Formal press releases and company-wide memos are oh-so-2017. To best reach employees, strategy conversations have gone social and communication teams need to adapt.
By Donna Chan

Complex and sensitive corporate communications used to be exclusively reserved for formal memos or press releases. Now, employees are increasingly choosing to receive (and respond) to strategy communications, major announcements, and team updates via social media.

What is driving the change? Some credit can be given to the blurring lines between external social media, like Facebook and Twitter, and internal social networks, like Yammer or Slack. Diminishing attention spans, the “always on” work culture, and organizational needs for everyone to be quickly and easily informed also play a role.

Together, it all adds up to 2019 and beyond being a banner season for using social media as an organizational communication tool, and it is important to get the message out right. Here are six tips to help.

#1: Keep it Short, Simple and Shareable
When using social media as a corporate communication tool, more messages are better than a single long message. Simple, direct messages are more likely to be opened, read and remembered. Making content shareable – internally or globally – can also help the message spread.

Mayo Clinic has found this in its own social networks. In fact, for key articles, communications team members write a one-sentence summary that can be shared as a quick sum-up and publicity note. In this way, the organization keeps 64,000-plus global employees engaged and interacting with the various private and public corporate messaging platforms.

#2: Mold the Message to the Platform
Each social media network has its own norms … and that is doubly true of internal channels, where GIFs, emoji-speak and team hash tags may dominate conversations. To ensure strategic messages break through the noise, each message should be tailored to the channel/platform being used.

At Mayo Clinic, this has meant updating videos to use kinetic text (moving type) and images in place of stand-and-speak actors, breaking out key sharable lines of the message into tweets, and including out-links to rationales for statements and decisions. For Dig.In, a copywriting agency, it has meant customized Slack icons to provide visual shorthand for major clients and projects. The Titanides, a women’s networking group, opted for a private Facebook group with weekly team meet-ups over Zoom. In all cases, key info is shared, but the form differs dramatically.

#3: Don’t Rely on a Single Channel
Nearly 100 percent of Canadian professionals have a social media profile … but they do not all have one on the same platform. Even internal messaging systems can have varying levels of adoption. For this reason, blending messages between channels rather than relying on a single point of transmission helps to spread the word.

When distributing corporate messages across multiple channels, it is important that each message be a stand-alone announcement. It is okay to reference material in different formats on other channels, but each channel’s conversations should share the same core messages to maintain organizational consistency.

#4: Be Mobile Friendly
Some 55 percent of all emails are opened up on mobile devices first, according to a 2017 study from ReturnPath. They also noted double-digit growth in mobile usage, particularly in the 55- to 64-year-old set. Bigger screens, the move toward tablets over desktop computers at home and at work, and the ease of finding wi-fi everywhere mean mobile is an increasingly influential gatekeeper for communications.

Thus, any message needs to be created with a mobile consumer in mind. Will employees be watching videos on their phones in the bathrooms? Do key info graphics or illustrations display well in small scale? Are acknowledgement forms and read receipts able to be filled in on a single screen? Tailoring corporate communications to the mobile-first user will help increase uptake, sharing and action on corporate messages.

#5: Have a Dummy Account to Test Before Sharing Through a Mass Send/Push
Beyond obvious, right? And yet, each day, thousands of messages go out with typos, missing images, broken links and faulty personalization codes. To bring down the credibility and authority of a corporate voice, it is hard to beat sloppy, careless messaging.

To prevent “apology sends,” costly corrections and embarrassing retractions, test every message with a dummy account accessed by another team member. They will help catch everything from harmless-but-annoying “Dear %%FISTNAME%%” salutations to jumbled numbers, missing files and broken tracking links. It is five to 10 minutes that can save a fortune in reputational and hard-money costs.

#6: Monitor Accounts and Follow Up Promptly
At this point, it should go without saying, but continued corporate failures in this area make it a timeless tip: Any social media channel being used for strategic corporate communication needs to have an active monitor. Sometimes this is an official “social media champion” who responds to questions and posts new content as the designated voice of the company. In other cases, it makes more sense to have a team handling communications. The biggest takeaway is that these channels can no longer be treated as one-way broadcast systems, according to the Society for Human Resource Managers (SHRM).

This is especially true if the head of the organization is a “social CEO” who is using his or her personal account to post updates, send emails or Tweet about the firm. More than 40 percent of North American CEOs play this role in some capacity, but failing to respond to conversations (even if a junior associate ends up ghostwriting the content) is considered a major faux pas and corporate liability, according to the latest data from OkToPost.

As a result, when using social media to communicate organizational strategy, prepare to actually BE SOCIAL about it. For some teams, this constant two-way communication is the biggest shift of all, compared to one-way press releases and memos. However, done right and done consistently, social media can and will continue to be a major asset when communicating organizational strategy to internal teams and external stakeholders.