The newsletter phenomenon – part 2

Behind the scenes
So the newsletter is here to stay, is still much loved, and still the popular kid in school. While part 1 of this article talked about when it’s agood call to use a newsletter, we now get to the cooking. There’s practical nuances that work behind the scenes to make the newsletter an effective tool – frequency, content, technology, and just simply the skills and resources needed to create it.

The frequency and regularity is important. This depends on how easy or difficult it is to source content, the effort going into design and layout, and mindspace of your audience. The newsletter that arrives promptly in your mailbox at the same time, same day every week makes you believe it’s credible and dependable. And therefore the news in it is also credible and dependable.

To ensure regular streams of content you need a network of sources who are enthusiastic and willing to provide news on your publishing schedule, besides their day jobs. Packaging content is important – tiny digestible bites with goto links for more information. Graphical treatment of key points or emotive use of colour and design create the ‘mood’ to receive information. Engagement devices such as contests, feedback, and a call to crowdsource content make audiences feel included.

Then of course there’s technology. Is your newsletter a pdf delivered by email, or an emailer, or is it an e-zine? Or perhaps it’s just a news stream on your website that is delivered to mailboxes? The technology must be chosen based on the receptiveness of the audience. In one internal newsletter I worked on, the technology evolved with the audience. It began as a pdf, then became an interactive pdf, then grew into a slick e-book. But following an acquisition which changed employee demographics, 50% of them were not receptive to the e-book, so we scaled it back to a pdf. It’s most important to reach people – the technology is a means to an end.

And who will do all this work? Admin, CSR, sales teams, businesses and change programs would believe that that this is an hour’s work tops for a coms person. Coms people do have superhuman powers, but not here. It needs the skills of writing, design, and whatever technology you are using – maybe html, flash, maybe a tool subscription.

The newsletter generally heralds a time in the organization where there is a thirst for information, and a compelling need to share it.  While it is a positive climate for communication, newsletters are the ‘last mile’ connect. In a newsletter, the amount of information that can be shared is limited, and its job is to ‘push’ the content until a ‘pull’ is created – where people themselves visit the regular channels frequently.

Newsletters must eventually pave the way for a strong aggregated channel such as a single monthly or weekly communique, the intranet or website. In the food-related dessert analogy I use here, the intranet or website is the buffet where people can choose what information is relevant and helpful to their work. They can choose how much they want, look around and see what they may want later, and keep coming back whenever they want.

So what the ideal newsletter essentially says is “Bon appetite!”  

 

The newsletter phenomenon: Part 1 - “This calls for a newsletter!”

(This is a two part article on newsletters – part 1)

Every coms person has come across this – the newsletter phenomenon. It’s when suddenly everyone in the organization is overwhelmed with the need to communicate (a job too well done by the coms head, perhaps?). Admin wants a newsletter to tell people they’ve recently upgraded the washroom. CSR wants more volunteers. Businesses want multiple newsletters – one for sales teams, one for customers, and one to let global know they’re on the job. Change programs want one because for the life of them, they can’t justify their very existence on the very intricate multi-colored graphic from their ppt slide with the objectives and methodologies in font size 8.  

Now just to be clear. I love newsletters.

As a communications device, a well-designed and thoughtful newsletter is the chocolate cake of coms – looks delectable, delivers just the right information right to your mailbox, so easy to consume. And if crafted with care, leaves you wanting more. Which is exactly the coms person’s evil design – to ultimately lead you to the mothership, the intranet or website.  

But just like the chocolate cake, if eaten every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, ugh. Overkill. No longer interesting to the reader nor useful for the sender. If everyone is serving dessert at their stalls, no one wants to buy any.

We must understand the humble newsletter as a communications tool  - in the context of the purpose, the time, and the pulse of the receiver. Typically, a newsletter is useful in these scenarios:

1.       When an organization is vast and unstructured – In organizations with multiple businesses, each one needs to reach out to their people to create a sense of core team or a shared vision. The same goes for customers – a conglomerate selling a diverse portfolio needs to create separate nuggets of relevant and exciting news for the customers of their specific industry, product or technology.

