The latest episode of CIPR TV went out live yesterday afternoon, with plenty of interaction from the audience. The programme's guests are Jenni Wheller (@jenniwheller), Internal Communications Manager at SSP UK, and Mike Grafham (@mgrafham), Head of Customer Engagement at Yammer.
I think you'll agree the audience's questions and the guests' responses make for an interesting show. Rather than repeat anything covered in the show, I'll just take a few paragraphs here to make another observation.
You'll know from the Six Influence Flows that I invest considerable energy trying to get clients to view the world without the blinkers of traditional functions and siloed role definitions, particularly as organisational structure and culture are supposed to support the execution of strategy not the other way round.
Case in point ... I've had three conversations specifically about internal comms recently where the same assertion was made by the person I was talking with. The assertion, whilst made in different ways, was consistent – internal comms isn't the same thing as PR.
And yet of course it is.
Their assertion has more to do with their regard for PR, confusing it for media relations pivoting around getting the message out, rather than the two-way excellence model seeking to grow understanding between an organisation and its publics. And of course employees – past, present and future – are publics, just like customers, partners, suppliers and other stakeholder groups.
Whilst this show wasn't the forum to discuss it, it's the facility for social web and related technologies to help bring the respective stakeholder groups together, to help them influence each other more readily and productively, where I think great value lies this decade, and which forms a central part of my company's definition of social business. After all, the 21st Century organisation is not defined by its payroll.
