Synaptic Transmissions

• Sender Identity:  Communities immediately know who is sending the communications, and thereby know what position and role the sender plays in the business and how they affect the recipient's work
• Thematic Groups and Effective Monopolies on Content:  By branding communiques, you have instantly set up logical groups for combining individual messages into a single communique.  For example, if you set up a sender brand as IT Sales Operations, you can logically combine CRM updates, expected downtimes, taxonomy changes and new functionality element announcements into a single communique, though the work has been provided by multiple groups across the business and IT organizations.  The brands allow content monopoly, further streamlining the volume of communications to your communities
• Content Guidelines:  By branding, you can control the content presentation.  No more ALL CAPS, music embedded, pink background, yellow blinking text emails! :)
• ConsistencyAcross Vehicles:  No matter what you're using, you know they know it's important
• New Group Awareness:  By co-branding new groups with strong existing groups, awareness and attention benefits can be immediately gained from piggybacking on the existing sender brand
• Old Group Re-definition:  If a brand has been singled out as over-communicating and content effectively ignored, re-branding can help reset the perception bar.  Of course, real change in communication will be needed to maintain the new perception.

So what's the deal with frameworks and why are they important?  Frameworks can often be seen as process with a negative connotation, adding constraints to make things more difficult.  However, semantics and preconcieved notions aside, what they really do is drive the ambiguity, and therefore risk, down to manageable structures.  With communications, the best frameworks go back to the basics:

Like every dilemma in this world, everything lies in balance, and decisions can be made on 2 x 2 grids.  What balances the audience of your communiques?  The senders, of course.  Delineating those with the power to mass communicate is as equally important as identifying your target communities.  And, yes, this balance is difficult to achieve.  When out of balance, you can swing to spam or silence, and either direction is deadly because each precludes effective receipt of your message.  So how do you define the roles and responsibilities of who can|cannot communicate en masse?  With the myriad number of critical processes, tools and businesses within your business, it's no wonder that there are communities of senders and recipients.  From the CRM managers to the Financial P/L groups, marketing programs to distribution managers, everyone, on some level, is critical, and often, each of them needs to say something to the masses at one point or another.  Before trying to tackle the world and place it on your shoulders, first try to identify and constrain the number of mass communicators in your organization.  And be prepared, because everyone is critical and there will be a lot of push back.  Your senders can be identified in the same way as your communities--profiled taxonomies that describe your organization.  Chances are, your world is divided into a logical and relational pattern that can be leveraged to understand your sender communities.  Whether you have distinct communication roles or not, you do have distinct units within your business that have something to say.  Use those distinctions to create communities of senders.  What does this structure do?  It lays the groundwork to define frameworks of communication.  Frameworks provide rules and constraints that work WITH your business.  They drive a rhythm to your communications so that your communities can begin to expect and look for target communications within a defined pattern.  And when that pattern breaks, they know it's important and they'll take the time to read your message.  An effective framework can drive a behavioral change throughout your organization, leading to more effective communications.

A new project was started earlier this month with the running title "A Million Penguins". An experiment in social networking and collaboration, the project is attempting to apply the concept of open source codes to a more...creative...endeavor.  I thought I should add this to my blog because it really does push the limits with what you can do with communities in your enterprise.  Sometimes, effective communications and collaborations does not necessarily mean directional information flow and process.  It can also mean that a shared and accessible workspace can effectively bring together a large number of people to communicate and collaborate towards a defined goal. 

 

In the example above, that goal is the creation of a Wiki novel.  People can add content to the site, and therefore move along the creation of the novel.  Can this type of approach lead to a continuous plot?  Deep character development?  Engaging story?  Well, we'll find out at the end of the project.  But how does this apply to an enterprise?  Content creation does not always require process.  Sure, market content and approval processes need to exist within your enterprise, but what about internal content?  For example, could you drive the creation of new GTMs and business plans through global collaboration on an internal wiki?  What about defining the communications framework for a global field by asking the field to delineate the framework for themselves?

 

The possibilities are endless when you bring social networking principles into the fold of tools you use to communicate.

So before we get any further into communications, let's talk a little about communities.  What exactly is a community and why should you care?  Detailing and defining your organizational communities is probably the first thing you need to do prior to tackling the issues that plague communications in an enterprise organization.  According to Wikipedia, a community is defined as:

 

A community usually refers to a group who interact and share certain things as a group, and can refer to various groups of people...sharing an environment. [In] human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of adhesion. *edited for context

 

What does this mean for you?  It means you need to identify your communities of interest, as each community is a defined audience with which you are communicating.  Now, how you go about identifying and defining your communities can be a difficult issue on its own.  However, there are a large number of tools at your disposal and you may not even realize that they're there.  How you organize and describe your people within the individual divisions and departments that make up your company is one of the most essential tools to define your communities.  In essence, they provide an implementation of standard taxonomies that you can leverage to profile your people.  By profiling people on a standard set of metadata descriptors, you create the ability to segment and define your communities in an effective and business-relevant manner.  One of these metadata descriptors is their email identity.  So now, you've killed two birds with one stone:  You've defined an audience of communication and vehicles to deliver your content.