Currently we have 2600 people working for us ranging from senior executives, office workers, warehouse colleagues and delivery drivers. Do you have any advice on producing a communications audit to this diverse audience. Thanks
There are some very good guides on the site about developing and running your internal communications audit.
I particularly recommend Jim Ylisela's toolkit which covers Surveys, Focus Groups, Executive Interviews, Vehicle Analysis and writing your plan.
I am off to do one next week in a company of a similar size in Luxembourg so the topic is very close to my heart at the moment. If you need any more direct help then do not hesitate to contact me
What social media monitoring tools can I use to listen, monitor and find the 'influencers' in a closed enterprise social network (built on SharePoint)? Radian6 can't do this.
A very astute question and one which is going to become more and more important as adoption increases. You do not say which version of SharePoint you are based on. SharePoint 2010 boasted improved management information but we have not found anyone who has really achieved any good social network analysis on that platform. Our tech guru Lee Stevens is looking at SharePoint 2013 to see what can be switched on to enable better social search and we will be talking about that at a special session at simplySMILE2013
Meanwhile you can look at some other platforms such as
But watch this space; it is a subject that simply will explore once the software companies realise that there is a huge untapped market for better analytics behind the firewall.
Internally we want to make sure all our policies have a consistent look and feel and perhaps look into the development of a microsite to house them. Has anyone any experience with this or worked with any agencies who deal with this sort of design and branding work?
Kindest Regards,CL
Hi CL,
Thisis a very interesting question - and timely as the interpretaion of policies can get a bit out of control. This is because staff are starting to use forums to find out about compnay policies and taking advice from each other. This can be helpful in some cases - but often it means that ambiguities creep in and people can take for gospel thngs that are not company policy.
We have done work for the HR department of GSK in this area and for Unilever. Happy to chat more about it. Just contact me on marc.wright@simply-communicate.com
but cannot now find that article. Could you point me in the right direction please? Teresa.threadgold@rspb.org.uk
Hi Teresa,
Ruth Findlay at Scottish Water has used phone recordings to communicate with hard to reach employees. It works OK but they back it up with other channels as well.
There are a couple of articles on their award-winning work:
I experience a lot of cultural push-back in the company I work with due to my accent. What would you suggest best to tackle the ESL issues?I'm a senior associate in a Chicago-based consulting firm.
This is a really surprising question as we thought such cultural barriers had long since dissolved among international companies.
More often than not we asked how to make English simpler and more easily understood in meetings and newsletters that are aimed at a wide audience.
Have a look at Georgi Paoletti'article on this subject:
I am based in the Midlands area and our company has 12,000 employees based in c 700 stores and at a Head Office. I'm looking for an intranet solution to meet three different environments and wonder if you have any recommendations on a company/ies you have used and would recommend who can help me with a solution?
Rebuilding an integrated intranet on this scale will be complex and expensive. Sounds like you need a remote solution possibly based on BYOD - Bring Your Own Device combined with a freemium model employee social network such as Yammer or Socialcast. We have some good experience in the retail sector we can share. Call us on 0207 487 8303 and we can put you in touch with other communicators who have gone down this path and some specialist consultants who might help you.
We are trying to improve our internal communication, so that all the different internal audience get the most out of the internal communication. Beside the management we have senior project manager, as well as junior software engineers. This different personas do not take out the same out of the information that flows within the business.As a SCRUM Master I invited some of my colleagues to find out which information, thorough which channel has to reach which persona.Do you have any experience or any tips how to facilitate such a workshop?Thanks in advance.CiaoMichele
Are there any sources that give benchmarks that you can measure the results of your enewsletter?Many thanks in advance!
Chrysoula
Hi Chrysoula,
Thank you very much for your question. It is salutary that more and more communicators are interested in outcomes rather than outputs.
Too often in the past our job was to get stuff out, on time and on budget. If we achieved those three things we thought that we had achieved our goals. Never mind that what we were sending was ignored by our audiences.
Often when we look at the stats of open rates on long-standing newsletters the results are very disappointing - down in the 17-25% range. But this is quite typical where the editorial agenda is set from above and there is little or no understanding of what our colleauges are truly interested in.
We have been working with a food packaging company on their newsletter to their Middle East region and over 18 months they have got opening levels up to over 80% which is pretty impressive. The trick - good content and the development of a compelling CEO blog.
I work for a large site with over 2500 people, I look after internal site communications. We have a fortnightly newsletter, TV screens (as we are a posterless site) and an intranet. We also do site briefings for managers, yet we still find people are not aware of what is happening on-site, do not read emails etc. So I wanted to see if you had any innovative ways to get information to a large group of people without flooding them with emails?
We put your question to Euan Semple in a recent edition of simplytv
You can hear his answer by spinning forward to 50 mins into the programme.
We caught up with longtime social media expert and President of IABC Belgium, Aurelie Valtat, to get her top tips for executing an effective digital...
