If there’s one significant voice in the PR profession that attracts attention and influences opinion within the industry and outside of it on a global scale, that voice is Steve Rubel: PR practitioner at Edelman Digital, blogging pioneer, social media early adopter and evangelist, geek, re-inventor and lifestreamer.

In this FIR Interview, co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz talk with Steve on a wide range of topics that stimulate his insight and commentary, including lifestreaming – what is it and why Steve’s doing it – the Posterous platform, the Micro Persuasion and Steve Rubel brands, organizations and public relations practice, his experiments with the iPhone as a unique platform, and much more.

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About our Conversation Partner

Steve Rubel, SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, is responsible for keeping Edelman and its clients in the vanguard. He studies global technology, media and online trends and shapes them into actionable insights and marketing communications strategies.

In his role, Rubel has served as senior strategic advisor to Edelman clients such as Dannon, HP, PepsiCo, Zagat, Unilever, Microsoft and many others.

Rubel supports the account planning processes, intellectual property development and the firm’s innovation and business development efforts. He is a member of the Edelman Digital senior leadership committee.

His writings on emerging technology has been called must-read by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNET, PC Magazine and Forrester Research. In addition, he is actively followed by more than 28,000 on Twitter, writes a bi-weekly column for Advertising Age and is often sought by the press and as a keynote speaker.

Rubel has been named to several prestigious lists, including: PR Week’s 40 Under 40, The Forbes.com Web Celeb 25, PC Magazine’s 100 Favorite Blogs, Media Magazine’s Media 100, the AlwaysOn/Technorati Open Media 100 and the CNET News.com Blog 100.

Prior to joining Edelman in 2006, Rubel worked for 15 years in a variety of marketing communications positions in corporate, non-profit and small/mid-sized PR firms. Most recently, he spent five years at CooperKatz & Company where he pioneered the use of blogs as a marketing vehicle for clients such as the Association of National Advertisers, simplehuman, and Vespa.

Related FIR Interview podcasts:

• FIR Interview: Steve Rubel, Edelman – December 22, 2006
• An Open Conversation with Steve Rubel, Micro Persuasion – March 21, 2005.

Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future interviews, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

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This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

Podsafe music - On A Podcast Instrumental Mix (MP3, 5Mb) by Cruisebox.

Content summary: Welcome to the 500th episode; upcoming FIR Interview with Steve Rubel; Edelman launches TweetLevel while Waggener Edstrom prepares to launch TwendZ Pro; Dan York reports from Orlando, Florida; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop. What will FIR be reporting on and talking about in the next 500 shows? We consider and comment on insights and predictions from FIR listeners Ricardo in Costa Rica, Mathew Lowry, Bob Crawshaw, Keith Childs, Bernie Goldbach, Sallie Goetsch, Norbert Mayer-Wittman and Tony Molloy, and thank listeners whose comments online we found via the #FIR500 hashtag; listener comments discussion (the regular one); music from Aloud; and more.

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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for October 15, 2009: An 81-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #500 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

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So, until Monday November 16…

Curious about why I’d want to favorite a DM, I replied to Dan about what he had in mind. His answer: “Where can you favorite a DM? I don’t see the option either in the Twitter web interface or in Tweetdeck.” When I let him know that the tip had appeared in his DM to me, he replied, “Wow…wacky…I have know idea how or *why* you would favorite a DM.” In other words, the tip hadn’t come from Dan. Somewhere, somebody inserted it.

I did a bit of investigating and found that CC Chapman is also curious about these mysterious tips:

I don’t know that I’d call it spam, exactly, since there’s no link and it’s not promoting anything. But it certainly creates confusion by leading you to think that the tip was written by the person sending you the message. You also have to wonder whether whoever is creating these tips can start using them for more spam-like purposes.

Whoever’s doing this needs to stop. Adding text to somebody else’s private message is a very, very bad idea.

But like any tool, Technorati’s usefulness vanishes if it’s broken. And Technorati has been broken in a big way for some time. What’s more, they don’t seem to be very interested in fixing it.

For years, this blog has included two Technorati links. One is a widget that displays the blog’s Technorati authority; the other is a link to a Technorati page that lists blogs that have linked to mine. A while back, Technorati relaunched its site with a new design. Suddenly, the long list of blogs linking to mine disappeared; the page now shows zero blogs linking to this one. (Google Blogsearch shows more than 4,000.)

What’s more, the authority on my widget shows 132, but a visit to my blog’s Technorati page reveals an authority of 525.

