You may have received the gist of this post via a blast e-mail from Ragan Communications (did you know that Ragan has the capability of sending marketing e-mails to all of its subscribers?!?!).

If so, I apologize for the repeat . . .but I wanted to make sure the people in this community got the word.

I'm looking for cool communication case studies. On just about any topic you can think of. Here's why:

I'm going to be putting together a brand-new seminar for Ragan in the fall, and it's going to be great, I think. IABC is so excited about the concept, they've already signed on as a co-sponsor. I'm excited.

As anyone who has attended any of my seminars knows, I'm not real big on communication theory. I like best practices. I like case studies. I like profiling companies that have made stuff work.

90 percent of my seminars are rooted in real-life examples from actual companies. (The other ten percent usually consists of me trying to get attendees from the bigger companies to either a) order a drink cart for the afternoon; or b) sponsor several rounds at the bar after the seminar is over).

For this next seminar, I'm looking for the best of the best. I don't have a title for this baby yet, but it's going to be something like: 'Ideas That Work: Communication Tactics From the Front Lines' (hey, I said it was a working title, so don't make fun of it, STEVE NERUDA).

The idea is that we're going to spend two days covering all the stuff communicators have to deal with today. No topic is out of bounds. We'll cover everything from the approval process and getting senior management buy-in, to engagement and how to work with your designer.

I'm already getting in some great ideas: One woman has built a very successful employee ambassador program; another one has a great way to communicate with her company's truck drivers—folks who spend 95 percent of their time on the road, with no computers or office mailbox.

I figure a seminar that features 100 ideas that work will be more than worth the price of admission.

Of course, I have plenty of ideas of my own. But I want more. I want the best of the best. What are you most proud of? What have you done that works? What tactics or strategies have made a difference in your organization?

Let me know . . .either here in this blog, or via e-mail. Of course, anyone whose idea I use will get many free drinks at the seminar, and also get their name up in lights.

In the words of our fearless president, talking from behind the walls of the most secure building on the planet, the White House . . . . bring it on!!

You have to prove yourself before management will trust you.

I'm reading an interesting book right now . . . and it made me think about employee communications. (One of the many, many horrible things about being me is that almost everything makes me think about employee communications).

Specifically, it made me think about the whole 'fluff versus no fluff' debate, which was raging for a while in my previous post.

I don't want to tell you the name of the book or the author . . .yet. But here are the first two lines of the book:

'It has been reported that Tanuki fell from the sky using his scrotum as a parachute. That is not so ridiculous when we take into account the unusual size of Tanuki's scrotum.'

Now, pretend that you are a publisher, or a literary agent. And that is the first line of a 250-page manuscript by a completely unknown author. You read the line, but—while it may have caught your interest (it certainly caught mine)—would you be willing to risk your firm's money and put your reputation on the line for this unknown author who writes such crazy things?

Not sure? Okay, if you were to keep reading, you would learn that Tanuki is a God from The Cloud Fortress—and that he is a fat, horny, badger-like animal that loves to seduce young women. After scrotumchuting to earth, he immediately goes after a farm girl who is standing by a well. Here, the author describes the action:

'At first, the daughter at the well seemed prepared to accept Tanuki's invitation to lie down with him. She was a farm girl, after all, and the mating activities of animals were as familiar to her as the sprouting of rice or the ripening of plums. Likewise, bestiality was not unknown to her, for she had brothers, cousins, and young male neighbors who, from time to time, were prone to so indulge.

'If we seldom if ever hear of girls participating in such sordid practices, it's certainly not because rural girls are any less lustful than their masculine counterparts. Perhaps it's due, rather, to the universal girlish character, which is cleaner, more restrained, sensitive, and finer-grained than that of the hopelessly coarse adolescent male. Or, it may only be a matter of logistics: it's one thing for a hormone-racked boy to mount a ewe, but a maid presenting herself to a ram is so awkward an enterprise as to be nearly unthinkable. It would test the girl's ingenuity and probably confuse the ram.'

Okay, you're the publisher. Or the agent. In the first five pages of this manuscript, you have a crazy badger with a massive scrotum falling out of the sky and young farm girls engaging in bestiality with said badger.

Do you publish? Do you take the chance? With an unknown author?

Of course not! But you know what? The author in question is Tom Robbins, and the book is the New York Times best-seller Villa Incognito. Robbins—like Kurt Vonnegut before him—gets to publish just about any crazy thing he wants to, because he has earned his reputation. He sells books. He has an audience.

There's no way a rookie, unproven, unpublished author gets this manuscript published today.

