Subjective communication objective

Successful communication inspires action and is clear to others what needs to happen to meet that objective.

All communication faces daunting odds to reach each person, intention intact. Perception, bias, and noise lay between intent, action, and reaction.

To succeed in the communication obstacle course against intent, you need to make clear how to make it happen.

Company social media strategy reflects organization culture — engagement

A company that does not engage their market lends little confidence they engage their employees. A persona-driven strategy identifies characteristics through insight, data, and feedback to develop pertinent images of an ideal customer’s goals, needs, and objectives.

Social media reveals organization culture through more transparent ways than any HR engagement program.

What people want, may not be what you want to say. That gap is more realistically a chasm.

Community persona for SharePoint intranet design

SharePoint intranet site design that leaves out understanding user need offers little more than propaganda for what you hope sells.

Hope for a community to buy-in is not much of a strategy.

Conversely, community commitment happens when people return to seek value, exchange value, and contribute value with, and for, each other.

Can you build that? Yes, particularly when you start with a community persona strategy to identify end-user motivations and the transparency to contribute to their need.

Company social media strategy reflects organization culture — sales

Social media is a wasted investment if the wrong numbers are valued over the right ratios. Social media is not a sales promo blitzkrieg, social media is an engagement strategy.

Culture is the way things are done. Getting something done in a culture is understanding what the culture values and how to navigate.

A relationship built on a transaction is a relationship built on perceived value; sales or otherwise. A relationship built for a sale is a relationship that starts with the end game and that end game is more transparent to the mark than you realize.

Social media strategy provides proof of involvement and the real tolerance an organization has to listen to a diverse community of voices and harness the contrarians.

3 performance review politics that always trump merit

Politics trumps those who have shown reliable, merit-based performance.

When rewards are given to those with little merit, but through a host of politics such as cronyism, parochialism, and kleptocracy engagement is sabotagued and have little hope to achieve true engagement.

Merit-based performance would focus on the employee’s behavior that exemplifies excellence or the employee’s behavior that needs attention or improvement. When cronyism, kleptocracy, and parochialism gang up meritocracy has no chance.

Company social media strategy reflects organization culture — marketing

Insight into corporate, social media strategy lends insight into governance. Insight into social media management lends insight into employee management.

A company marketing strategy and the people who lead, develop, and execute that marketing strategy, are a proxy for organization culture.

If web 1.0 brought about the concept content is king, the maturity to a web 2.0 and social media environment are achieved through the concept community is king. You can you develop a community unless you are a transparent part of a community.

The pain with change management

A leader’s job is to not create a space that causes so much pain that people must move, but to create a compelling future vision people are drawn to.

If leadership starts their focus on what did not work or what you do not want to happen then effort goes into putting procedures in place that constrain. If leadership focus starts on what worked or what it looks like when it worked and the focus shifts to how it worked to and what is achievable, what is possible.

Appreciative Inquiry, as a principle for design and change management, allows organizations to change the focus. Where we inquire, we move and Appreciative Inquiry changes the change.