My rank is showing up as 3,930—not bad if it’s accurate, but given the other issues, to say I’m skeptical is putting a positive spin on the situation.

And that’s the problem. It’s not about my ego and needing to know that people are blogging about my posts (I get that information from Google’s Blogsearch). It’s about trusting Technorati when looking up information about other bloggers. I have no confidence in Technorati, and therefore can no longer use it in my work. I trust the Oakland Raiders to score multiple passing touchdowns in a single game more than I trust Technorati to give me usable results for any blog I’m researching.

A couple weeks ago, when this situation really started to bug me, I did some searching and found that Technorati has a Get Satisfaction page addressing the problem. The explanation from Technorati deals with a long-standing problem with producing good results and the solution, which involves “work(ing) from a clean data set.” The post continues:

Sites that we have added to the clean index are being crawled, having detailed authority calculated, display recent posts (one at the moment) on our site, and contribute to other sites authority. We are continuously adding more and more sites to this index, and are working on ways to do so faster, but as you can imagine, the volume of sites to qualify is enormous.

An impressive number of comments follow the post, none of them happy. A typical comment reads something like, “My blog has lost all of its 2 years authority, plus it’s not showing recent posts and its screenshot is very old. Please help.”

Technorati isn’t responding to any of the comments (as they did occasionally at the outset) and reports of the problems being fixed are more rare than sightings of wild condors in downtown Manhattan, leading to comments like this one: “I’d suggest that either Technorati or Get Satisfaction are ignoring this thread as there don’t seem to be any recent responses to points raised by bloggers.”

I understand that processes can take time, but for a professional service, the response from Technorati is abysmal. The problem is knowing where else to go for comparable metrics on blogger influence.

It goes without saying: Technorati FAIL.

Of course, it’s common to talk about return on investment more casually. You invest time, money, and resources in an effort and want to know what you got out of it. It’s easy to refer to the results of your effort as ROI. And I understand that, outside of the C-Suite, ROI has assumed a variety of different meanings, all of which come down to the perceived value of an expense or investment.

I’m a huge believer in measurement as a foundation for any kind of communication effort, whether it’s PR, marketing, whatever. Budget-conscious executives are increasingly less likely to fund communications if they can’t see how the effort is helping the business achieve its goals, so it’s vital to be able to demonstrate the results our efforts have produced. It’s also critical so we can figure out what adjustments we need to make in order to improve the results.

While I do recognize that, in some cases, it’s possible to tease the actual ROI from a communication investment, most of the time it’s a guessing game to determine just how much money was generated in sales from the social media dimension of a company’s communications efforts. Ultimately, of course, any communication should be designed to support business goals, which at some point translates into money in the bank. But it’s usually impossible to determine exactly how much money, to the penny, fell to the company’s bottom line as a result of social efforts to bolster the firm’s reputation or tout a new product.

Thus, every time we go to executive management and claim we’ve achieved ROI using calculations that are out of synch with their understanding of what ROI is, we undermine our own credibility and reinforce the perception that communications people just don’t understand business.

The thing is, I don’t understand why we’re so obsessed with needing to prove ROI. We don’t. What we need to prove is that we have set objectives for our efforts that support business goals and that those efforts produced measurable results. That’s the kind of reporting that earns management respect and support for investment in communication.

It’s also the approach IABC—the International Association of Business Communicators—has been taking for at least as long as I’ve been a member (since 1977). To assess excellence in communication, IABC wants to know what objectives you set and how you can prove you achieved them. Nowhere does the label “ROI” appear in these criteria. Nowhere does it need to.

Consider, for example, the ongoing participation of several Dell staffers—Richard Binhammer and Lionel Menchaca, for instance—on Twitter. Their availability, their insights, their passion certainly have an impact on perceptions of Dell and the company’s reputation. These undoubtedly factor into decisions to buy. But is there a way Dell’s communications team can express the value of these contributions in precise dollars and cents? Clearly not.

On the other hand, Dell does an amazing job of assessing the shift in the sentiment of online discussion from negative into neutral and positive. The correlation between sales and negative sentiment has been long accepted by the most senior executives in almost every organization. Hence, proving that the communication effort has shifted sentiment is accepted as a valuable effort that supports business goals that lead to sales.

