ICYMI: Marketing gets it, surveys, and a toy maker
3 comms things and one toy thing
This is the final edition of Mister Editorial for 2020. What else is there to say about this year other than, zhcaaihadzanxz.
Have a safe and happy holiday season everyone! And best of luck in 2021!
In case you missed it…
1. Even Marketing Gets It
Ah, Marketing. Internal Comms and Marketing have always had a love-hate relationship. Our departments fight over territory, resources, budgets, content, narrative, control over channels, and even credit for successful messaging campaigns.
And yet each can’t excel without the other.
MarketingWeek reviewed this indescribable year to come up with a few bright spots and lessons that can be applied in 2021. Their first lesson?
As companies went into lockdown in March amid growing uncertainty and heightened levels of stress, it was the internal communications teams who managed the message from the C-suite and disseminated information company-wide.
Says one Marketing exec: “[Internal communications] will have a big seat at the top table every single week, certainly for the foreseeable future, because for a lot of people it might seem like short-term pain and things are getting back to normal, but the reality is they’re not.”
Thank you, Marketing. You can have 2021.
2. Ask Not
Ragan says that to receive valuable and effective feedback from your employee surveys, you need to know what to ask, what not to ask, and more specifically, how to ask it.
They share the do’s and don’ts of crafting employee survey questions for four areas:
job satisfaction
employee development
company culture
areas for improvement
📢 Paid subscribers to Mister Editorial get access to exclusive content, such as:
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel (6 places to steal ideas)
Why You Need an Editorial Calendar for Internal Communications (6 ways it makes your life easier, plus a couple of tech recommendations)
Two Easy Ways to Increase Open Rates for Your Employee Newsletter (get a 5-7% bump)
3. Zoom Out
The battle for your eyeballs, attention, and app integration is fierce. Ring Central and Cisco are the latest to introduce upgrades meant to embed deeper into your workflow and enterprise systems.
RingCentral introduced a free, unlimited solution that integrates video and audio conferencing with team messaging, file sharing, contact, task, and calendar management.
Meanwhile, Cisco announced the revamped Webex platform allows users to easily move from Webext to a suite of third-party apps, like Dropbox, MURAL, and Salesforce.
It’s not all rainbows as these platforms evolve. Microsoft recently unveiled the Orwellian Productivity Score. According to Forbes:
The workplace surveillance tool gives managers, for example, the ability to find an employee by name and see the number of hours they’ve spent in meetings on Microsoft Teams over the last 28 days. It also lets employers know the number of days a person was active on Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Skype and Teams in the last month and on what type of device.
💭 We love analytics, but is this a bridge too far?
4. The Toy Maker
Eddy Goldfarb, who is ninety-eight, created such toy classics as the bubble gun, chattering teeth, and Kerplunk! And he’s still inventing.
Watch on The New Yorker.
✨ 🎄 Happy holidays y’all!!