Blogs vs. conventional communication

It's quite easy for your blog to cause trouble, and you may not even know it' happening.

Regional CIO blogged that he met the new Group CIO yesterday - and, he commented, many people in IT didn't even know we had a Group CIO. Is this a problem with the way we communicate appointments, he asked.

Group CIO's boss (v. senior director) gets to hear about this, assumes it's the fault of communications and asks communications director why we didn't publish the announcement.

Communications director immediately assumes her team has let her down and never published the announcement. (If that was the case it would be the first time in seven years that the team has let her down). She finds a different page published on a different date and assumes the deathless prose has been butchered. Accusations fly.

Reassurance. We did publish the announcement, the trouble is that not many people read it, and it was six weeks ago. Furthermore we have a comms plan for the group CIO starting with a profile on Monday.

Hmm. Strange absence of grovelling apology from the comms director.

Neither the blogger (Regional CIO), bloggee (Group CIO) or v. senior director know about any of this. Should we tell them? Don't know. Should they have communicated the appointment better themselves? Well, yes. Can a communications department cover up for managers failing to communicate to each other? Errr...

Emailing the CIO

Our new CIO responded to my request for help with blogging guidelines. It's great to have a perspective from elsewhere - he's been working in the States for years.

One of his points was that many of the most successful blogs are set up to meet a short-term need, perhaps over a few days or weeks. That's probably something which would only work in a corporate environment where people know about each other. No-one would know about an internet blog which came and went in a week.

The other point is that it has to be as quick to set up an internal blog as it is to create one on Blogger or Wordpress. That's not the case at the moment. Even duplicating an existing blog takes a couple of working days, which is very scary.

It was great to hear back from another blogger, director of customer experience in one of the UK divisions. He said he felt really concerned when he got my email that it meant the end of carefree blogging in the organisation... but in fact he felt my guidelines were good and really helpful. :-)

Now the hard bit will be to stop HR turning them into a set of rules and banning everyone from using Facebook.

Blogging guidelines

I've been asked to put together some blogging guidelines for my current client. It's quite a challenge. Writing them is like writing a good blog entry: succinct, readable, tell you something you didn't already know, link to more information. And you never know your audience.

The fist draft has gone to some of the company's existing internal bloggers for comment. They range from the group CIO (he joined last week) to a lady whose job is to post responses to blogs and messageboards to soothe aggravated customers. Plus my personal favourite blogger, the Europe CIO, and a number of other movers, shakers and mavericks. They are a really good collection of interesting people. I can't wait to see what response I get.

Loose collections of ice, dust, and small rocky particles

Last week I had an interview for a possible contract based in Rickmansworth, Herts. An IT consultancy wanted someone to do the communications for an IT change programme for a major retailer. I did fine on the phone interview, was in London the next day, so agreed to go out to Rickmansworth to meet the senior IT consultant. However, since the identity of the client was top secret, we had to meet in the Caffe Nero in the High Street.

On the way out of the Tube station I passed a large, brown building with a big illuminated sign on it. I arrived about 20 minutes early, spent 10 minutes seeing the sights of Rickmansworth (it takes that long), and repaired to the cafe, which was very draughty, noisy, and full of harassed mothers with young children. The interview was due to be at 5pm.

At 5.15 I phoned the consultant's mobile and left a message on his voicemail. At 5.25 he called me to say he was on his way. Just before 5.30 he arrived, apologised slightly, didn't offer me a coffee, and we went to the back of the cafe to chat. At 5.55 he abruptly said he didn't have anything else to ask me and the interview was over. In all this time he declined to say who the client was or tell me anything useful about them. Nor would he explain what was actually involved in the project or who the stakeholders were.

Strangely I didn't get the job. They said I didn't seem enthusiastic enough. I wonder why?

As a consultant, when you attend a job interview the quid pro quo is finding out quite a bit about the company you're seeing. You put in a fair bit of time on research and they tell you more at the interview. Even if you don't get the job you come away with extra knowledge which is always useful. None of that works if the client is, supposedly, secret.

In this case it seems likely that they had found a friend of a friend to do the job, forgot all about me, and made a token show at an interview. I haven't named the consultancy here, but I was not impressed and nor were my agency. I don't like being treated as insignificant or inept. No-one should be.

Camilla Herrmann - profile

Camilla is the director of Kalessin Consulting.

She is a communications professional with extensive experience in corporate and internal communications for blue-chip companies in the financial and hospitality sectors - and with a special focus on intranets as a communication tool. Her background is in newspaper and magazine journalism and contract magazine publishing.

Camilla is respected for capability in analysing and understanding communications needs, and in originating, planning and delivering successful solutions from print and intranet to face-to-face.

She is also passionate about effective, clear communications and good writing at every level of an organisation.