And what, you're wondering, do oversized scrotums and badger-humping farm maids have to do with employee communications? Well, you're probably not the first one to ask that question.

But here's the link: It all comes down to reputation. Publishers don't take chances on unproven authors. Management doesn't take chances on unproven communicators.

And if you are busy running service anniversaries and hobby stories, you're burying yourself. And when you go to management and tell them you want to write a story explaining the company's finances, say, or a complicated new-product roll-out, they're not going to let you.

BUT . . . if you build the right reputation . . . if you create a body of work that shows what communication can do to help the organization . . . if you prove yourself to management again and again—like Robbins has done with his publisher—then you can have the same kind of carte blanche with your management that Robbins has with his publisher.

Here's the bottom line:

A communicator who publishes a lot of fluff in his publication has as much chance of being taken seriously by management as an unpublished, unknown author has of selling a book about big-balled badgers bumping bellies with buxom farm girls.

P.S. Thank God Robbins does get to publish whatever he wants, because the man is just a terrific writer. Here's how he describes the birth of the child that was the result of Tanuki sleeping with the peasant woman, Miho:

'The baby rode in on a sweet summer wind. Miho squatted, animal style, on a bamboo mat and gave birth with scarcely a pang. Describing it later, she made it sound as if, following an hour or two of pressure in her lower abdomen, a big quivering blob of plum jelly had suddenly shot out of her to slide down her thighs. Slick, wet, and tickling. Like a tadpole winnowing out of a cocktail straw.'

Like a tadpole winnowing out of a cocktail straw . . . boy, I wish I could come up with stuff like that.

Pinch me hard, because I must be dreaming.

I finally understand what the hell 'RSS' is.

For months now, everyone has been talking about RSS technology. It's going to change the Internet. It's going to change newsletters. It's going to render push e-mail newsletters obsolete, in fact. Or so everyone says.

Which is all fine and good, but for the longest time, I just could not understand what RSS is. Yes, I understand that it can stand for Really Simple Syndication. Yes, I understand that it can somehow deliver the news you want right to your desktop.

But every time I tried to use it, it never worked. I would hit the 'RSS Feed' on someone's blog and get a page of gibberish. I tried to download an 'aggregator' or 'reader' or whatever it is you're supposed to need to do this, and couldn't do it.

And every time I read an article about it, I was even more confused.
I must have pestered my good pal Shel Holtz 10 times in the past year, asking him to explain it to me. But because it was always via e-mail, or over the phone, he had to do it without showing me how it works. And because I'm a technological idiot, I never got it.

Then, one glorious day last week, I got it. And why? Because someone was able to show it to me.

I was doing some work out at McDonalds, and the techie guru out there, Brian Kramer, and I were talking about future trends. 'Do you get this RSS?' I asked him.

Stupid question. Brian is real smart. Within minutes, he had given me a simple tutorial that made everything perfectly clear.

And if you're still confused by the concept, there's a real simple way to figure it out.

Go to www.yahoo.com. Sign up for MyYahoo, which will give you an e-mail address and a home page that you can customize with anything you want.

When you do that, you automatically get an RSS reader, which is built into your MyYahoo page. No downloads, no new software, no nothing.

Then, all you have to do is go around to all the blogs and web sites you read on a regular basis, and if they offer an RSS feed, get the link and paste it into your MyYahoo page. (It's really that simple).

Then, instead of surfing the intranet, you can just go to your MyYahoo page, and everything you want is right there. You can even set your reader to give you just headlines, or a headline and summary. You can set your reader to get updates every day, every hour, every week, or whenever you want.

It's so cool! And MyYahoo has so much content already. Just by clicking on links, you can add RSS feeds from technology publications, travel publications WINE publications . . . they've got hundreds of RSS feeds you can add to your page.

So basically, my MyYahoo page is my own personal newsletter, with headlines and summaries of stories. The first story is by Shel Holtz, the second is about wine, the third is about the Cubs, the fourth is my pal Pete Shinbach's blog, The Bach Door. And so on.

Now, I'm sure there are probably a lot of techies snickering out there right now. 'Hey,' they're e-mailing each other, 'Ding Dong finally figured out RSS . . . about six months behind the rest of the profession.'

Well, I'm not ashamed of myself. At least I kept trying until I got it. Thanks, Brian.

If you have nothing to say, a podcast can't help

I read an interesting comic strip the other day, and it made me think about CEO communication. (The comic strips, if you play close attention, are rife with similarities to CEO communication).

This was a fairly new strip, so I haven't gotten to know the characters yet. They seem to be two small, fuzzy animals. But smart.