What about cost-avoidance, which I’ve always seen as a useful communication measure? Building strong relationships can prevent tthe need to spend money to address strikes, boycotts, costly legislation or regulation, and the like. Again, occupants of the C-Suite recognize this as valuable, but there’s no way to assign it a formal ROI calculation: Money we didn’t spend doesn’t show up anywhere on a P&L.

So I’m not suggesting that we don’t measure the impact of our social media efforts, nor am I suggesting that we can’t prove that there’s value produced for the resources invested. But for the sake of our own credibility, unless we can come up with the numbers that reflect the way management perceives it, we need to stop trying to claim that it’s ROI.

Content summary: Introducing FIR Phone Quicks on ipadio; FIR Interview with Steve Rubel coming; just ask @FIR if you want to be included in the FIR Twitter List; the next show is FIR number 500: add the hashtag #FIR500 if you comment publicly; Michael Netzley reports from Singapore on the Frost & Sullivan ‘Meetings Around the World II’ study, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: Why social media is vital to corporate social responsibility, Joie de Vivre CEO experience prompts the question: how authentic should the CEO be on Facebook?, why you should apply your common sense about permissions when using content created by others; listener comments discussion; music from Jemimah Puddleduck; and more.

Get FIR:

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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for November 9, 2009: A 71-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #499 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

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So, until Thursday November 12…

Disclaimer: The bold-face emphasis that appears throughout this commentary is mine, not Rabbi Yoffie’s.

The heart of synagogue community is face-to-face interaction. We go to temple—especially now -– to touch, taste, and feel community. We go there for solace, humor, and support among a reassuring crowd of friends and fellow Jews.

That being so, what about the Internet? Will it undermine the synagogue? Some fear yes -— that it will lure Jews away from the old ways of connecting that require us to be in the same physical place. They fear that it will become a substitute for in-the-flesh contact, and that if people start getting their needs met in the virtual world, they will have no need for the real world.

But this is not my view. True, you can’t have a minyan or pay a shiva call online; online experience is not the same as being there. Still, it can be a powerful adjunct. And studies show that heavy Internet use actually encourages users to meet more with other people.

Remember: from the time of Ezra, who rewrote the Bible in a new script, we Jews have always adapted to our environment and taken advantage of the latest technologies. To encode our conversations and sacred texts, we moved with ease from stone tablets to parchment to paper, and we will move with equal ease to the electronic word.

In fact, we should see the Web as one of the most wondrous developments of all time.

In the first place, our members do not have the time they once had. We are working more and sleeping less, and we can’t get to the synagogue as much as we once did. Carving out an hour or two for a class or committee meeting is harder than ever. In this world, we need the benefits that online community brings. In any case, let’s not kid ourselves; our members are spending more and more of their time online, and we need to be there with them.

In the second place, the web does what Judaism has always aspired to do: it opens up the vast treasury of Jewish knowledge to everyone. Judaism is not a religion of elites; we are all expected to learn and to know. The web provides access to Jewish learning on a scale that was unthinkable a decade ago.

And in the third place, the web -– potentially at least -– empowers our members and democratizes our synagogues. The synagogue is the grassroots address of the Jewish world, and the web gives us an instrument to involve and include Jews as never before. This is enormously exciting, and more than a little scary.

Are our synagogues doing great things in this area? Absolutely. Are we making the most of this potential? Not even close. Almost all our synagogues have email lists and websites; but these are usually a way to present information rather than a means to engage their members. Even those congregations that have a blog rarely use it to generate conversation and foster connection.

But I believe that we are missing a critical opportunity. The Internet and cyberspace are changing all the rules of Jewish interaction, and we need to be at the forefront of these changes. We need to create an online, Oral Torah of ongoing Jewish discourse, and invite in the opinions of our members. We need to ask our members to share their personal stories and Jewish memories -– which they love to do when given the chance. We need to encourage hotly debated, multi-voiced, civil discussions on synagogue and local issues, and on Israel and national issues.

The idea is not just to serve our members but to engage them. The idea is not only to inform but also to inspire and create community. The idea is to see the Web not as a bulletin board for announcements but as an act of communal collaboration.

Please note: None of this makes temple leaders less important. Information is not knowledge. Our members will still want their rabbis and cantors, their educators and administrators to listen and to lead.

Nonetheless, we need to be aware of what is happening in our world. We have talked endlessly about how to attract young adults into our congregations. No one is certain how to do it. But if we are ever to succeed with these young Jews, we need to know who they are, where they are, and what they want. Having grown up in the digital world, theirs is a culture of interaction and enablement. They want to inquire, discuss, and argue. They are natural collaborators and community-builders. And they will not be attracted by authoritarian Judaism; they want a synagogue that is more bottom-up than top-down.

