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digital social media mobile

The business case for #DigitalLiteracy

April 23, 2015April 23, 2015Dana Poole

768x350_digitalliteracy

I think of #DigitalLiteracy from a corporate communicator’s standpoint as the awareness, attitude and ability of people to appropriately use technology and digital tools to widely communicate business strategy, to leverage digital in delivering business goals, to collaborate and work more efficiently than those who possess the same knowledge and skills but are not digital savvy.

How I define digital literacy

For me, digital literacy is a broad term that demonstrates our ability to continually learn, un-learn and re-learn skills and ways of doing things in order to embrace new digital trends and behavior that bring about positive change in our every-day personal life and at work.

In practice it could be anything from communication strategy and planning, website management & analytics skills, writing & marketing blogs, knowing not only social media etiquette but being able to purposefully use it to accomplish your communication goals, using mobile devices and apps to collaborate, contribute and share content (images, video, copy), engaging, managing or interacting with communities online and virtually.

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IABC UK&I Blog, Innovation in Communications, Intranets, Digital & Social Media, Professional Development, Strategy, Planning & Tactics communication futures, digital social media mobile Leave a comment

SMiLE London 2015: social means human. Now what?

March 17, 2015March 21, 2015Casilda Malagon

768x350SMiLE-London

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is the social enterprise. Melanie Wheeler (@tweetwheeler) pointed out at the beginning of this year’s Social Media in the Large Enterprise conference: business has been social for a long time, it just hasn’t been as visible as it is now.

Social necessarily means human, and this resonates with the need of understanding human behaviour when it comes to finding digital solutions for any organization. At SMiLE discussions were tinted by the tension between, on the one hand, building on the past and, on the other, using new technology to help organizations succeed. I felt lucky to join the select group of practitioners along with my IABC colleagues to discuss all things social. If you want to know how the day went, just take a look at #SMiLELondon on Storify .

If you weren’t there and if like me, your day job goes beyond digital communications, you might be interested in three ideas that I think apply to all communications work:

1. Culture still eats strategy and platforms for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everyday.

The case studies presented, from industries as varied as construction, professional services and soft drinks, highlighted that we need to understand the culture of a company to make any communications solutions add value. Culture understood through people’s behaviour. So if you want to influence your company start with people.

As Marie Wallace from IBM demonstrated, when you base analytics on behaviour, the business case for your work becomes easy and you can make changes that matter. Which takes me to the second point:

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IABC UK&I Blog, Intranets, Digital & Social Media, Measurement & Evaluation culture, digital social media mobile, Enterprise Social Networks (ESN), measurement Leave a comment

Design thinking + Gamification = Business Innovation

November 9, 2014February 26, 2015Ezri Carlebach

The now-established IABC Rápido session format (5 min presentations) promotes three important things:

  • storytelling
  • concision – the art and craft of being concise
  • design thinking

Design thinking is about applying problem-solving skills, typically associated with the design process to other areas, particularly in a business environment. Probably the least well-known term in communications circles and despite a relatively short and somewhat checkered existence, is now taking off by virtue of being hitched to another buzz-wagon: gamification.

David Kelley, founder of the innovations company IDEO, began to use the term design thinking in the early 1990s to describe what IDEO did. In 2008, current IDEO CEO Tim Brown made the case for design thinking in a well-received Harvard Business Review blog post, and its influence seems to have been growing since then.

Now it seems to have found a soul-mate in the shape of gamification, the much-touted introduction of game elements into business processes from recruitment and onboarding to sales training and various flavours of employee engagement programmes.

Gamification guru, Mario Herger wrote recently about How Gamification Design Thinking Helps Your Business – without creating an even more hideous neologism like ‘gamidesignifying’ (sorry) and in doing so sets out some simple steps that you might use as a way of framing an issue or challenge you’re facing at work.

After all, the core idea of gamification is simply to provide a different and more engaging take on an existing business process or need.

Herger says “I believe that design thinking has much to offer a business world in which most management ideas and best practices are freely available to be copied and exploited. Leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage; they would do well to incorporate design thinking into all phases of the process”.

Herger’s article which suggest as a process to 1) define the problem, 2) observe the users and 3) iterate on ideas for responses
strikes me as a useful heuristic that can easily be applied in any number of situations. He advises a player-centric approach to constantly remind us that  design must satisfy the play instinct in the target audience, otherwise they just won’t join in.

He acknowledges that in a business context this kind of language might sound trivial but the reality it’s quite the opposite.

Only by focusing seriously on our innate desire for play, and its manifestation as an organized activity in games, can we hope to capture the kind of engagement that will see your HR or sales process become the next Angry Birds.

Whether you then go on to build a multi-level, immersive game experience that drives columnar geo-spatial data warehousing – well, that’s up to you.

Ezri CarlebachEzri Carlebach is a consultant, writer and lecturer with a background in senior communication roles for public, private and nonprofit organizations. He consults on communication and stakeholder engagement and writes for The Guardian, simply-communicate.com, and other publications. He is a visiting lecturer of contemporary issues in public relations practice at the University of Greenwich, and has recently led sessions at communication conferences in Slovenia, Canada, Italy and the U.K.

