Communicating mundane messages to employees is one of the tasks that has been made harder for internal communicators by the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities on internal networks.

Consider, for example, the communication of a benefits enrollment deadline. There’s little that gets communicated inside companies duller than employee benefits information. But employees still paid attention 20 years ago because the reminder was one of a few messages being broadcast to employees. Back then, the role of communications was to produce one-way, top-down messages to ensure employees knew what they needed to know (like, for instance, not missing the benefits enrollment deadline). With communicators acting as gatekeepers, it was easy to maintain a flow of content that the average employee could digest.

Today, communicators produce only a fraction of the messages through which employees must sift. Depending on the dgree to which the company has embraced the Web 2.0 concept internally, employees consume messages from communities of various stripes, employee blogs, internal RSS feeds, updates on enterprise social networks, employee-generated videos, internal presence networks like Yammer, the list goes on.

Not that this is bad; in fact, it’s great. The more employees can network with each other, the more quickly they’ll find the information they need to do their jobs, get answers to question, connect with others with whom a relationship is beneficial and form ad hoc teams to tackle problems and jump on oportunities.

But still, with all this content, how prominent can you make an email or intranet item on those drab-as-dishwater messages that still need to get out?

The solution is to go analog. While this won’t work where employees are scattered and working from wherever, but for those organizations whose employees still gather in office buildings and manufacturing facilities, analog communications can stand out from the sea of digital messages.

Who’s going to miss a brightly colored poster on an easel by the elevators, in the lobby and in other high-traffic areas? How about table-tent cards in break rooms and the cafeteria? When I worked for ARCO back in the early 1980s, Employee Communications Manager Dave Orman drew attention to a 401(k) plan by hanging mobiles all over the ARCO Towers and other facilities; each of the pieces hanging from the mobile reinforced the enrollment message.

Even a print publication can get attention. One communicator I spoke with several years ago had ceased publication of a company magazine, moving all content to the intranet. But when a critical issue arose, she produced a special print issue that was distributed to employees’ desks. The reaction from employees was, “Wow, if they’ve gone to the trouble to print this, it must be important.”

I remember one boring message that was printed on movie theater-style popcorn boxes, then filled with popcorn and distributed on cafeteria tables for employees of one big manufacturing company. That was a message that employees not only remembered, but talked about.

Not only is print not dead, it’s a means of getting mundane messages to stand out.