That being so, I believe with all my heart that the Judaism best able to reach them is Reform Judaism, and the synagogue best able to meet their needs is the Reform synagogue. We must become the address for technological experimentation -– for web streaming, “virtual board meetings,” and a whole range of creative approaches that the innovators in our midst are already working on. To help our congregations begin this process, the Union has collected some of the best ideas for your review and consideration.

But there is one particular idea that I hope every synagogue will think about immediately, and that is a congregational blog -– not just an electronic temple bulletin, but a truly interactive, online forum. We need blogs because the era of one-way, passive information consumption is over. Our members, young and old, expect to talk back and have a conversation; they think in terms of networks rather than hierarchies. And creating a blog is easy and free, and the technology is so simple that even I can understand it. The Union has produced a guide with sample posts, technical advice, and ideas on how to draw people in. The key is to assemble a team of temple members who will agree not only to write for the blog but to read other posts and to comment. At the beginning, participants may be few, but if we address the real issues in people’s lives, the numbers will grow.

If this is to work, it cannot be the job of the rabbi or the administrator. They may choose to join in, but they have enough to do. Only if lay leaders take this on will a community come into being. As I said, if we ask our members to share their Jewish journeys, most will be flattered and eager to respond. Let’s exchange Jewish memories. Let’s talk about why we come to services or why we don’t. Let’s discuss the big issues of the Jewish world. And Presidents and board members can test ideas and ask for feedback, on anything from dues and membership to personal theology.

It is a rare business nowadays that doesn’t have an online forum for customers to share insights, make observations, and post questions. Given the importance of our sacred work, shouldn’t we be doing the same?

A word about the risks. A blog means you don’t control everything. You must welcome honest and open conversation and give people the freedom to disagree, criticize, and complain. Once, as we see from the Talmud, Jews could be counted on to do this with civility. But today, blogging can be a shoot-from-the-hip medium. And if our blogs are taken over by the kvetchers and the whiners, by the grievance collectors and the supersensitive souls, we are lost. I suggest, therefore, a simple solution: every temple needs a volunteer moderator who will review comments before they are posted. The Union will offer online training to prepare the volunteers for their work. And I recommend three rules to govern what will be posted and what will not: you need to sign your name; your comments will only be posted if they could be read from the bima on Erev Shabbat; and no one blogger will be permitted to dominate the conversation.

Our NFTYites do not agree with me here. They favor a wide open approach and feel that those who are petulant or nasty can quickly be brought around. But I believe that if online conversation is to serve our sacred cause, tact and reflective judgment are essential.

So yes, there are risks, but they are manageable; we will lose some control, but we will gain the ability to hear and to learn, and to reach out in new directions. The greater risk by far is that we will do nothing, and the digital generation will pass us by.

So let’s take up the challenge of the online age. Let this Movement do what it has always done: welcome diversity, encourage community, and join ancient tradition with cutting-edge culture. Let us create Torah, embrace Torah, and search out the unfolding word of God, wherever it may be found.

And by the way, this sermon will appear next week on the Union’s blog, and I look forward to entering into discussion with you.

• PR Week: CIPR Seeks To Calm Concerns Over Looming Financial Loss. (Referenced: IABC wipes out deficit by Allan Jenkins, Feb 2006.)

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Content summary: Shel’s on his own in Toronto; How the Union for Reform Judaism used Twitter and Facebook to solicit member questions for Tony Blair’s live appearance at the group’s biennial; Google Wave and Twitter List reminders; Dan York’s report; Media Monitoring Minute; News That Fits: Novell introduces Pulse with Google Wave integration, the move from stickiness to spreadability, more on Twitter lists including a how-to guide from Mashable, Second Life takes enterprise software into beta; listener comments; and more.

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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for November 5, 2009: A 66-minute podcast recorded live from Toronto, Pntario, Canada.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #498 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday, November 9…

They both see the recruiting process changing, for example, to one of inviting people already connected to the company through online and offline social networks to come work for them. The IT department becomes the ET department—Technology Enablement. P2P companies don’t outsource customer service. Collaboration is supported by the use of the best tools available. And, according to Maltoni, “Facilitating conversations inside and outside the connected company means designing business through interactions.”

