Are you struggling to engage your global audiences? Are you trying to break a silo mentality between regional offices? Find your solution by listening. Really hard.

The IABC Global Communication Conference in Hong Kong was an eye-opening experience. Outside of being in an incredibly cool city, it was really refreshing to hear about communications from a different perspective.

Last week communicators from countries all over the world (Canada, China, Singapore, Australia, and  India … just to name a few) experienced the first-ever IABC communications conference in their neck of the woods.  One of my favorite sessions was with Mark Schumann, ABC. During his morning keynote he talked about the new rules of employee engagement -  and I had an “a-ha!” moment.

One of Mark’s main messages was that when it comes to communications it’s all about listening. Now, we’ve all heard this before, right? I’m a measurement person, so I definitely have heard, and have said this myself many times. But this time, there was something different. Mark used a wonderful analogy to put this statement in a global perspective.

“Think about two tin cans and a string,” he said. So I did. I could visualize myself using these to talk to my sister when I was growing up. I thought it was cooler than the set of walkie-talkies we had.

“Now,” said Mark, “Think about what happened as you got farther and farther away from the person who was holding the other end. The farther away you were from that person, the harder you had to listen. The same applies with global communications.”

OF COURSE! That made perfect sense to me. And, it’s so true. I work with a couple of clients right now and engaging the regional offices and working to not be so U.S. centric is an ongoing battle. And, while we have included them in employee surveys — and have done some focus groups here and there — we just aren’t listening hard enough.

Unlike our ability to constantly get feedback from the offices we’re located in, we’re making the mistake of only “scheduling” feedback mechanisms once or twice a year. And, as Mark put it during his keynote, that’s only a snapshot of how their feeling right at that moment.

In order to engage them throughout the year, we need to have conversations with them throughout the year to understand their challenges, their achievements, their fears, their questions and their markets.

So how do we do this? Here’s a couple of  ideas I have that I’d like to toss out here — I welcome you to do the same.

Steve and I are off to London next week (April is proving to be an exciting month) to speak at the Simply-Summit. I’m hoping to get more case studies and best practices from across the pond. In the meantime, what about you? Has anyone used any techniques to bring global offices together? I’d love to hear from you!

AAA uses its regular, online article message board for ‘live chats’ between executives and employees . . . and the employees love it

I’ve known David Kligman for almost six years, and he never ceases to amaze me.

David is the senior publications manager for AAA’s Northern California, Nevada and Utah region, and he was doing “social media” before the term was even coined.

In 2005, David started allowing employees to comment on his daily intranet articles. He called it the “feedback string,” and the comments would go live—with no moderation or censorship. It was a free-flowing, open discussion about business issues, and it was a huge success.

That may not sound like much today . . . but back then, nobody was allowing comments on intranet articles; and if they were, they were moderating them first, and deleting any that carried even a whiff of bad news or other “controversial” stuff.

Well the “feedback string” is still going, stronger than ever, and David recently e-mailed me to tell me that he found another use for it.

“I’m using the comments section to do an inexpensive version of a ‘live chat,’ between employees and leadership,” he told me. “We did our first one in November, and the response was terrific.”
I immediately wanted to know more, and thought you would, too. So here’s a Q&A with David, where he walks us through how it works and what he uses it for.

Crescenzo Communications: What made you think of turning the comments section into a live chat, instead of just setting up a live chat? It’s genius and a hell of a lot more cost effective, I imagine?

David Kligman: Like a lot of companies, we just don’t have a lot of money to spend on new technology. So I figured let’s use what we already have. It’s based on our feedback string, which has allowed our employees to post un-moderated comments on every article since 2005. Our feedback string is also really popular and sometimes people read the comments more than the actual article. The only thing I had our developers do before the first Live Chat was to add a function to our feedback string so that users can sort comments from newest to oldest or oldest to newest. This allows them to follow the chat however they like.

CC: How does it work, exactly?

