As you could probably tell by my last several posts, I had a wonderful time at the Ragan Employee Communications, PR, and Social Media Summit at Microsoft. As I’ve done with the last several conferences I’ve been to, I wanted to wrap things up with a summary of the themes and takeaways I had at the conference. Here you go:
SharePoint Can Be More
It was the excellent opening workshop by Dux that made me realize that SharePoint could be so much more than simply a document repository. He showed example after example of how SharePoint could easily implement things like workflows and be used to build dashboards. I’ve come back with a better sense of optimism and I’m in the process of looking for ways to utlize SharePoint to help my team.
Video Helps Tell Your Story
While the presentation by Drew Keller on using video to tell stories was excellent, it was the presentation connecting internally using video by Justin Fong, of Teach For America, that energized me. Not only was he able to use video to increase internal reader/viewership by 5 times, but he laid out the phases of his plan. It was obvious in the video examples he showed, that members of the organization were much more energized with the videos than they were with the newsletter. Having worked in video for the last 7 years, I knew this, but it took these presentation and examples to remind me of the power of video for internal communications.
Every Company is Different
Some great companies presented on internal communications, from SAS and REI, to Best Buy, Expedia, and Microsoft. What I learned is that every company is different. While companies like REI and Best Buy have to worry about a huge portion of their employees who don’t have a company-provided computer, there are other companies like SAS and Microsoft who are able to build robust Intranet Hubs for information. Every company communicated with employees differently, but that’s because they all remembered to put the audience first and let their audiences’ needs be their guide.
Make Executives More Human
It was neat to see how, particularly SAS, Expedia, and REI get their executives out of the office and into the mix with employees. Whether that’s visiting the locations where they work, revealing parts of their lives on a blog, or working side-by-side with them on projects. The presentation by Mark Schumann (@dmarkschumann), which covered leadership communication in a social world and maximizing leadership communication, gave some excellent examples of how you can help make executives more human.
Change Management is Way More than Communications
Hearing about how Skype was brought into Microsoft was enlightening. As they showed in their presentation about change management communication, change takes a lot of communication, but it also takes a whole lot more – like partnerships, leadership communities, and a strategic plan.
There are always New Tools
I consider myself to be fairly tech saavy, and while I was aware of many of the tools Dux used in his presentation about maximizing social media success, there were several I wasn’t aware of. There were some excellent tools for incorporating Twitter into PowerPoint that I’m going to borrow. Both from this presenation and catching up with @BevJack, I’m always excited to learn about new tools, apps, etc. that folks in social media find useful.
