All Things Bruce Eric

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.

If you like the “status updates” feature of Facebook and are addicted to seeing what your friends are doing at each minute of the day, you’ll love Twitter. But, I’d like to suggest that Twitter is more than just a toy to track friends but can be a powerful tool for networking, for keeping in touch with friends all over the world and for certain aspects of one’s job. Tapping the simplicity again of the folks at The Commoncraft Show, I’ve pasted below a short vlog on how Twitter works. Think of it as an RSS feed of what your friends and colleagues, even some people you may not know personally, are doing throughout the day. Once you’ve signed up for Twitter, you can use a cool little desktop applet called Twhirl that allows you to have a window of tweets from all of your friends in front of you. If you want to follow me, my Twitter profile is bruceericatdell.

Have a look.