Your PR Architect

Eric Friedman makes a number of good points about employee communications in this blog: 10 Steps to Keeping Employees Engaged and Motivated -- but he skims past an important step: listening to employees, face-to-face. His communications advice: " Communicate well and often.  Training sessions, memos, newsletters, FAQs, and regular meetings can all be used to present your vision to your employees. Make sure to ask questions, and if they are confused, redesign the way the information reaches them." "Trim for ansatte hos NVE" by Henrik Svedahl/Norges vassdrags- og  energidirektorat - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ nve/4174242876/. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share  Alike 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Trim_for_ansatte_hos_NVE.jpg# mediaviewer/ File:Trim_for_ansatte_hos_NVE.jpg This advice feels at once both intelligent and dated, because Eric's cited source is about 10 years old. Memos and newsletter...

My earliest PR successes came from creating newsletters for business-to-business clients, alumni, and employees. These publications -- semi-weekly, monthly, and quarterly -- each helped grow relationships between my clients and their constituents (customers). And none of them exist today. Casualties of the digital age? In some ways. In the 1980s, desktop publishing gave almost everyone the power of the press. And some resulting newsletters were ghastly, much like some of today's blogs. But, as the internet grew, printing and mailing costs increased, and managers and marketers switched to online content: e-newsletters, or some other digital solutions. Those managers overlooked an important factor: their audiences . People who view a newsletter as an emblem of a relationship. They're accustomed to physical connections, and willingly invest their resources and time to support those relationships. After spending their workday staring at an optically challenging computer scree...