Insidedge Mindshare Conference
I was invited to participate in a conference focused on the art of internal communications with some old colleagues from Insidedge, experts in internal communications and the consultants who helped make my company’s cultural campaign real. It was an excellent opportunity to get away from the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ and share ideas and best practices with others. My former manager Bernie Charland (blog: Public Relations Rogue) and I were able to attend last year’s conference in New York and this year’s took place just three hours away in Dallas.
I learned quite a bit from the other attendees and realized that for all the frustrations I have, my current employer really has a lot of good things going on. We’re actively listening to employees about what they like and don’t like, just as my cohorts on the external side are actively listening to what our customers have to say. It’s refreshing to see how closely aligned we are on how we’re behaving on the external and internal fronts as in many companies, external leads and internal simply follows. In my case, internal is clearly leading the way.
Keith Burton and the entire Insidedge team has launched a blog called Intake, that will facilitate conversations specific to internal communications. Good luck, Keith and thank you for your letting me be part of Mindshare 2008 — it was excellent.
What Is a Blog, You Ask?
I’ve been fortunate that most of my family members understand exactly what I do in my job. In my current role, I look after all things digital to reach employees of the company I work for, which means I need to understand social tools like Facebook and Twitter. Over the past 18 months, we’ve rolled out nine different blogs to engage with and listen to employees so I thought I’d post a very simple YouTube video a colleague of mine on the external side showed me recently. It offers a simple explanation of how blogs have taken off and represent the democratization of content authoring. Take a look. (This video is courtesy of Lee and Sachi LeFever at www.commoncraft.com/show)
