messenger, blogs, wikis and so on.

Luis has been on this detox for almost three months now, and by challenging each and every person who sends him one, he has managed to reduce the number of internal emails he receives by over a third. Pretty impressive. He's posted regularly on it, including charts (super organised!).

There are some notable points in the conversation:

• Luis works at IBM but email overload problems are just as apparent there. Luckily they have the software infrastructure to be able to change channels effectively.
• In reference to Gen Yers and other younger generations, email politics - the CC and BCC game - may become irrelevant. Luis says whenever people start playing that game with him he brings the conversation out into the open, saying there's no place for it in a professional environment, especially among your own team.
• Email is not appropriate for project development and collaboration. Not appropriate at all, yet we all do it.
• People are not lazy. Luis says in his detox experience, people think email is an easier option but when you look into it closely you're actually making more work for yourself. Again, I agree that people are not lazy in most instances. The laziness factor is surely symptomatic of a deeper problem, that is, we're just so damn used to working with email that digging out of this entrenched way of thinking is going to take some time - and concerted efforts by people such as Luis.

For me this conversation presented some clear examples of where social software tools can be of value to business:

• Improved, more fluid employee-to-employee communication.
• Easily searched and easily found project histories and conversations by way of using project blogs instead of chaotic email threads that branch off into dozens of fractured conversations.
• Rapidly developed project plans created and edited on wikis or simple shared, hosted documents, instead of sending round, and losing track of, endless word documents.

It's all pretty obvious, but when you hear about someone actively working to change the behaviours of a group of people, it's quite intriguing.

Also mentioned somewhere is IBM Atlas, a Lotus Notes-based software program that takes your IM conversations, blog posts etc. and analyzes the links and references to provide a social network analysis and determine topic experts and informal networks among employees. Identifying these networks is an increasingly important capability for businesses and the internal comms departments who, similar to marketers on the web, are looking to communicate by informal channels and determine influential people in an organization.

Much of the above comes down to improving, or better exploiting, communication and information - something Capgemini said last year could be worth £140 billion a year in the UK alone. I guess the hard part is finding more people like Luis.

Podcast files
Matt has listed the full index of the podcast and split it into three sections (originally planned for 30 minutes but went on for a fair bit longer). We spoke on Skype and the quality is not perfect in some places, but it's easy enough to keep up.

Part 1 (16:48, 4.0Mb)
01:00 - Luis describes his email detox moment in 2007.
03:10 - Luis challenges his email correspondents within IBM.
06:10 - How do you bring people round to the post-email world?
11:00 - Where is email appropriate?
13:00 - Instant messaging & social networking.

Part 2 (20:23, 4.8 Mb)
00:00 - Patrick raises the infrastructure question.
03:00 - Luis brings up wikis.
04:10 - Luis talks about discussing the detox with his team.
07:55 - The laziness issue.
09:00 - Do we love email?
10:00 - Alex mentions email overload.
11:00 - Generational issues.
13:00 - Patrick raises the politics question.
15:00 - Luis busts the whole thing wide open.

Part 3
00:00 - Alex agrees with Luis on email politics.
01:20 - Humans as political animals - in public or in private?
03:00 - Should we be selling tools or solutions?
06:00 - Applying social software to business problems.
08:00 - The email detox workout video.
10: 00 - Wrap up & next steps.

Email overload vs. Email education

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

There's a lot of people out there at the moment who say they hate email, that it's a serious problem, and email overload is ruining our working lives. While I understand the issues people have with their email inbox, I'm with those who say that email itself is not the problem.

How can it be? As the chorus of anti-email sentiment increases, Research In Motion - makers of the Blackberry, have also posted 2.18 million new users in the first quarter of 2008. That's 20% more than originally expected. Apple's gadget of the century, the iPhone, didn't have secure enterprise email and it's a big selling point of the new version expected out in June.

Let's be clear about one thing. People have used written messages for a long time. Currently, email is the written message status quo and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.  It's fast, global, easily obtainable, widely used and is the main source of communication for most of the time. Regardless of notions that teenagers think it's quaint and for old people, those quaint old people (everyone in business who's not a teenager?), still predominantly use email, and they will for a good few years yet. Email is actually a pretty handy thing.

As Matt Moore explains in this presentation and several other posts, our problems with email are not with email per se, it's the way we use it. It's our own email behaviours and the melting pot that email inboxes have become. Everything and anything can go in an email. But, just because it can, doesn't mean it should.

