You must have heard of TinyURL.com, bit.ly, ow.ly, goo.gl, droplr.com and other such ‘web address shortening services’ and you may well be using them without fuss or thought in your emails and tweets.
But do you use them when you’re at work with colleagues or do they cause confusion with non-techy people?
Did you know you can use your fave shortening service with intranet URLs? Oh yes. And here’s why you would want to.
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The Interwebs loves infographics; funny Venn diagrams and pie charts have entire web communities devoted to their production. Internal Communications can make good use of graphics to explain and display numerical data, and I’m not saying you should take a screen shot of a bar graph you made in Excel. No, in 2010, graphics need to be pretty. Sorry, but style does matter, and the substance benefits from good styling.
Create graphics by hand, using Photoshop, Fireworks. Serif or your favourite image creation software. You’ll want to create coloured circles and squares; it’s not too much of a challenge so give it a go.
Before you start though, check out 11 Ways to Visualise Changes Over Time – which shows you what lines, circles and squares can do for you and your communications.
I’ve used some simple graphics, see:
[Wedge]
Antagonistic line managers who hate people, distrust the business and have their own strategy at odds with the company’s have to be the major blocker on communication.
People can’t thrive on ‘broadcast’ comms from above all the time; they want face-to-face communications and time to express themselves and give feedback. People want to be involved with the direction of the company, and full understanding of business change and the whole strategy can only happen when a person is involved – and that means two-way comms. Conversations, as we used to call them.
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I’m planning the launch of our new intranet. I need to engage hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, to get them to see the intranet as a work tool, not as a company news channel. I’m slowly going to make everyone able to publish stuff – and of course our people are not writers or web workers – the intranet isn’t their passion as it is mine.
I say “I” when of course it’s a massive IT project with dozens of stakeholders, but I’m the intranet manager so it falls to me to put voice to many a matter.
Here’s my draft manifesto, to guide everyone who writes, publishes, comments, blogs, uploads or interacts with our new intranet system. Can you help me smooth it out? I haven’t edited this; I’ll come back to it over the days and weeks, but this really is a first draft straight from my brain-fingers into the computer.
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Document control. Don’t send, share or publish files / documents with the word ‘final’ in the file-name or on the document. It is rarely true, and it is always confusing.
Here’s a handy reminder for you to download, email around or print.
Right-click and save the above linked inages.
Wedge
I’ve been writing about comms for years now, and seriously talking about good practices for over a year. Considering Chris Brogan’s prediction that solos will need to consolidate and collaborate in 2010, I’d like to throw out an idea and invitation to you.
If you’re working within an Internal Communications department, would you like to join me and write about comms (writing, intranet, email, presenting, scripts etc.) here at kilobox communiqué?
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I notice that writers look for short-cuts for when they’re crafting their internal communications, especially for our intranet. People see what others have written, and consciously or not, copy the style and tone.
Front page news articles lose their impact if their headlines are all constructed the same way, or if their opening paragraphs / teasers all start with “we are pleased to announce…” – these conventions add nothing to the article and take away a great deal of value, vim and vigour.
This is why I believe it’s so important for the comms editor or the intranet editor to take an active role in editing the articles, and not just act as a passive publisher of web pages.
Fashionable communication conventions to avoid
The ellipsis
A beautiful creature, the ellipsis is not three full stops! Oh no; the ellipsis is an independent punctuation mark and has a couple of appropriate uses, such as when part of a quote is missing, or when a sentence ‘tails off’ like in conversation when one implies something.
But there is a fashion to use an ellipsis as if it is a drum roll: “New System Launched… Log On Now” the headline screams from your intranet home page, as if you care.
Reduce reliance up on the ellipsis; similarly to the exclamation point, it does not add excitement to your dull business stories.
(Anyone using “And the Winners are…” in a headline will have their Internet access cut off with pinking shears.)
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