Category: communication

Reading Update January 2016

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One of my personal projects for the year is to read (listen to – I’m an Audible.com freak) 24 business books.  Please check out my Reading board on Pinterest for other books I love.

January was a good month for reading.  I cranked out 4 books.  This is all part of my master plan for having an outstanding, amazing, breakthrough year!  Below is a quick summary of each one.

Content Inc. - By Joe Pulizzi

Content Inc is all about how business is changing and how content and the internet is the platform to this new game.  If you have a content vacuum, how can people (more importantly your current and future customers) understand who you are and what you have to offer.  Perfect example is Joe’s site promoting the book.  How many books that you’ve read have their own movie trailer?  Joe’s approach is to build an audience first!  Align your passion, ensure that you have a unique offering, develop your style & tone, build your base and then reap the rewards for all the hard work!  Must read.  It has to be part of your business model.

OverSubscribed - by Daniel Priestley

I swear I didn’t do this on purpose but Oversubscribed was the perfect follow up book to Content Inc.  Daniel Priestly authored one of my all time favorite books – Entrepreneur Revolution. This new book Oversubscribed didn’t disappoint. Oversubscribed tees off on the same principles as Content Inc. Content is critical to building your audience and filling the vacuum of what you and your organization are all about and then the book goes takes that model so much further. Its all about supply and demand.  Its all about building anticipation with your audience and then celebrating your customers!  What can be more powerful that actually celebrating your customers?

Outside In - By Harley Manning & Kerry Bodine

Again I don’t think I could have picked a better book to come next.  I’ve been following Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning on social media for some time.  Outside In is an insane blueprint to what my company Zuggand is doing to help our customers deliver Digital Customer Experiences (DCX).  Again this book is in alignment with the previous two books in that we have passed out of the Age of Information and into the Age of the Customer (and execution).  Being customer centric (or obsessed) is the new differentiator.  The authors take a research based approach (which I love) to systematically designing customer experiences.  I love the examples in the book.  And we aren’t talking about little websites you’ve never heard of.  This book has the Forester brand, research and army behind it and is working with amazing customer-obsessed companies like USAA and Fidelity.  So many takeaways and it lays out a plan for any business to go through this customer experience transformation. It can also be used as a brilliant career development plan for any person that aspires to be a Chief Customer Officer or a Chief Digital Officer.

Crush It! - Gary Vaynerchuck

I read about Gary Vaynerchuk and his Wine Library store years ago.  An amazing story about how Gary help build and transform his family store into an impressive enterprise.  It wasn’t until about a year ago that I first saw him on youtube with his new brand though.  I’ll admit that at first I was a bit turned off.  It’s funny because before I even started writing this article, I saw this post on Instagram from Gary today.

 

GaryVeeInfluence

I love a good F-Bomb like no one else, but when I heard him drop it in the first minute of a video it shocked even me. (Did I mention that I LOVE a good F-BOMB???) Maybe it is his “east” cost style that rubbed my “west” coast style.  But then I saw this video on 6 MINS FOR THE NEXT 60 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE – A RANT.  And now (and I can’t believe I’m going to say this) I am (BIG sigh) part of the Vaner Nation. (f*#* I said it!)

Again, this couldn’t have been a better book for me right now.  Its his oldest book that is on Audible so I decided to start there and catch up.  Gary stays true to his DNA, as he loves to say.  He knows his strengths and he plays to them.  He is a master of his craft.  In his DailyVee video on January 27th The Family Business (you can jump to 6 mins and 54 seconds if you like) he articulates what he does for a living.  “I day trade attention.”  That’s what this book is about.  That is what Gary is all about. That is what each and everyone of us should be about!

 

 

A Pretty, New Intranet Will Fix All Your Communication Issues (Not!)

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Is a solid enterprise communications strategy a pretty new intranet site?  Would our employees feel the love if we sent out a monthly newsletter?  If the CEO tweeted, would everyone completely understand the vision?  These seem like silly questions but I hear people offer them up as solutions all the time. So how do you build a solid communications program?

My last organization had serious communication issues (just like nearly every other org out there).  Our department had over 600 people – not too large but not too small either. We had many different divisions that were very siloed in everything that we did. We used SharePoint as our intranet site to share documents, news and policy info.  We didn’t have a dedicated person assigned to manage the intranet.  And if you asked our employees what they thought of leadership’s ability to communicate they would have laughed!  Let’s face it, communication just wasn’t a priority and our intranet was faded and ugly!

Through some employee feedback it was determined that we needed to redo our intranet.  The employees wanted a site that was much more like a blog or a cool website.  I was the CIO and so the request ended up coming to my group.  I told them that we can definitely build a cool new intranet site but first I needed to see the plan that would keep the site fresh, add content regularly and get feedback from our users to ensure that we were heading in the right direction.  I told them that a new intranet site won’t do those things by itself and before I pull resources to build this site, we needed to have a good plan. (By the way, this response didn’t go over well and I ended up having to put the program together myself.)

How do you build a sustainable and innovative communication program?  How do you consistently communicate relevant, fresh, interesting, educational and concise content? How do you impact your organization, increase alignment and accelerate transformation with better communication?  How do you encourage employees to participate, increase collaboration, expand thought leadership and be more engaged and innovative?

Too good to be true?  That’s a lot to accomplish.  I’m not saying this program was perfect but it was pretty awesome!

To detail this all out, I plan to write multiple articles.  The topics will include: Keys to Success, Program Governance, Measuring Objectives, Content Creation and Executing the Plan.

I’m passionate about strong program management, organizational alignment, communications, content development, technology platforms and accelerating transformation.  This should be a great series of articles!  Please comment and share your great (or bad) experiences with internal communication programs.  Let me know your horror stories and killer solutions.  I will incorporate your ideas and questions in my future articles.

(*note: I’m brand new to this blogging thing and am following the Blogging 101: Zero to Hero approach from WordPress. This is my fourth article, part of Day Nine: Inspire Yourself.)