Employers at large organizations face internal communication challenges. Employees are frequent social media users, and they expect timely and accurate information at work: “All of them want to know what’s going on,” Dynamic Signal Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Joelle Kaufman says, “and employers want everybody to understand organizational priorities.”
I’ve previously written about the Dynamic Signal mobile app and Edelman PR’s use of it to engage with employees in sharing content across their external social networks.
However, a frequently more pressing challenge is “the cacophony of messages that come at people all day from so many sources,” Kaufman says. More than two decades after email transformed workplace computer-mediated communication (cmc), employees often spend too much time sifting through the inbox.
Mobile phone apps offer a more efficient path by targeting messages to the right people at the right time.
Kaufman says Dynamic Signal offers, “the ability to measure who got it: Did they engage with it? Did it have the desired impact?” While external social media reach and impressions may be a company goal, “80 to 90 percent of what you need to communicate with your employees is not actually what you need or want them to share,” she adds. Instead, leaders need effective ways to move a team in a strategic direction.
Those metrics really are about impact. It’s not just that they saw it, but did they by segment – we’re very big on segmentation – so, by segment, did they click on it? Read it? Did they engage with it?
Health, wellness and safety compliance are among key use cases. Some companies share short videos as, “snackable, so that the other person doesn’t have to interrupt their day to do it,” Kaufman says. “I’m hard pressed to find a circumstance where being able to communicate effectively with your employees isn’t needed.”
This form of internal communication may work best when the goal is to clearly define employee roles within a set of organizational priorities. Ideally, clear vision allows teams to identify opportunities to collaborate. “That just catalyzes energy and can truly break down silos,” Kaufman says.
Dynamic Signal, though, is not a chat room environment found within Slack, Facebook, Yammer, Microsoft Teams or other collaboration tools. Rather, it can be used as a strategic internal communication option. Its model is based upon “authentic relationships,” and “credible communication,” Kaufman says. “It’s just my instinct that people like to communicate with real people.”
While artificial intelligence (AI), chat-bots and augmented reality (AR) continue to grow in popularity, don’t expect human communication to die in 2018.
Marketing AI, though may help improve efficiency for people in search of simple information within noisy internal and external social media spaces. Data help identify target audiences for creative media storytelling within appropriate communication channels.
Mobile Content Sharing
It’s clear that email and company newsletters have lost relative effectiveness over time, and the Dynamic Signal app offers an alternative for large organizations (500 to 400,000 employees) to track effectiveness of internal messages. “They’re getting the data and measuring,” Kaufman says. “They can actually show the value of what they’re doing, and that is how they can unlock and are unlocking more resources for communicating.”
Dashboard Data
As is the case with external media monitoring tools, data analytics help communication professionals make the argument to the C-suite for justifying staffing and budget. Active users, post views, reactions, comments and other engagement data offer important insights into the value of content through employee engagement in 2018 and beyond.