You’ll recognize more and more of these traits as existing companies evolve into networked companies and startups embrace the P2P model. But succeeding under the P2P model won’t happen just because it seems right. It’ll take work. Companies have to implement systems to support the model.

Employee Communications is a critical function that must adapt in order to accommodate its role in a networked company. Inspired by Valeria and Olivier,  I’d like to offer a list of characteristics of the employee communications function in the networked/P2P company.

Ease employee access to social networks. Both Olivier and Valeria have noted that connected companies won’t block access to social networks. Leaving access unfettered is, indeed, a requirement, but companies will need to go a few steps beyond unshackling employees from the restrictions that keep them from connecting. It will be incumbent on the internal communications function to identify communities within social networks where the company’s products, services, operations, and other dimensions are discussed and even summarize the nature of the conversation taking place in this communities. Helping employees identify where the conversation is can help them begin participating in a more meaningful way. After all, it is within some of these communities where employees will establish and build relationships with people who are likely to become candidates for employment. These networks are also where employees will glean insights from customers that could lead to product or service innovation.

Show employees who’s saying what, right now. Employees already participate in the networks and communities aligned with their interests. Some may be interested in engaging elsewhere, such as communities they’ve never heard of where the company or its brands are being discussed. At the least, companies should provide a directory of these communities. Ideally, however, companies will let employees see, in as close to real time as possible, what the members of those communities are saying about the company. You might consider this a curator role for Employee Communications, one that demonstrates the sentiment of real people with real influence who are having real conversations about your organization. I can easily see a dashboard on the intranet portal with the very latest customer sentiments along with a link to more detailed content from these communities.

Communicate research results. Organizations of all stripes spend a ton of money on consumer research. Few share the results of the research with employees company-wide; it’s data that, for one reason or another, is usually made available only to brand team members. With all employees networking with customers, knowledge of the study results can inform the conversation. Internal communications needs to become a channel for sharing the results of market research throughout the organization.

Increase business literacy. Employees need to know the business. It’s a sad fact that most frontline employees couldn’t answer basic questions about the business beyond the work of their own department. It’s equally sad that this is most often true because nobody bothers to teach them about the business and the resources for them to teach themselves aren’t readily available. Employee Communications needs to focus considerable effort on ensuring employees are savvy about the company for which they work.

Build awareness of business initiatives. In addition to general business literacy, employees need to know about specific initiatives. Employees in a hospital that has started marketing its quality ratings should know about the effort. Employees in a manufacturing organization that has taken steps to be more sustainable should be able to talk intelligently about what that means.

Make sure everyone knows the rules of the road. Too often, organizations assume that because a policy has been published, everyone knows what it is. Employee Communications needs to communicate the policies and guidelines that govern employee activity in online communities on an ongoing basis through multiple channels. No employee should ever be surprised to learn they have violated a policy.

Champion and support internal training. Some of the companies that have the most positive employee engagement are ones in which employees can attend classes to learn about how to engage. At Zappos, employees can take classes on Twitter. The Mayo Clinic offers tweetcamps, where doctors and other staff can learn about social media. Ideally, the Internal Communications team will partner with the Training department to develop learning opportunities—face-to-face and online—that will help employees get business-literate and learn about social networking and how their engagement can produce meaningful results for the company.

Enlist company advocates. Best Buy’s Twelpforce is one of the more forward-thinking initiatives for engaging front-line employees with customers. Blueshirts—the employees who work in the retail stores—volunteered to respond to queries sent via Twitter to the Twelpforce account. Companies can take this concept beyond the initiative level, finding those engaged employees—that is, the employees who want to make discretionary efforts on behalf of the company, train them, and get them into vital communities. (This kind of engagement must be disclosed and transparent, of course. I’m not suggesting anything deceptive, just a means of identifying and activating those employees who want to be part of the organization’s organic networking efforts.)

Work with ET to ensure systems support networking. If IT has transformed into Technology Enablement, they are the ideal partner for Employee Communications to identify and launch the tools employees can best use to network with one another. The technology department can also ensure the intranet supports the modules referenced earlier, such as business literacy training, communication of research results, and real-time updates of who’s saying what about the company in key online communities.

All of this has to happen along with much of the traditional work Employee Communications performs, such as letting employees know that benefits enrollment is coming, supporting an internal change process, and informing employees about decisions that will affect them. In a networked company, there’s no question in my mind that the role of Employee Communications becomes bigger and more important.

What other traits should characterize the Employee Communications function in the networked organization?