2.       When the intranet or website is ineffective – The more sustainable way to communicate is intranet or web. But many intranets or websites are ill structured making it frustrating to find information. In this case, a newsletter is an interim solution, curating content and linking it with web or intranet, so that people know where to find what. At times too, an older audience or one that is not well on-boarded into the technology may struggle.

3.       When change is in the air – Especially in times of change, it is important to over communicate, so that there is a sense of reassurance or something to focus on. A newsletter in this context is extremely high impact.

4.       When there’s too much to say, but all to the same audience – In the coms maturity cycle of any organization, there’s usually a time the newsletter phenomenon hits hard. Then your mailbox is filled with them, and pfft…it’s over. Overkill. If there is a common audience, and many teams trying to communicate to them, it makes sense to have a single aggregator newsletter.

The newsletter has evolved from a simple communication containing information to one that is dynamic, and can deliver return on investment. Far from becoming outdated, it has redefined itself to the current digital environment and can now offer advanced tracking and effectiveness metrics. A newsletter can let you know who read it, how much time they spent, which article interested the reader most, and entice people to act. For internal audiences, this could help put a metric to that nebulous HR parameter - employee engagement, or for customers it could generate and qualify sales leads, and become the first touchpoint to reel in the person to a longer conversation.

No doubt about it. Newsletters are still around, still making waves, and still stealing the show.  

Wait for part 2 of this article: The newsletter phenomenon – Behind the scenes

The virtual world gets (horribly) real

Recently, a whatsapp group admin was murdered because he expelled a member for unacceptable behavior. Also recently, an unthinking comment on a (usually) well-moderated group of mothers went communal because the group was unmoderated for seven hours, while the admin chose to spend those hours with her kids instead. The admin was stalked, threated and forced to get police protection.

The virtual world just got unmistakably, horribly real.

Until now, social networking offered many a way to connect with communities and like-minded people that surpassed the physical boundaries they had to live in so far. A world they could not find with neighbours, work colleagues or sometimes even their own families. Until now, it’s been a cozy little Utopia.

But mobile penetration is higher than the use of toilets. And personal space, the rules of social engagement, the need for civil behavior and even the legal enforcement of these had never come up. We need to realize now – social media and society are one and the same. The virtual world is made up of people. Only until now, those people were still experimenting with it. Today’s generation are digital natives, who learn about phones and internet along with their first baby words. Also – smart phones and internet penetration has only scraped the tip of the iceberg. While currently only 34% of India’s population is online, industry is leading a frantic race to increase users and get everyone online.

So from a sociological context what we have on our hands is a potential nightmare. A world where under the notion of anonymity and no geographical, social or culturally enforced limitations, it’s easy for the best of us to lose grounding and rationality and give way to the dark side. I shared once a video of a drunk cop on a metro train and was all judgemental….it later came to light that he was suffering a stroke while riding home in the metro. I reposted with chastisement, but the damage was done by collective social media fueled by thousands of such shares. I shudder to think about how easy it is for the committed and conscience-less anti-social personality to deal in murky, downright creepy exchange of ideas, material, trade or worse.

Cyber laws and their enforcement are met with the ambiguity of free speech and the complete confusion on how to handle this new type of social scenario that transcends the limitations of the law.

More than laws, a society is governed by peer pressure and conformity. How will India’s diversity, and more terrifyingly – India’s hyper discriminatory, over critical, self-righteous culture translate online?

Will the 34% of people online rapidly mature and be able to nudge newbies into behaving?

We need to realize that a personal moral code is carried over into our online social life. And if that is a common moral code, then we have a civil society. While India is held together by several moral codes, each was limited to a geography, a religion, a community. The great melting pot is around the corner, and let’s face it. India is volatile – passions run high, rationalism is perceived to be anti-national, and communal sentiment is a pile of tinder, with politicians just waiting to light a match.  

Social media is going to rip off the paper thin façade that holds us together off and let the crazy out. It’s the wild wild west where everyone has a gun, and triggers ‘send’ with no sense of reality or consequence.

Is it time to log out? Or is it the right time to log in?

