From Trends
Hold up! Energize your corporate photos in a flash
Welcome to the first installment of Motivational Monday! Every other Monday, we will offer our audience a short tip, best practice, or mini case study. Hand in hand with that, every other Wednesday, we will feature Wednesday Wisdom, another short piece of realistic advice. So you’ll get a little shot in the arm once a week! So away …
Did this headline stop you in your tracks?
We just spent a great couple of days with the communicators at a big utility company in Pennslyvania. Three two-hour, customized Zoom workshops over two days. When I build customized workshops, I ask the client to bury me in samples. For these workshops, I went through about 100 different articles, videos, leadership communications, and social …
From Corporate to Creative … how to get there!
For 25 years, I’ve been telling communicators they need to take the “corporate” out of corporate communications, and replace it with “creative.” And where is the most creative stuff happening? In the consumer world. Everything from Artificial intelligence and mobile to gamification and humorous videos. Our job, as communicators, is to make the important interesting. …
Data Gives You Power
This week’s tip on Low Hanging Fruit: Use data as power to communicate differently. My wife and business partner and MUCH better half, Cindy Crescenzo, is the queen of employee communication measurement. She speaks all over the world on the topic. And her favorite thing to say is: “You never want to walk into a …
Is it time to retire the term, “Intranet?”
In 1994, I launched a publication called The Intranet Report. It was a print newsletter! Remember those? The publication was all about this weird new “internal World Wide Web” that people were starting to call “Intranets.” I was working as the Editorial Director and VP of New Product Development at Ragan Communications, a publishing/conference company …
Is it time to publish baby announcements in employee publications again?
When I wandered into the weird, wonderful world of employee communications, back in 1994, I learned at the feet of the great Larry Ragan. Larry was, along with Roger D’Aprix and a few others, one of the founders of what we consider “employee communications” today. Just a brilliant man. And a wonderful mentor. Larry was …
I’ve got all this data, now what?
The good news about being a communicator is that there are so many ways to collect all kinds of data these days. The bad news … if you collect it, you’ve got to do something with it. Often times, we end up with that sinking feeling and we say to ourselves, “What did I just …
What does ‘engagement’ really mean in the communications world?
In the communications biz, we like to throw the word “engagement” around a lot. We’re always trying to figure out if our workforce is “highly engaged,” or “somewhat engaged” or “disengaged” or some other kind of engaged. But the problem that none of the high-priced engagement consultants want to admit is, it’s really, really hard …
Where do bad words come from?
People say “world class” when they haven’t the energy or the courage to find and use a word that actually means something There are a lot of bad words out there. And most of them can be found inside companies, where good people use bad words for the wrong reasons. You hear words and sentences in …
Bar Charts don’t equal an infographic
Sigh … it seems that too often, left to themselves organizations will always create bad, boring content. In our Creative Communications case study in this issue, we showed you how an infographic can be a creative and powerful way to tackle a complicated topic. But, that’s because it was well thought out and designed. Just …