In his Crisis Guru Commentaries, Jim Lukaszewski provides real answers to real questions about your most critical communications problems and issues.

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Question:

Dear Crisis Guru:

I attended your teleconference/web seminar on influencing employee attitudes last week and found it very informative.  I have one follow-up question.  What is your experience with the value of corporate podcasting as an approach to getting messages out to employee audiences?

As background on my situation, I support a 5,000 person IT organization through the CIO's communications team.  We use many online channels or vehicles to communicate with our IT employee audience as well as to the wider corporate audience.  We have been experimenting with podcasting as another vehicle to draw employees’ interest and get them to take in the important messages that the organization's leadership needs them to grasp.  So far, these podcasts have been well received.  I'm wondering if you have an opinion about this medium's effectiveness.

Thanks for your consideration,

Manager, Business IT Communications

Answer:

Dear Manager:

Thanks for the kind words.

A lot of organizations are experimenting with these new technologies.  My sense is that the success secret will be to keep what you provide of sufficient quality and value that it's worth the audience's time.  Too often, the new tool becomes the only tool.  It gets swamped with junk and over use.  Avoid marginal or outright useless content.

My suggestion is save to this channel for only the most important and substantive content.  Keep the quality up but avoid the flashy.  Flashy gets resented quickly and distrusted even faster.

Here are my content use test questions:
This approach should preserve the value for a while.

One other crucial rule . . . use the technology intermittently.  Regular use degrades its value and forces you to generate mindless content to meet a schedule.

Good luck.  It sounds like you've started out right.  Now the tough part starts . . . keeping it so relevant and cogent that all 5,000 employees, and their relatives, will be waiting in line to listen and view.

Your mantra:  Say a lot less but make sure it's really worth hearing and learning.

Let me know how it works out.

All the best,

Jim Lukaszewski