Mar 20 07
Cruising for Social Media
By Renn Vara
I just wasted another weekend cruising the web searching for and reading corporate communication blogs. Most of what I found was interesting, if a bit out of touch. The most noticeable issue is the confusion between public relations, marketing, and internal communication needs. The less obvious problem is the big disconnect between those who are responsible for communicating and those who need to be communicated to.
Professional communicators can be a bit in the clouds, I’m afraid. They don’t seem to understand their audience, even though they think they do. Or, at the very least, they have forgotten what it’s like not to know. They are so caught up with being on the cutting edge or “cool” that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be an employee trying to get a job done, advance in a career and still have time for friends, community and family. I know, not very sexy. It reminds me of my past life working with professional advertisers. Loads of hip, smart people focused on doing interesting work – but not into serving their customers, advertisers and end consumer. It’s all pitch one thing and do another.
The challenge for professional communicators is to balance their personal need to do fun work with serving the real needs of their audience. When those two things conflict, the challenge is to have the maturity and wisdom to subjugate their personal desire for “hip” and focus instead on what works in the real world and makes good business sense. Our current obsession with social media is the latest example. Blogs and RSS distribution of print, audio and video makes logical sense; but is it really functional for all businesses and divisions within businesses? That’s the question that deserves to be asked again and again no matter how convincing the argument is for blogs and RSS. Why? Because most employees barely have time to read their own email, much less read and write blogs.
It’s not all bad, of course. Here are a few of the resources I’ve found that were pretty good in this weekend’s search. I got these while Googling corporate communications, executive communications, corporate broadcasting, etc.
I give you these web addresses to save you from wasting your weekend Googling around like me. This is my gift to you. Now do your audience, employees, partners, customers or investors a favor: don’t subject them to your blog unless you truly have something to say. Ok, go ahead post your comment, complaint, or suggestion. But do it fast, you have work to do.
Wow, and I thought my weekends were boring!
Hey, we all have our hobbies. This is one of mine.
It’s funny that “communications” can mean so many different things to so many different people. Offering internal communications from the outside would seem to be a paradox to many people, but in essence, creating marketing communications for the outside world from an insider’s perspective within the business seems equally as silly to me. Either way, the operative skill is to be able to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and see things as they see, or want to see them.
Well said. Thanks for posting.