IABC Employee Communication Commons

“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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Multimedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.