Corporate communications ?= internal marketing

Photo by Eric Ziegler

Isn't a corporate communications teams really just internal marketing team? Why don't they act like external marketing teams, using the same techniques?  The ones that I know, have not changed their ways to match the methods external marketing. In some instances, they don't embrace some of the newer ideas and technologies.

Are there reasons why? My guess? The biggest reason is probably that the focus and value provided by these corporate communications teams is perceived to not be as high as the ones that are "driving" people to purchase the products and services of the company. Because of that, they do not get the funding or the encouragement to step outside of the basic tools they are provided.

Unfortunately, enterprise communications teams are probalby more valuable than most people think.  They have the ability to really drive change in the organization, change to processes and new technologies. And unfortunately, they are often left with either the lack of tools to do the job of external marketing teams or the lack the ability to realize that they could be more like the external marketing teams.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.

Helping corporate communication find value with an #ESN

Photo by Eric Ziegler

In my previous post, I talked about helping team find the value in using a new technology.  In this post, I am going to focus on one very specific example. Helping a corporate communications team that is stuck in their old methods of communication style.

In the traditional corporate communications world, most teams are just familiar with the intranet and email as primary vehicles to communications. In many cases this specific team will resist the desire to change communication methods. My guess on why they resist? They don't see the value. They are uncertain and doubt that a new method might be better. As I stated in my last post, to help a team like this find value, their biggest concerns, their biggest issues with communication need to be understood.  For example, are they seeing a drop in people reading their communications?  Are they hearing that people only hear about events after they occur?  Are they hearing that people can't find appropriate content?  

So when a new technology like an Enterprise Social Network (#ESN) is implemented, identifying solutions that will reduce the issues they see today is a great way of getting a team like this to adopt the new technology. So the question is how can an ESN help corporate communications with these hypothetical issues?

By using an ESN to advertise and promote the latest news article or event, people visiting the ESN will start to read more of the content. It is a secondary channel to share and obtain a greater readership. And if done well, the reach of the message could be even larger, as people share and re-share the information.

In addition, by sharing out the enterprise social network, the sharing and resharing will have an impact on the ability for people to find the best and most appropriate information and content. Similar to the internet, social plays a huge role in how search works. And by having employees engage with the content will allow search engines to automatically assess the most important information and will allow people to find the content faster (through multiple channels including the ESN and search).

This statement might seem out of place, but ...  the concepts of traditional inside the enterprise marketing has to adapt. Especially as semantic and social in the enterprise collide. The quality of the content that is created is all that much more important.  The higher and more relevant the content, the more likely it will be found.

This note was inspired by +David Amerland 's book, Google Semantic Search.