Carlebach is a director at large for the IABC Europe, Middle East and North Africa region, and is a Fellow of both the Institute of Internal Communication and the Royal Society of Arts.

Twitter: @ezriel
Blog: www.ezricarlebach.com

See Ezri in action during the European Training Foundation, Communication Week initiative.

IABC UK&I Blog, Innovation in Communications, Intranets, Digital & Social Media digital social media mobile Leave a comment

Shel Holtz talks digital..

October 28, 2014January 25, 2015Dana Poole

This is a summary of our recent event – Keys to Digital, Social Media and Content Marketing Success


Shel Holtz, one of world’s most renowned corporate communicators provides an overview of the social, digital and content marketing landscape as it exists today – and what it will most likely look like tomorrow.

His presentation contains these topics:

• Where to invest your resources to generate the greatest benefit
• How to take advantage of the eroding barriers between earned, owned, paid, and social media when developing a content marketing strategy
• The importance of mobile and context in developing 21st-century communication programs
• Why the new mantra must be “every employee engaged”
• Why staffing for specific competencies is a vital activity


Shel’s presentation and others are available on IABC UK’s Slideshare

 


Follow the Twitter discussion via @iabcuk #digisocial

#digisocial Tweets


Watch all our videos- IABC UK YouTube channel


About Shel Holtz

Director of Holtz Communication + Technology, and an Accredited Business Communicator, he has extensive experience across strategic corporate and employee communications, corporate public relations, crisis communications, media relations, financial communications, marketing communications, change communications, and compensation and benefit communications.

He has authored six communication-focused books, including “Tactical Transparency”, Corporate Conversations”, “Blogging for Business” and “Public Relations on the Net”. He is currently co-authoring “Beyond Sharing”, a book about the emerging collaborative economy.

Shel is also a prolific blogger and a pioneer podcaster. He launched “For Immediate Release”, the first communication-themed podcast, nine years ago. He is a founding fellow of the Society for New Communication Research and, among other accolades, a Fellow of the IABC.

More information: http://holtz.com/

 

IABC UK&I Blog, Intranets, Digital & Social Media digital social media mobile Leave a comment

SMiLE London 2014 – Event Review

March 18, 2014February 1, 2015Stephen Welch

I was lucky enough to be able to attend a fascinating SMiLE conference yesterday, fantastically hosted by Marc Wright, Silvia Cambie, Gloria Lombardi and the rest of the team from simiply-communicate. I certainly learned a lot: thank you to the team who did a great job.

Cards on the table: I’m a skeptic when it comes to social media. It’s often touted as a panacea to organizational performance and indeed “shiny new tools” are one of the #11ways that communicators can help their organization underperform, as Michael Ambjorn and I will be discussing at the IABC World Conference in June, in Toronto.

My scepticism is based on two key elements. One: in my view, shiny social media tools are nothing without the right culture. Buying the most expensive shiny new car doesn’t automatically make you a better driver, but you’ll be determined to use it all the time, even when it’s inappropriate. Two: it is surprising how little work seems to have been done on the business impact of investment in social media. It is hard to find concrete, specific, costed (in £) evidence of ROI. Compared to other investments an organization might make, and their WACC, how does investment in social media compare? No one seems to have data. Or if they do, I’ve not seen it.

However, I went with an open mind; prepared to be convinced. Was I?

On point one (culture), almost. I heard lots of great stories of how social media is being a catalyst for culture change in organizations, and how it is fostering new cultures of collaboration and knowledge sharing in ways that would not otherwise be possible. And there were some new examples of the power of social media tools in helping to address business issues, like integration of new acquisitions, customer service, or involving people in remote conferences. So I was really glad to see momentum in this area, and learn from some great examples.

I do think that gamification needs to be handled with care: any reward system need to be sure to align behaviour to company strategy and not just help people’s achievement drives run amok.

On point two (ROI), I’m still looking for more specific measurement and evidence of a financial return. There were some good stories (such as from Pearson and Grundfos), but in conversation with Kevin Ruck during a break we agreed that the measurement of internal communication has a way to go before it catches up with the measurement of external communication. Few seem to be tackling this issue to the standards a sceptical CFO might require. (But perhaps this was covered in the afternoon session when I had to absent myself.)

Overall, though, I’d say that it was well worth hearing from the latest developments in the field, and the interview style of the presentations worked well to bring things to life in a different way from the norm. But I will have to await the next conference to be totally cured of my scepticism.

 

stephen welchStephen Welch helps organizations with culture change, communication and leadership, and explores the connections between behavior and job/organization design.

He is a member of the Market Research Society and the Chartered Institute of Publications, a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and past president of the IABC U.K. chapter.

Follow him on Twitter at @stephenwelch11

IABC UK&I Blog, Intranets, Digital & Social Media culture, digital, digital social media mobile Leave a comment

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