In the strip, one is saying to the other (and this is paraphrased, because I used the paper to light a fire the other night):

Fuzzy animal #1: 'So, once I get set up, you can just simply download my podcast and listen to it wherever you want to.'

Fuzzy animal #2: 'What will you be podcasting?'

Fuzzy animal #1: 'It will be like an audio version of my blog.'

'Fuzzy animal #2: 'Why would I want to listen to that?'

'Fuzzy animal #1: (Pause) . . . 'I don't know. I guess it would be better than just reading my blog.'

This is the problem I have with all this new technology, from an internal communications perspective.

Now we have blogs, and many people in the industry are whooping up the idea of a CEO having his own blog! And we can link that blog to an RSS feed, so employees can have constant updates from the CEO blog right at their desktop! And the CEO could do audio versions of the blog, or other audio messages, via Podcasts, so employees can listen to them anywhere, anytime.

Imagine! You're working out and instead of listening to the Counting Crows, you can get a Synergy Update from the CEO!

But here's my problem with all this stuff. We have never had a shortage of communication vehicles in the internal communications profession, have we? We've had print, and voice mail, and video, and face-to-face venues, and intranets and e-mail.

If a CEO wants to communicate with his employees, the mechanisms have always been there. Technology has certainly speeded things up . . . but the problem has never been a lack of vehicles.

The problem has been a lack of content. CEOs don't want to say anything! They are scared to communicate. And when the rare CEO comes along who does have something real to say, his legal advisors and HR people strangle him into submission.

I read thousands of CEO columns every year. For every 1,000 columns, there are two or three good ones. The rest are patronizing, insulting, and probably do more harm than good in the workforce.

So now we're going to give these clowns more tools? You think what sucks in print is going to read better on a blog? You think what sucks in a blog is going to suddenly come alive for people in a podcast?

In our rush to embrace the new technology, are we forgetting that good communication is still about the content, not the vehicle?

This is a question that needs to be asked: By giving our executives more channels to communicate without first fixing that communication, aren't we doing more harm than good?

I'm heading off to New York today, for the big Ragan summit on Employee Engagement.

I'm really looking forward to it . . . because I want to see how many companies are really doing engagement well—meaning, getting the entire organization involved in it, from line supervisors to senior vice presidents; from HR to organizational development—and how many people are just sort of paying lip service to it.

I have a feeling that there's a lot of misconceptions surrounding engagement, and that a lot of organizations want to reap the benefit of an 'engaged' workforce—e.g., low turnover, higher productivity, better safety numbers, employees acting as ambassadors for the company, etc.—without doing the work.

And by the work, I mean two things:

1. The research. The only way engagement works is if you measure the levels of engagement and actively work to drive your numbers up.

2. Getting managers involved. So much of the whether or not employees feel engaged has to do with line supervisors, middle managers, and other people who have direct reports. Companies that do engagement well make those people responsible for communication. And that takes a lot of work, because you can't expect people to be responsible for communication unless you're willing to train them and help them do it, because it's not their area of expertise.

I just had a funny experience regarding engagement. I was meeting with this wonderful client last week. Great company culture, lots of people who truly cared about the organization, and a real interest in communication.

In fact, when they put the word out that a communications consultant (me) was coming in to talk about employee communication, 150 people signed up to listen. For an entire morning! Managers, non-managers, blue-collar workers, executives . . . they all signed up and stayed the whole time. And this was a completely voluntary meeting!

So it was a great day . . . and towards the end, about 30 of us—a good mix of communicators and non-communicators—were sitting around chewing the fat. It turns out that this organization had recently started using Gallup's Q12 engagement questions to survey employees.

If you're not familiar with them, Gallup has come up with 12 questions you can ask your workforce to see if they are 'engaged.' Questions like, 'Do you have a best friend at work?' and 'Do you know what is expected of you at work?'

People have to answer each question on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest or best score. In theory, then, those managers who get lower scores are expected to bring those numbers up—thereby guaranteeing that anyone who has direct reports is actively communicating with their employees. In theory.

Anyway, we were talking about the recent survey, and the director of communications asked the group:

'What did everyone think about the survey? What was the buzz.'

And this one woman—an administrative assistant—stood up and said:

'Just circle five to survive, baby! Mark five to survive. That's what I was told.'

Five to survive!! I love it! I asked her about it afterwards, and she said she was told that unless she wanted a lot of extra meetings and other extra work, she was better off just putting '5' down for everything, and then her department would be left alone.

Five to Survive. I wonder if the Gallup folks have ever heard that before.

Anyway, I'll be filing reports from the front lines over the next couple of days. Should be interesting.

