Why don't organisations really care about communicating with their staff?

I'm continually astounded about how few organisations really care about communicating with their staff.

When communications campaigns are put up for marketing awards it's almost as if internal communications doesn't exist as an objective for anyone.

For most organisations their staff are potentially thousands of people (or in the case of the NHS over a million) who, every day, have the opportunity to market their organisation - not just to customers but to their friends, neighbours and acquaintances.

Within major organisations there's usually a communications hierarchy where the press office is closest to the board, marketing is somewhere in the middle and internal communications is often left to the human resources department.

All the exceptions I've come across either result from an organisation that genuinely believes that staff are the future of it (e.g. the John Lewis partnership) or where the Chief Executive realises the value of it (e.g. Allan Leighton's internal Ask Allan blog at Royal Mail).

Anyway this is a convoluted way of saying that there's a great blog post on this at Hill & Knowlton's Collective Conversation blog here.

The incredible rise of free council newspapers

My local free newspaper from Lambeth council has an audited ABC of 115,000 copies per issue (one copy every two weeks).

The Independent, across the whole of the UK, has an audited ABC of 200,000 copies per issue (daily).

Add together free newspaper circulations across the UK and they must be in the millions.

Tam's pregnancy - part II

What happens if you announce some interesting (to friends & family) news via various online channels?

1. Twitter - nothing at all - reflecting the fact that I only have one follower.

2. Blog - roughly 25 visitors found the news out that way, and a few said congratulations in the comments. This seems to be a combination of my regular visitors plus a few people who noticed it on LibDemBlogs.

3. Facebook - at least 25 people noticed, with lots of wall comments and messages. This included quite a few people at my work - and gradually they've told other people at work. Cumulatively I reckon half my company (ie 50 people) now know indirectly this way.

I'll sweep up by email at some point in a few days - but it's an interesting reminder of quite how un-viral even interesting news can be.