DK: Essentially, we use our feedback string for a special one-on-one interview with a business leader. We promote it with an article the week before, soliciting employees for their questions. Then I take their questions, add my own, and interview the executive for one hour. The interview appears in the feedback string of that day’s intranet article, and employees can ask their own questions then, too. That’s what makes it like a ‘live’ chat, as opposed to a Q&A article. Employees can either follow along by refreshing their browser to see updated questions and answers, or they can check back later in the day and see the whole transcript. We’ve gotten great responses. We just did our second Live Chat with the head of our automotive services team. The interview lasted 90 minutes and I sent the executive the remaining questions we didn’t get to, as well as additional employee questions that came in during the chat. He’ll answer those, send them back to me and we’ll post them later in the week.

CC: Where did you get the idea?

DK: I saw something similar on CNNSI.com a few years ago—where people asked questions of a sportswriter who had visited and rated every major league ballpark. I liked the idea that you could either follow the chat live by refreshing your browser or go back later and read the full transcript. I’m a big believer in taking ideas from mainstream media and adapting them for use in companies to talk about business issues with employees.

The only difference between what we’re doing and what a Web site like CNNSI does is that we don’t have the technology to limit when folks can jump in on the feedback string. So to keep it from becoming a free-for-all, we reminded employees to not post comments or questions during the actual chat and instead e-mail them to our Editor mailbox. I then took many of those questions and asked them during the interview.

CC: What kind of feedback did you get the first time? Were people into it right away?

DK: Our first Live Chat was in November with the person who oversees the AAA discounts program. I wanted to debut with a topic that our employees know about and are passionate about. And our employees love talking about all the discounts you can get using your AAA card. Plus it seemed to tie in with the upcoming holiday season.

I prepared about 20 questions for a one-hour conversation just in case we didn’t get any employee questions. We got about 15 employee questions e-mailed to us ahead of time, and many of the questions were ones I hadn’t even thought of asking. I gave priority to the employee questions.

The response was really great. We got almost 3,000 hits (we have about 6,000 employees). And a lot of people came up to me afterwards to tell me how much they found it fascinating and that they really enjoyed it because it was different than just a stagnant article.

CC: How did you market it? How did you get the word out?

DK: We marketed the Live Chat several ways. First, we introduced the concept one week before the event with an article on our intranet home page. The article explained the concept, the ground rules and solicited employees for their questions. This is the artwork we used to brand it:

We also have a scrolling banner on the top of our intranet, which we used to count down to the Live Chat a few days prior. On the actual day of the Live Chat, we posted an article that was similar to the preview article, telling folks exactly when to tune in (10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Pacific time…we needed to be very clear with the time because we have employees in three different time zones). We also took a photo of the person we were interviewing so that people could put a face to the person being interviewed. Here’s the photo of Steve Sumner of our AAA discounts team that we used for our first Live Chat:

CC: What was the feedback afterwards? Did you measure it? As I mentioned, the feedback has been really positive. It’s an opportunity for any employee to ask any question of an executive. In our second live chat, we tweaked our follow up a bit. We gathered every question that we couldn’t get to (from employees and my own questions) and had the executive write one-paragraph responses and e-mail them to me. He promised he would answer every question, no matter what the topic. We then posted it the week after the Live Chat. Here’s a partial screen shot of what that looked like after the second Live Chat, in December, with the head of our automotive team:

CC: Did you moderate or censor the questions before posting them? Did any “bad” ones come in that the executive was not comfortable answering?

DK: We absolutely did not censor any questions. On a few occasions, I e-mailed the employee back to get clarification. We sent our questions ahead of time to the executives, but I was very clear to them that they shouldn’t prepare answers or the conversation would sound scripted and not believable. I told them their responses should be off the cuff, just like we were sitting and having a regular conversation over coffee. By the way, during the actual interview we were in the same room working off our own laptops. We could have done it from separate locations but I wanted us to be in the same room to make sure we were on the same page as to when we were posting comments so that they flowed in an orderly, logical way. So I’ll type the question, which shows up as a comment; then he’ll immediately type the answer, which shows up as the next comment. (I could type as he talked through the answer, but then the answer would have my name attached to the comment instead of his.)

CC: So, technically you don’t have to be in the same room?

DK: No, not technically. But we’ve done it that way so far just so that we can talk in between questions or talk through an answer if that’s necessary.

CC: Can’t wait to see what you do next!

DK: Okay, but can you stop calling every day? You’re kind of like a stalker.