I'm going to post quite a few observations from the Engagement Conference in New York last week, as promised. But first I have to tell you a funny story.

I'm doing some work right now with a very big company. Very big. So big that they have about 220 communicators in the organization, spread out in different divisions, all over the world.

Well, they used to have even more communicators. Upwards of 300. And they were having an all-communications conference, bringing everybody under one roof for a day.

And they were thrilled when the CEO of the company agreed to address the group to kick off the conference.

So this guy gets up there, looks out over the sea of faces . . . and says:

'Boy . . . there sure are a lot of you.'

And within a couple of months, there weren't so many communicators anymore.

Now, the communicators I talked to wouldn't say that the two events are related . . . but it's hard to imagine they weren't, no?

Is too much information a bad thing?

Oh, don't you worry. Those blog items on the engagement conference are a comin' . . . but this bronchitis I got that won't go away is slowing me down terribly. And I got arrested last week, and that pushed everything back a bit more.

And the whole getting arrested thing made me think about, of course, employee communication. I actually had a communications epiphany, and I'm curious to get other opinions on this.

Here's the background:

In Illinois, they have an emissions testing program, where you're supposed to take your car in for an emissions test. Of course, I never did that. I mean, why would I? My car is fairly new, and the muffler isn't even dragging on the ground yet (I say yet because I've owned at last count 26 cars in my life, and with every single one of them, the muffler ended up dragging on the ground; in one of them, a Chevy Nova, the gas tank also leaked. So the muffler would drag on the ground and shoot sparks up toward the leaky gas tank. Oh, the chances you take when you're in your mid 20s!).

So I blew off the stupid emissions testing. But here's what I didn't know. Illinois has a 'Double Secret Probation Program,' like the one Dean Wermer had in Animal House. If you don't get tested, they secretly suspend your driver's license.

I mean, I guess it's not secret, since they send you a letter. But if you're like me and you never open anything that has 'emissions' on the envelope, then it might as well be secret.

So my license expired on March 20th of this year. But I didn't know it.

I didn't know it until last week, when I was driving from Iowa to Chicago, after doing some work with John Deere, and I was still three hours outside of Chicago, and got pulled over for speeding.

And my license was suspended. So my car was impounded and I was arrested. In Morrison, Illinois. I felt like an insult to the name 'Morrison.' As in Jim, you know? If I was going to get arrested in Morrison, it should have been for public urination, or for taking acid and running naked down Main Street.

I won't bore you with the long, tedious details of my time in the pokey, or how I finally got back to Chicago a day later, still sick as a dog. But I will bore you with my communication epiphany.

You see, I have always been a proponent of communicating information to employees. Bad news, good news, any news at all. The more the better, I always say. Never hold back any news, no matter how bad it is! Never! That's what I say!!

But this whole thing made me think. See, my license was suspended since March 20, but I didn't know it. That was more than two months of ignorant bliss. I was driving back and forth to my son's house, 45 minutes away, every other day. I was driving to his t-ball games, driving to the butcher shop, driving to take him to school, or pick him up. Just driving, driving, driving.

And if I was pulled over once during that time, I would have been arrested in front of my son . . . something I could probably never recover from.

But I didn't know that!! So I was as happy as a lark, whatever the hell a lark is . . . driving along, radio blaring, singing songs with my son!! Happy Days!!!

Then I got arrested. And here's the deal with that. Even after you take the emissions test, which I did immediately, your license is still suspended. I took the test on Friday, and they said I would get the official letter in two to three business days. And that I shouldn't drive until I got the letter.

But that didn't work for me. I had my son for the weekend. Which meant driving to Naperville, the suburb where he lives with his mom. And, more importantly, it meant driving with him from Naperville back to Chicago.

There was no way out. I had to drive. I had all my paperwork ready, showing I took the emissions test and passed . . . but I've never been more scared in my life. I took side streets whenever possible. I wouldn't pull out into an intersection until I saw another car coming . . .so I could be sure that car would be behind me, and not a police car.

When I finally made it back home, I was spitting blood. It was awful. It certainly didn't help the bronchitis.

And why was I so scared and miserable? Because I had too much information! Before the arrest, I was just as vulnerable, but I was also ignorant! And I was productive and happy. After I acquired the information that I was at risk, I was a mess!!

Couldn't you say the same thing about withholding information from employees? If there are some really bad things happening, will sharing that information with them distract them? Will it make them miserable? Will it make them preoccupied?

If they don't know, are they maybe better off?

I know that's the position some senior leaders take . . . but I've never agreed with it before. Now, I'm not so sure.