Without too much hassle there are methods for improving email use. In fact there are pages and pages dedicated to this idea.

These type of improvements for how email is used show some smart thinking in light of the the situation we're faced with and, as Matt includes in his presentation, providing people with other tools that help do certain jobs better is another step forward. For example:

• Instant messenger applications for quick chats and questions, even file transfers (and the teens prefer it, of course).
• Shared, editable documents in a central location - think Google Docs, wikis etc. - can vastly reduce the constant confusion of swapping of files and the inherent danger of something being overwritten or work being done on the wrong document.
• RSS can cut down mass e-mails, and streamline information into more relevant subjects.
• Even something like Twitter can cut down email by providing people with a space to chatter quickly and easily (from the desktop) without clogging up inboxes, because sometimes at work people want to chat and they use the only available channel that's not the phone.

Matt's coining of the phrase "Peak Email" (a la Peak Oil), is a point well made. We have to get smarter with how we use it. We have to educate on its use and provide alternative communication methods when and where relevant (incidentally, I'm currently reading this book that repeats over and over that the fundamental problem with oil is that there is no viable alternative).

Most of all, we have to be completely pragmatic and realistic when dealing with the problem. The written message is not going to go away, and mobile email and message devices are getting even more popular. It's time to work with email and focus on making it better, rather than keep getting annoyed with it.

E-mail bites Qantas flights

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

"Oh dear."

That was my first thought when I discovered that Qantas was to formally introduce e-mail and SMS capability on some domestic flights (international trips are currently under consideration).

Why, "oh dear"? Why do you think. Immediately, I had visions of my next Sydney-Brisbane flight being a nightmare of phone beeps and alerts, and Crackberry addicted business people tapping furiously on their devices, the sweat pouring off them as they contend with a barrage of incoming communications in an environment that used to be off-limits.

I'm exaggerating, but this news does seem unnecessary. Screaming babies, getting your knee bashed by the hostess trolley, and the musty-smelling person sitting next to you are just some of the joys of flying – why add another element to the mix with mobile SMS and e-mail coverage?

Of course, there's a flip side to my argument. People want to stay connected all the time. It's important. Hours are too scarce to while them away doing nothing on the plane. And planes are boring anyway.

Proponents of this argument are the same people who carry their Blackberries 24/365, even suggesting that keeping in touch while away - on holiday - prevents a volcanic e-mail inbox whence you return from your beachside retreat.

Fair enough. This train of thought has its merits.

Even though I have no need or desire for a Blackberry, I'm currently working hard to ween myself off checking work e-mail at home in the evenings on my laptop. The future of my relationship with my girlfriend pretty much depends on it. Having worked at home for eight months last year it's now stupidly and irritatingly difficult to stop pressing "send and receive", but I know life will be better once I've kicked the habit.

My deeper fear, though, is perhaps not with just e-mail on planes, but what Emirates are doing with the same Aeromobile technology as Qantas. You guessed it: inflight mobile calls.

God help us.

Up until now flights have been something of a green zone. If you're busy you can use the peace-time to catch UP with e-mail. If you're not that busy you can watch a movie, or these days watch an episode of 24 on your iPhone. You can read a magazine (or even a book if you're really traditional), or gently fall asleep to the hum of your surroundings. It was a genuine chance to climb into an impregnable bubble for an hour or two.

Kiss goodbye to that idea. In five years time it will be the norm for aircraft passengers to e-mail, text, web-surf and make voice calls - just like we do everywhere else.

When discussing the mobile calling capability, Aeromobile's VP of external relations, David Coiley, said he didn't think etiquette was going to be a problem.

"The Emirates flights (with voice call capability) may help debunk some of the etiquette concerns that were raised when the FCC considered dropping its ban.... the concerns are somewhat overstated, without some of the commentators knowing all of the details with regard to how these services are implemented and what can be done to encourage appropriate behavior."

Coiley added, "I think people are a little more sensible than some would give them credit for, and the appropriate behavior will emerge anyway."

Dave my friend, maybe you need to go speak to the guy who thought up "Quiet carriages" on trains, or even spend a few days doing an hour-long to/from London commute. Etiquette went out with the 90s.

I suppose it was inevitable. Modern aircraft are about the most sophisticated, technically advanced machines the average person comes into contact with on a regular basis. It was a bit silly that these man-made marvels might be susceptible to damage from the odd text message winging its way into the cabin.

Such reasoning does not make me feel better, however, and even given my penchant for a shiny new technology, I think this is one feature I could definitely do without.