Comments on: News, emails, videos from Corp Comm: spam or not?

By: Brian Lamb

Brian Lamb — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:22:59 +0000

Jane it would be really interesting to measure just news carewords in a poll but no-one has asked us to do this. Top poll items tend towards the mundane and everyday concerns of employees.
We do know from task performance measurement studies that it doesn’t matter how much corporate stuff is placed on the front page, employees aren’t even conscious its there.
Comms have to align their content to employee needs and hope they can cross-sell. For comms teams that are charged with communicating change or strategy its an essential message.

By: Ana

Ana — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:07:13 +0000

Hi Jane, I think the readership rate is directly influenced by the frequency of the mass -mailings aka “newsletters” sent to all employees in a period of time. We used to send as many as needed, without much limitations and the readership rates were going down. Once we started to treat them seriously and plan them, the readership rate wnet through the roof. Because people are interested in what’s going on, but not 24 hours a day

By: Jane McConnell

Jane McConnell — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:30:39 +0000

Thanks Harry. What’s interesting is how to define “quality”.
Brian, can you shed some light on this – from your research what have you discovered that makes intranet end-users like a news item and how does that differ from the comms team?

By: Brian Lamb

Brian Lamb — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:19:45 +0000

What a good questions to ask. What is the real value of news on the intranet? We measure the popularity of news as a task with Intranet readers using our polling technique (How a customer careword poll works)and we consistently find news is less popular with employees than it is with the comms team (we poll both groups)Having these kinds of figures for your Intranet makes discussions on what to publish and when a lot easier.

By: Harry Chittenden

Harry Chittenden — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:49:04 +0000

Hi Jane, good post.
Don’t you think that corporate communicators have the same task as all the rest of us communicators, quality of content? And shouldn’t corporate content be carefully styled typographically for easy reading. Thoughtfully worded headlines and liberal use of white space can make a memo from HR much more endurable.
And no memos from people who don’t know what a paragraph is.