ICYMI: Hollywood Meets IC, Darth Vader, BIG Mistakes
🗣️ Call for speakers: The Institute of Internal Communicators (UK) is calling for speakers for their virtual sector conferences. Deadline is May 28.
📺 Webinar: How to Drive Business Outcomes With Employee Comms, featuring Zora Artis, Gold Quill winner Jared Curtis, and me! Hosted by Poppulo on June 3 (free).
Programming note: There will be no Mister Editorial next week.
1. Internal Comms Goes Hollywood
Imagine Broadway actors putting on a short production or a Cartoon Network-like animation for internal corporate communications. The Bloc ad agency’s new unit The Bloc Storytellers is doing just that with two internal projects for Boehringer Ingelheim, a German pharma company.
“Using the storytelling method has really helped us drive home our messages,” said Kimberly Raia, senior associate director of cardiometabolic marketing at Boehringer Ingelheim. “The emotional aspect is what gets people to remember what you’re telling them."
The Bloc Storytellers aims to deliver Hollywood-like productions with strong narratives and emotional pull. It's currently working on its own casting call for creatives from film, theater, and TV to join its team.
Choice quote: "If we don’t have strong internal communications, the strategy you build out does not get executed evenly and uniformly, or even at all,” said Raia. “You have to get people to believe in the strategy, you have to get people to understand it and be fired up to execute on it."
Read more (Fierce Pharma)
💭 Maybe in your next budget request you can put in a line item for Hollywood-style productions.
2. Power to the (Comms) People
Cogent Power Inc., a manufacturer of power generation equipment, implemented a new employee communications platform, called Blink, to boost team communications and increase employee engagement.
Cogent operations teams work on a 24/7, 12-hour work schedule. This makes connection, engagement, and alignment very difficult, as leadership and staff work on different rhythms.
Says Ron Harper, President and CEO of Cogent Power:
We had been, for some time, looking for a platform to communicate and connect with teams more effectively. All the solutions that were encountered were either cost prohibitive, not simple enough, needed an enterprise email address, or just tried to do too many things. In the search, we stumbled across a relatively unknown app called Blink.
Read more (Plant Magazine)
✨ I just kicked off a nine-part series that examines how internal comms professionals and teams can avoid The Innovator's Dilemma. The series concludes with a proposal for internal comms to adopt a truly disruptive communication effort. This series is available exclusively to Mister Editorial’s paid subscribers.
3. May the Force of Internal Comms Be With You
Spotted on #internalcomms Twitter.
4. 🤦♂️
How not to…
…run a phishing test by teasing your employees with a salary bonus for all their hard work during Covid. (HuffPo)
…write an op-ed about how you really feel about your employees who choose WFH (Washington Post)
…handle finding a noose emoji in your diversity Slack channel (Delivery Caviar)
Have a great weekend!
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Disclaimer: Besides running Mister Editorial, I work in employee comms at Splunk. The views in this newsletter are my own.
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