The Communication Cannonball Run
Things to consider when choosing your company’s communication platform(s)
The Race
You have a team of 40 and they need to get from New York City to San Francisco via highways and roads. They must arrive as efficiently and effectively as possible. Of course, and there’s competition trying to beat you to the finish line.
Let’s weigh some options:
You could put everyone on a big yellow school bus. It may not be the fastest, but everyone will arrive together and be able to talk about obstacles and bond while being in the same room for the entire race. Simple.
The other option is that you can let teams within the group take the vehicle of their choice. You now have teams choosing a sports cars, SUVs, off-road vehicles, driver-less cars and a few in motorcycle packs. Each team feels comfortable working effectively in their respective vehicles and can certainly beat the big bus to the finish line.
As communication strategist for the entire team, which do you choose?
Company Communication Strategy
The options in our hypothetical race (although loosely based on the Canonball Run movie from 1981) are similar to the decisions that need to made for your company’s communication channels.
You can go with the Swiss Army Knife approach and keep everyone on a single platform that does everything okay. Or you can let teams, departments, sectors choose the communication channel that is best for them. The advantage for keeping everyone in the same room is that everyone is on the same page. The more the teams work in their own silos the less cohesive the teams, and probably the work, will be. However team agility and speed are critical, and should not be easily sacrificed.
Connect The Teams
In our race analogy, it may be that everyone is on the same CB radio. At least everyone can connect, but it doesn’t mean they are working together. At our firms, the default connector is email. If you’re reading this publication, you probably have heard our case against email. We need to organize our communications platforms so that search and trending content are the connectors, regardless of channel. All users need to be able to find things easily (of course, they need be in the habit of Search First!) and see what’s important in every channel.
Any platform in your ecosystem needs to have APIs that connect to each other:
all platforms must indexed in global search
all platforms must have exportable analytics
all platforms must have single-sign-on
all platforms must be able to surface trending content
The Balance
There is no platform that does everything well. There never will be. Think about it today’s social web. Facebook does status updates, blogging, images, messaging, stories, videos, communities, retail sales, professional backgrounds and so much more. But Twitter, Medium, Instagram (Facebook), Telegram, Snap, YouTube, Reddit, Amazon, LinkedIn and so many others do their respective specialties much better than Facebook.
You can see even Facebook itself struggles with keeping everything together within its own platform when they decoupled and made separate mobile apps for Facebook, Messenger and Groups. The Messenger team needed its own app to compete with other messaging apps. Facebook shut down the Groups app and brought that functionality back into the main Facebook app. However, Messenger has thrived since decoupling.
One model intriguing model is that of Google Now, encouraging employees to “Search First”. One place for all of search along with cards to easily see what is important for you now and what is trending across the firm and industry. The idea is create, contribute and collaborate at your small, but varied choice of platforms while connecting each to the shared homepage for search, news and tasks.
Regardless of tools and platforms you choose, you have to make sure everyone is connected one way or another. What is the encouraged behavior at your firm?
