CRA Inc

Career Opportunity

An FYI for our non-client readers: CRA is currently adding to our team of internal communication consultants. If you’re curious about joining the CRA team, view our CareerBuilder job posting here, and learn more about CRA here.

Friendster for Business?

This article from Fast Company, A Little Help from Your Friends, provides some good background on how businesses use, or are thinking about using, social networking technology. (For more background on social networks, check out Alan’s previous post … and for more extensive background on social networking technology, check out Jeff’s previous post.)

So how does it work? These programs scan contacts in your address book, appointments in your calendar, and senders and receivers of your email, and then make maps of all the relationships they find among your contacts—and even go so far as to calculate the relationship “strength” based on the frequency with which you interact with the people in your network (we’ll get to that in a second).

bq. If it works for romance, why not commerce? A handful of companies have begun using Friendster-style social networking to help businesses and professionals find a perfect match. We’re not talking romantic partners here, mind you, but access to previously unreachable customer leads, investors, business partners, job candidates, and employers.
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U R Fired: Government Edition

Reuters reports that firing by text message, the growing use of which we’ve chronicled here and here, has reached the political sphere:

Swaziland’s King Mswati fired former Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini last year via a text message on his cellphone, enraged local lawmakers say.

…

“If a loyalist Sibusiso could be kicked out so rudely, it says a lot about palace attitudes towards those who serve them,” one Mbabane attorney said.

More On Accenture & Outsourcing

I have to comment on the HR survey post by Carolynne below … at first glance it’s good news for internal communication professionals, reading that a recent Accenture HR Services survey of 125 global HR executives and CEOs places employee communications at the top of the ‘we will never outsource’ list.

It’s bad news, however, if Accenture is the HR consultant du jour in your organization:

David Clinton, president of Accenture HR Services, told HRG today that there was no reason why outsourcers could not deal with communications. In fact, he feels that outsourcers could do a better job and provide a ‘personal touch’:

‘Most of the problem is perception rather than substance. Outsourcers can be just as personal, if not more personal and frankly more professional and more relevant when it comes to employee communications.’

That view frightens me on a number of levels, not all of which will I get into here. Fundamentally, though, it’s because this orientation considers employee communications a set of transactional processes … such as writing, editing, and managing the corporate intranet … and not a set of strategic processes, such as working with leadership to set the corporate agenda, communicating strategy, monitoring and responding to the employee pulse, and most important, acting as counsel to leadership.

To serve as a strategic function, though, internal communication has to be at the table as a trusted advisor to leadership, an advisor that fully understands the organization culture and context—something that’s very difficult to do if it’s not a living, breathing, and internal part of the organization. (As a consultant, and hence, “outsourcer,” I feel I know of what I type: the greatest challenge to providing good counsel is intimacy with the organization in question, and it’s one of the reasons our firm insists on deep work with fewer clients, rather than shallow work with many clients.)

The outsource crowd has one thing going for it, though: Our experience is that where internal communication doesn’t add strategic value, leadership ultimately doesn’t see an ROI and indeed takes action–they either hire consultants whom they consider strategists (a short term solution and one from which we benefit on occasion), or they make a more dramatic choice … not to outsource, but to cut.

Outsourcing Employee Communications

Two interesting findings from a recent study of 125 global HR executives:

* 87 percent stated that they would never outsource employee communications.
* Only 1 percent have fully outsourced their employee communications already.

From HR Gateway.

More Proof That Leaders Are Made, Not Born

Interesting piece from HBS Working Knowledge … “The Leadership Initiative” has created a Great American Business Leaders Database, which contains the names and accomplishments of almost 900 senior executives through the 20th century. Some of the Database can be accessed by the public free of charge.

According to the Initiative’s Executive Director Tony Mayo, one of the biggest lessons from the research is the importance of contextual intelligence: “A business leader’s ability to make sense of his or her contextual framework and harness its power often made the difference between success and failure.”

10 Rules For Using Weblogs

MarketingProfs has posted its 10 rules for using blogs and wikis. We’ve posted about blogs quite often, and gave readers a heads up on wikis recently, and this MarketingProfs piece is an addition worth reading.

It leads with a premise with which we agree: that more companies get blogs wrong than right. The MarketingProfs example:

To promote a new flavored-milk product called Raging Cow, Dr Pepper/Seven Up had a “cow” post random comments about a cross-country trip. Although the target audience was 18- to 24-year-olds, the comments appealed more to third-graders.

A sample: “‘How would a cow know diddly about the phases of the moon?’ Good question, but ever since that whole jumping over the moon incident, we cows and yonder moon have been TIGHT.”

Ugh. The rule I’d most like leaders and internal communication professionals to read is Number 8:

Use blogs for knowledge management: Despite its critics, knowledge management (KM) has not been over-promised; rather, vendors have under-delivered. Blogs can address the gap between KM promise and requirements by letting local expertise emerge. Here’s a good background on blogs and how Lucent is using them in KM. Other companies using blogs effectively include DaimlerChrysler, Hartford Financial Services Group, IBM and ESPN.

For the record, CRA has used blogs for our intranet and KM solutions since 2002.

Condi Rice & Confidence Markers

While most of the world was watching the Condoleeza Rice testimony yesterday for the political discourse, folks in our firm were watching the behavioral discourse, and in particular, the extent to which she projected “confidence markers.”

Confidence markers are the relatively small set of verbal and nonverbal behaviors that communicate certainty to an audience. They also strongly contribute to persuasiveness, and they’re well documented in the interpersonal communication literature. What’s important is that they’re all behaviors a speaker can focus on and control, which is why we tell clients confidence isn’t something you feel as much as it’s something you project.

So what are the confidence markers? We break them into two groups: verbal and nonverbal. Verbal markers include:
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The Cognitive Load Of PowerPoint

While I’m on the topic, it was at another PR weblog worth reading, Greg Brooks’ Engage, that I found this Richard Mayer article on the cognitive load of PowerPoint. Reading the full article requires a free registration, but here’s the gist:

(1) PowerPoint presentations should use both visual and verbal forms of presentation; (2) filling the slides with information will easily overload people’s cognitive systems; and (3) the presentations should help learners to select, organize and integrate presented information.

We agree and encourage you to read it all. We’ve posted about PowerPoint quite often: click here for a summary, and click here for our one-page Principles of PowerPoint primer.

PR Meets The WWW

The focus of CommLog is internal and leadership communication. That said, many of our clients serve (or lead) a PR function as well, and in a nod to that, I’d refer PR-interested readers to Constantin Basturea’s PR blog, PR Meets The WWW. Constantin has also created a PR RSS news aggregator at Blogdigger, which aggregates recent headlines from 30 PR-related weblogs–including CommLog–and is also worth a bookmark.

Finally, you might also enjoy reading PR Studies, a PR-related weblog published by the Leeds Business School & Centre for Public Relations Studies.