2004-09-27
Posted on September 27, 2004 6:55 am by Shel Holtz
| Internal
The doors are open at a wiki I’ve set up called The Employee Communications Manifesto. The term “manifesto” is, I think, apt, since this wiki will serve as a group’s declaration of ideas and exposition of the theories and directions of a movement. The group is the community of employee communications professionals. The ideas, theories and directions are those those of the employee communications profession.
I’ve launched the wiki because the employee communications profession needs a baseline. As I have noted here before, internal communications seems to be performing less than brilliantly at achieving its goals of employee alignment… Read More »
2004-09-26
Posted on September 26, 2004 9:53 pm by Shel Holtz
| General
Corporations are implementing policies on employee blogging, but the Pentagon isn’t following the trend. According to the very last graph in an AP story appearing Sunday, “the Pentagon has ‘’‘no specific guidelines on blogging per se,’’ said Cheryl Irwin, a Defense Department spokeswoman. ‘Generally, they can do it if they are writing their blogs not on government time and not on a government computer. They have every right under the First Amendment to say any darn thing they want to say unless they reveal classified information.’”
One wonders if this non-policy has been communicated to the troops. The Pentagon might do well to take a… Read More »
2004-09-24
Posted on September 24, 2004 11:52 am by Shel Holtz
| Technology
Jonathan Haber, internal communiator at Marriott, sent me a link to a search engine I’ve never heard of. IceRocket has an interesting twist. In addition to search results, the engine pulls up a thumbnail view of the page it found. “Visually oriented folks can recognize by sight the site for which they couldn?t remember the URL. Speaking as someone who often misremembers domain names but rarely ‘forgets a face,’ as it were, this has definite appeal,” reads the USA Today piece Jonathan forwarded.
The engine also offers an intriguing utility called “E-mail a Search.” Send a blank e-mail with the search term in the subject line to… Read More »
2004-09-24
Posted on September 24, 2004 7:23 am by Shel Holtz
| External
This week I’m the guest speaker at a graduate PR program in Maryland. It’s a virtual classroom and the grad students pose their questions on a message board. One student asked why public relations has such a bad reputation. I replied that bad PR gets a lot of press while professional, ethical communicators do their jobs without anyone shining a spotlight on them.
Such is the case with a headline I’ve seen in a number of print and online publications, a variation on the one that ran yesterday in The Silicon Valley Business Journal: Wal-Mart launches public relations offensive. Wal-Mart, the Arkansas-based mega-retailer, is apparently… Read More »
2004-09-24
Posted on September 24, 2004 7:05 am by Shel Holtz
| Internal
When people talk about the problems with e-mail, the conversation usually turns to spam. There could, however, be a bigger problem brewing with the potential to cost companies a lot more than they pay to deal with unsolicited e-mail advertisements.
The study, conducted by Queen’s University in Belfast, examined employee use of business e-mail. The results are disturbing. According to the study, 28% of workers have sent sexually explicit material to a co-worker. Thirty-one percent used company e-mail to send such material to someone outside the company. The bigger the company, the greater the abuse. Of those who send sexual material,… Read More »
2004-09-23
Posted on September 23, 2004 8:46 am by Shel Holtz
| Business
I routinely talk to employees at client companies who receive anywhere from 100 to 500 e-mails per day. Do they read them all? Don’t be absurd. They scan the subject lines for the ones they’ve been waiting for, then delete the rest. Among those deleted—or, at the very least, not acted upon are some that are asking for a decision or information needed to make a decision. Not answering holds up the process and slows the pace of business.
So says a study out of the UK commissioned by palmOne. Sixty-one percent of respondents said a delay in responding to e-mails delays business decisions.
It’s all about etiquette, according to the study.… Read More »
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