Last night I met up with two comms contacts of mine, Jenni Wheller and Dana Leeson. We meet fairly regularly to catch up and discuss all things Internal Comms over dinner. We were trying to remember how we first got talking to each other and realised that Twitter had a vital role to play – Jenni and I were regularly in touch through it and then met in person at a Melcrum conference in 2009. She then introduced me to Dana, who I’d also been tweeting, when the three of us first met for dinner about 18 months ago.
Regular readers of my blog will know I’m a fan of networking and encouraging comms professionals to meet up and discuss ideas. I always leave our catch ups feeling inspired and full of energy. I remember leading a teaching session for the postgrad students at Kingston University’s Internal Comms Management course last year and saying my number one tip for comms professionals to grow and develop their careers is coffee (or tea). The idea being there is nothing stopping IC professionals approaching peers and offering to buy them a cup of coffee and have a chat about all things comms related. I think sharing thoughts and debating topics with someone else in the same profession as you is invaluable. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than a course(!) and you will hopefully leave feeling motivated and with potential answers to queries you may have.
Jenni writes a blog, Confessions of an internal communicator and we discussed her latest post. She has created a poll to ask professional communicators: “As an internal communicator, can you really work with social media in your toolkit if you’re not a user outside of work”. We talked about this question and I’ll be interested to see what the results are. Do take a moment to stop by her blog and share your views.
Your name here?
I’m currently planning a new series of guest posts for my blog and will be featuring Jenni in the near future as she’s speaking at the Melcrum Strategic Communication conference in a few weeks’ time. Unfortunately I’m unable to attend so am looking forward to reading all about her presentation, which is looking at Building a strong employee engagement strategy across a remote workforce.
If you work in internal comms and would like to write a guest article for Diary of an internal communicator, do get in touch with me via rach@rachmiller.com with your proposal. Articles are usually up to 500 words and include a short biog of you too. I’m running a poll on the right hand side of this page to gauge what people would like to read more of, so do please take a moment to cast your vote.
Post author: Rachel
