“Well the night’s busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels…”

- Bruce Springsteen, from ‘Thunder Road’

I have seen the future of employee communications, and it is Amanda Congdon.

The thought came to me in a crazy epiphany last night. I realized that, somewhere out in the blogosphere, a savior, or rather multiple saviors of employee communciations, are being born. These nacent leaders are in their early twenties. They watch Amanda’s daily vlog, Rocketboom. They have always been wired. They are iPodded and WiFi-ed and blogged and podcasted and YouTubed to the hilt. They saw their mother and father’s retirement fund stolen by Enron and they want more out of their working lives than their parents got. They were born into a world where everyone is on TV, and they’re not afraid of being on camera themselves. They are the internal communicators of tomorrow.

When I look at the excitement being generated on the Web today, and imagine how all that energy and innovation will translate into the corporate world, I finally can see what is going to happen. Employee communication is going to be saved by the rise of the celebrity corporate journo-blogger — a new breed of young men and women who will start out with personal blogs that will transform into little company blogs that will end up being read and enjoyed and respected by all their work colleagues. They will graduate from the School of Hard Blogs to become the charismatic hosts of popular and compelling company podcasts and streaming video newsmagazines. And they will succeed in humanizing the workplace like no other generation before them.

One of the biggest problems of employee communications today is that there is no discerable person behind the wheel. Every day, we speak with a bland, anonymous voice to a bland, anonymous workforce. Why not speak as a human being to other human beings, in a natural, individual voice that tells real stories and talks with real people? Finally, after years of chilly Intranet postings and soulless e-mail news summaries, we now have blogs and podcasts and wikis that inspire true conversation, and real, human communication.

Look at Amanda. She’s telegenic, that’s for sure. But Rocketboom’s real attraction is her wit, her personality, her charm, her fearlessness, her connectedness, her ability to convey an idea in the wink of an eye or a tell a joke with the flick of her hair. She can communicate better than most in the new media universe, and she is a living template for how things are going to change in corporate communications.

Of course, no corporate blogger or podcaster, no matter how hip he or she tries to be, will be as cool as Amanda on Rocketboom. All I’m saying is that the current online trend, dubbed “social media,” finally makes it easy for some personality and warmth to be injected into the corporate blandosphere.

I just hope these fledgling journo-bloggers join IABC early in their careers so they can learn some ethics before they emerge from the shadows to take power.

– See a related post on my blog, For Your Approval

Anytime I see an item of clothing for sale that says “one size fits all,” I run in the opposite direction. It can be a t-shirt or a baseball cap with a Velcro closure, but rarely have I found that one size really does fit all.

The same is true with employee communications. Employees come in all sizes, shapes, colors. We say, as organizations, that we treasure the diversity. Yet our communication budgets are most often so meager that we can barely afford to cover the one-size-fits-all communication programs, let alone think of doing multiple sizes or iterations or tailored content. Those big monies are usually available only on the customer side of the house. For example, British retail giant Tesco (think Costco or WalMart if you’re in North America) sends a quarterly mailing to 11 million customers … in five million versions! It’s tailored to the members buying habits. And yet we struggle to get out one version of a quarterly newsletter to a few thousand employees. What’s wrong with this picture?

Technology is helping us. Portal products can recognize the reader and allow customization of content. RSS feeds and subscription efforts like podcasting give employees a chance to select what they see and hear. Blogging means that others beyond corporate communications are helping generate content.

Yet most of the information we push into the communications system is generated and “controlled” by someone in corporate communications or IT or HR or some part of the organization. How far away are we from the day when internal communications becomes the candid and freewheeling conversation that’s described in The Cluetrain Manifesto? When will the communication be as candid as what’s discussed around the water cooler? Are you there yet? I’d love to hear what hills you’ve conquered in moving away from one size fits all.

Only two-thirds of the respondents to a recent IABC Research Foundation survey said their organizations have a crisis communication plan. That’s startling, especially because the survey was conducted in December, at the end of an extraordinary year for crises around the world.

The good news is that among those who said their organizations have crisis communication plans and used them, 99% said the plans were effective in helping them manage organizational crises. This is good ammunition for communicators to use when challenged about the need for a crisis communication plan.

(By the way, I’ve never understood why an intelligent business leader would challenge the need for a crisis communication plan or any other communication plan. Would a business try to operate without a financial plan? Without a human resources plan?)

One of the most troubling findings from the survey is that communicators whose organizations don’t have crisis communication plans cite lack of senior management support as the primary reason a plan does not exist. Again, why would an intelligent business leader not support a plan to help the organization recover from a crisis?

Do you face such resistance? Why do you believe so many business leaders are reluctant to invest in what seems to be such a vital tool?

Disclosure: The survey was conducted on behalf of the IABC Research Foundation by my business, Holland Communication Solutions LLC, and my partner, Gill Research LLC.