 

The death of the intranet and the birth of (gasp!) the meme!

So it has officially been 12 years now that my love story with internal coms continues. And intranets in this story, being the backbone of internal coms, have been the ‘Coffee Day’ of frequent rendezvous in this analogy.

I think a little backstory is called for. My first internship was with i-Vista Solutions, and one of their first products was an intranet. I wrote the marketing content for it, sat with techies who patiently deconstructed the techspeak for the average arts student. My first job at ABB then had me spend massive amounts of time on CAWP – a Lotus Notes powered system of databases with a user interface that served as the intranet. Incidentally, when I came back to ABB 10 years later and saw my name under the pages ‘page created by Nandini Naik’, it felt akin to finding my star on the Hollywood walk of fame. At HP, I was part of an entire team that made updates to the intranet, for the whole of the company, worldwide. Clearly, they were already living in the future.

Then was Logica – when I fell head over heels in love with the intranet as the definitive internal coms solution. Swamped with the need to communicate to employees, give individual teams freedom to communicate, but maintain control over the messages and grammar (!), the intranet was my savior and my career launchpad. Over three migrations on various platforms, I evangelized intranet with zeal, marketed it as the win-win solution for everyone. As the responsibility of the organization, not the coms team. Had collaborative workshops with each team to understand what they wanted to say, how they could say it and what functionalities were best suited. Trained a network of ‘Intranet SPOCS’ who learned the tool, understood its value and then ran with it. It was the dream. The last migration to MOS gave us a world class, intuitive intranet that everyone was proud to own, not a tool that was part of the coms mandate. When Logica was acquired by CGI, final validation came from the fact that the intranet was the tool chosen in the integration discussions that would stay.

Now, back to the present. I met the founder of i-Vista riding a shuttle to catch a flight. They had moved away from their intranet product years ago. Hard to sell he said. I know. I ‘sold’ it internally for years.  Without a coms person crazed with evangelical zeal and armed with budgets pushing the decision from inside, it was a hard sell. Came back to ABB 12 years later, and still using CAWP, but in the process of migrating. Just saying, despite being passionately involved with intranets, I now go to LinkedIn to search for people within my own company. Met an ex-colleague who now works with a major lifestyle brand. They’ve just adopted Facebook@work. He says they only use intranet as a document repository now, and plan to communicate with employees only on FB. No need to train, evangelize, hard sell. Crowd-sourced content that can be moderated. Employee engagement at its best – through a truly social network.

Over a decade, is the writing on the wall? This love story seems right where it started, and destined to end where star-crossed lovers end up with all odds against them.

Reluctantly, I agree that Facebook is probably a better platform – easy to post, share, moderate information, balance of text, video and words, and let’s face it, fun. If you don’t have to force people to be there, that’s half the battle won. In my love story of internal coms, I must say, I have never imagined the meme rising up as an official mode of communication.

The times, they are a-changing.  

5 things I never learnt about communications in college

Had I known in college that ‘creativity’ was the least important thing in being successful at corporate and marketing communications, well……maybe I would have reconsidered. Or…..maybe (not being the most creative type) I would have felt more confident I could do it. Here’s what only 10 years in communications can tell you.  

1.       Learn MS Excel

The way corp com is funded in most places…well. It’s not. There are people and their salaries, and in most places, teams are well….. They’re not. They’re single individuals or sparse teams in single digits. So how it’s funded is by the business unit within the organization that has a communications need. And all decisions are taken by the budget proposal. So while the communications plan is sound, the concept and design is cracking, it all comes down to the question – how much is this going to cost me? So you very soon must learn to crack the numbers, put it into an excel sheet, cost each element of the campaign. Then prioritize elements – what will give maximum impact, what could be optional in case I need to rework the budget and not compromise the campaign? Excel is also more than a budget companion – it’s a savior come performance evaluation time, or ‘productivity tracking’ time. The end is what people see, and many times, no, I will say every time, no one understands the four days of research, interviews, writing, reviewing, calls and rewriting that is behind a simple intranet story. Excel to the rescue! I’ve been told I’m a bit extreme, but I track every request, type of deliverable, business, the person I’m in touch with. There’s a column in there for the number of man hours as well. I also have PR trackers, vendor bill trackers, PO trackers. I know, I know. It’s a bit neurotic. But, when an ‘internal change program’ hits me and my team (and they crop up oh so often), I know I can justify every one of their hours.  Or when I need to hire someone because the workload is too much. Or when it’s appraisal time, and in a minute I can spew metrics about the number of requests I’ve had, the number of businesses I’ve supported, how many of each collateral I’ve created….anything you like.

