ICYMI: Taco Bell, skip logic, animated nostalgia
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening,
International Women’s Day is Monday, March 8.
💒 Banantag and Staffbase just got married.
Kathleen Noonan leaves Microsoft to head global internal comms at Siemens.
Programming note: There will be no Mister Editorial next week as I’ll be on the road moving to Oregon. My fiancée and I will post-up in an Airbnb in Corvallis while we look for a home. Reply to this email with your Oregon hidden secrets, survival tips, and coffee recommendations! 🚚 🌲
In case you missed it…
1. How Taco Bell Communicates With Franchise Owners
Communicating with franchise owners is similar to communicating with salespeople. How? Taco Bell CEO Mark King talks about the necessity of maintaining a strong culture of communication between HQ and their version of “field workers.”
Like salespeople, franchisees are the face of the company and are responsible for generating revenue and profit growth.
“Taco Bell communicates with franchise partners through regular internal communications and virtual meetings to share updates on the business as the world quickly changes.”
Read the interview (Entrepreneur).
2. Skip Logic for Your Employee Surveys
Personalization is the holy grail of internal comms. We want to make sure the content we publish is relevant to the audience. If the material doesn’t apply to an employee’s experience, they shouldn’t see the message.
The same goes for survey construction. SurveyMonkey did a study and discovered that using “skip logic” in a survey gives you better data.
“Skip logic is a survey design feature that lets you send a respondent to a later page of your survey or a specific question on a later page in your survey. It means you can design personalized surveys where respondents answer only the questions that apply to them.”
Says SurveyMonkey of their research:
“From looking at a simple 10-question survey, we’ve seen that skip logic can influence a lot. It can affect the quality of your survey responses, the number of responses that come in, and even the respondent’s experience.”
Personal anecdote: I sell books on eBay and was recently asked to complete a survey about my selling experiences. At one point eBay asked me if I sold sneakers on their site. I replied No. If eBay had used skip logic, the survey would have ended there for me. But the survey continued and the subsequent questions were all about my thoughts on selling high-end sneakers on eBay. Not only had I no clue how to respond to each question, but the answers I gave were negative, which will skew eBay’s survey results.
Asking irrelevant questions on a survey annoys the survey taker and risks giving the surveyor faulty and misleading data.
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3. Do We or Don’t We?
Upvote: "The only thing I know for sure is I am not going to be working in the office five days a week, and I'm not going to be working from home five days a week." —Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, on Axios on HBO
Irony: “We all want to go back to the office, right? We are stuck in our home for such a long time, so painful.” — Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, on the company’s earnings call
Related: Why Zoom Fatigue Hits So Hard
4. Don’t Forget Your Hat
Thanks to Mister Editorial subscriber Mike Klein (@mklein818) for sharing his article in PR Intelligence. In internal comms, he says, “remarkably little attention is paid to the extent communication decisions are based on assumptions.”
Employee audiences are not monolithic. Throughout any given day or week they wear several kinds of hats, Mike says. Among them:
Citizen
Consumer
Investor
Subordinate
Tribe Member
Read on to get definitions of those hats and learn how to communicate with the personas.
5. Give Life to Old Photos
Deep Nostalgia can take photos from any camera and bring them to “life.” The gimmick swings between sweet and scary.
💭 How can you use this technology for your internal comms?