Thank you again to everyone who submitted their top tips to be included in my presentation for internal comms professionals. I had the pleasure of meeting the current group of students working towards the post-grad diploma in Internal Communications Management at Kingston Uni/Capita Learning & Development today. Alongside Geoff Timblick @GeoffTinUK from Vodafone (and ex-classmate of mine from last year’s course) we led a teaching session and shared our thoughts, including your top tips. We were talking about social media, why it’s important for comms professionals to keep up-to-date and passing on ideas for surviving the fourth and final assignment of the course.
As promised and following requests to share the comments, here are the tips sent to me via this blog, LinkedIn and Twitter. They reflect the views of the people who sent them to me. I’m grateful for the swift responses to my request, so thank you again. You helped me demonstrate the importance of comms professionals connecting with each other and the value of sharing ideas, best practice and ultimately – communicating.
Here they are:
“Relevance and resonance key. Use comms that fix business challenges in ways that work for the audience rather than what’s ‘cool’”
“Being an enabler instead of a creator | measure anything which you can and use it | networking | tell colleagues what IC is about”
“Think about the people and culture first before introducing new tools”
“Your best internal social media tools are a phone, an excel spreadsheet and the willingness to talk and connect”
“SM tip would be evolution not revolution. Evolve your existing IC strategy to incorporate SM. Don’t create a separate strategy”
“Be a chameleon – if you’re going to be voice of both staff and the organisation you need to meet people on both levels. Professional, credible, astute trusted advisor to your clients, and “one of us” to employees (and everything in between). Book smart is one thing but never underestimate the importance of emotional intelligence”
“When I was an internal communications specialist with a billion-dollar corporation, the number one thing I learned was to always share the news with your employees BEFORE you release it to the public, the media or your customers. I saw this mistake happen over and over again, and there’s nothing worse for employee morale than to read breaking news about your company somewhere else first”
“My top tips are ready widely, network lots with other in-house IC practitioners and never ever pay for IC consultancy”
“Don’t confuse with internal comms with journalism – they’re very different animals. Think about internal comms as building business-focused relationships, not being a publisher of news. There may be an element of the latter involved, but effective internal communication is getting other people talking rather than always holding the loudhailer”
“Top IC social media tip? Have faith in your people to find ways to facilitate their communication; they will do the hard work for you!”