2.       People need to like you

I remember a time when I was idealistic and swore never to be a hypocrite. Never would I ever say something I didn’t mean. Life’s a lot in the grey area, and has much to do with how you influence people. The ultimate aim of communications is to influence people. The corp com professional will never influence with work or campaigns, if she cannot first influence key stakeholders who fund, and support the bigger picture. Influencing key stakeholders is so much easier if they like you. I’ve struck a balance. While I don’t suck up, I talk shop, ask about their business, talk about what are their priorities, sometimes enquire about family. And I smile a lot. It helps me connect with the individual businesses within the company, and it helps me put together the pieces, create stories that span the entire company. Which in turn helps me seem clever (yes, seem….). Once people like you, they trust your judgment. Let’s face it, everyone’s an expert at communications – colour, word choice, positioning…… my job as the corp com professional is to make them all feel heard, and then skillfully negotiate to what I know is best. All I’m saying is …when people like you and trust you, these tiring negotiations become very few, and you can go ahead and do what you’re good at.

3.       You’ll spend a LOT of patience on procurement and bill processing

This part I could honestly do without. I’ve hated it. Tried to work without it. Was not successful. It is painful when you are a single person, or a tiny team, and every brochure or poster you print needs three quotes carved in actual stone in triplicate. And then of course you want to go with the vendor whose quote is higher, because, how can you explain that you can pay the same for two designers, but the end design will be the difference between a gorilla’s artwork and MF Husain? It’s a very difficult discussion, and if you’re lucky you will see point number 2, and the procurement head will like you, and so understand your point, and help you put in place rate contracts for standard stuff. And also support you when the CEO throws an entire office rebrand at you to complete in 2 days because of an important visit, and you have just no time to get the three quotes, so you give them a heads up and they collaborate.             

4.       Vendors are your team

Treat vendors like your customers. In tiny teams, you’re often doing 8 different events and 4 pieces of collateral, and also managing a PR interview for the CEO at the same time. Obviously, you cannot be in 13 places. Even if you have the maximum allowed single digit number of nine (wow!) people in your team. Loyal vendors have saved me many many many times. You need to cultivate loyal vendors, who will do more than supply. They also like you, and value your business. You need to make them responsible for the guidelines, and turn them into spies in case anything goes directly to them, and not through you. Then they will tell the errant business to please get corp com approval on this before printing. You make them responsible for the annoyingly small yet first to get noticed by management things, like why is this corner of the poster (at the back of the wall where no one will see it) got a smidgeon of a fingerprint on it when I squint my eyes?  

5.       It’s a 10-year career

I spent a few minutes thinking about whether this is really the fifth point I wanted to talk about, and then decided to go with it. The sad truth about communications is the fight to raise it to the boardroom is still on. Which means as far as a support function goes, it will always only stay at one place. While you start off with talent and creativity, you move on to processes and business impact, and then there’s a lull on how much more value you can add. Added to this, freshers also start off with the same talent and creativity, so after ten years, sometimes the actual ‘work’ you are doing can just as easily be done by a younger, less cost-to-company resource led with a single manager. So what happens to senior communications professionals? Who by nature are in the job for the learning and exposure of working with so many different people, the crazy rush of managing too much with too little time, of living for the great idea and the need to create change through communications? I’ve spoken with senior HR professionals a decade older than me, who moved from coms after ten years. Or moved to marketing. Or started their own companies. So apparently this is not new, it’s just that I’m here now. So in the things I wish someone had told me, this is one. Maybe I would have started thinking about this mid-career life crises earlier. 

Had I known these things before I started, would I have changed my mind about communications? Never.