Martin Luther took advantage of the technology at his disposal when he nailed up 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg, creating what could be considered the first print press release.
Four hundred and eighty-two years later, successful PR professionals are still using the latest technology to spread their messages, be they messages of religious intolerance or toilet bowl cleansers. Leading practitioners have taken their electronic capabilities and extended them beyond posting executive profiles on corporate Web sites and using email to communicate internally.
A recent conference call among top communicators, conducted and organized by the Public Affairs Group (PAG), focused on how corporations are utilizing today's tools to enhance their PR efforts. The following article highlighting several top companies' online efforts contains excerpts from that conference call, printed with exclusive permission of PAG.
Internal Stakeholders
Jerry Stevenson, EDS: Our intranet feeds on live events that we do with our CEO, with emails that he sends out to all employees, and emails that we send out directing people to news located on our site. It is important for these things not to sit alone. They need to be working with print media, with the events that you do, with the emails that go out and how it all comes together. One of the biggest problems we've had (as do many other companies), is with this intranet with a million different sites all controlled by different groups. All of them have different looks (some more professional than others), with spinning logos and violations of what you think your brand and core identity are. How do you take that chaos and bring it together into something meaningful that the average employee can walk into and not be intimidated?
You either have complete control or complete chaos. There is a balance you can have where you really get your hands around what the things are that apply to everyone. You have to put consistency around that, and then slowly loosen your control somewhat down to that work group level. We've been trying to do this, and it has been a big challenge.
Reaching your Audience
Dean Rodenbough, Hallmark: [One] challenge to a manufacturing environment is, how do you make the intranet available to people that don't have workstations readily accessible. We've been rolling out our kiosk in manufacturing plants. A challenge we found is that a lot of people don't have keyboard or typing skills. We've had to adapt it into like an ATM format for people to access information. There is also an issue of time because they can't hang at the workstations long enough if they want certain kinds of information.
I'd like to get some feedback on the whole idea of how organizations are funding expansions and activities of their Internet. We've had a cross-functional steering committee that's been planning a roll-out and continued expansion for the last year. We've gone to a flat fee or assessment for each of the divisions, but we're also looking at a charge back based on disk storage and number of those sensible documents. This way we can get some sort of pay-per-go based on users, so we don't encourage IT or Public Affairs picking up the overall expense for the Internet.
Subscription Models
Doug Swetnam, Cummins: We're starting to look at a subscription model where the corporate communications is the sponsor for the intranet. We're looking for all employees within the company to have a subscription fee, almost like a magazine subscription, only for the intranet services. This is a different model than we've used in the past. In the past where we might have allocated things according to revenue earned by different business units, now there is a flat fee that we're assessing the world. We are incurring the cost of the development, but then passing it back through based on that model.
Tim Schildberger, Infosentials: What sort of response have you had for that?
Swetnam: Mixed. Even though we hear grumblings from here and there, I think it's a small enough subscription fee per person that with most managers it's not a substantial dent in their budget, even though it adds up and is enough money for us to continue our work when we add it all together, but for any particularly manager worrying over their budget, it's not a killer. We have enough internal cross-charging now for different things that it's not out of line for other cross charges we may get for other types of services.
Stevenson: At EDS, we already do something like a subscription although sponsorship is somewhat mixed. Some of it comes from the corporate level, some in a per-user charge. In my gut, this is something you end up spending more money trying to track all of the charges to all of the people. If a company truly believes in what an intranet is capable of and what it should do, it should be sponsored at one level.
Sharon McIntosh, Sears: Our biggest challenge (like Hallmark) is reaching our employee base. Right now we are starting to roll out into our stores. We have 400+ people per store with one or two computers at each store. This would be chaos, so we're looking at a few markets to test that.
Tim Pagel, FPL: In any kind of a business where there is an extensive field operation or manufacturing operation and there is no provision for PCs (either in common areas or at the home through something like a VPN), you need the other more traditional forms of employee communications (media and newsletters). We have a weekly publication called FYI Facts that is distributed to more employees in total than the intranet. Until we find a way for more employees to have access or who are more Web-savvy, the more traditional forms of communications may not always rule the day, but will still be significant contributors. In fact, in some sense, they will probably be more important than the Web.
The Video Question
Tim Nicholson, AEP: If we could talk about having video on the intranet. I get the feeling that everybody is wrestling with it, but we've had some success with it. We've been "streaming" for a couple years now. We are in the midst of a merger with another company in Texas who hasn't been doing it because of a network situations. What are comments from others that have robots, videos on intranet situations or anybody that has had any challenges in that area?
Bill Longstreth, TECO Energy: We use Real Media, but are now looking at migrating possibly to Quick Time streaming media. In early tests we're seeing that the performance seems to be superior and also meets some of our other needs (i.e., handling bandwidth).
Schildberger: What's the quality like? We work in internal communications providing video and audio in particular to Web sites. One thing I've seen is the poor video quality that tends to distract people because of the bad quality. How have you overcome that?
Longstreth: On the intranet, and that's where we're posting a lot of these videos, we don't really have a big quality problem. On the Real Media, we've held everything down to about a 1/60 by 1/20. We have the software to tweak it and we spend time making sure we have the right quality and the right mix of audio to video. If we try to do anything larger than 1/60 by 1/20, then there are trade-offs.