When I first started working in marketing communications one of my monthly tasks was to review all trade publications for articles where our company was mentioned as well as other articles of interest. I scanned roughly 30+ trade publications for keywords using my eyeballs since there was no Web in 1991. This tedious process also involved clipping, copying and distributing over 75 bound copies to every employee.
Needless to say several employees would say to me, “quit wasting your time, I don’t read it and throw it away.” Of course my response was, “just doing my job,” and these people were not my manager so I did not have to follow their orders. But they were missing out on what the purpose of the whole process was, to educate them on our markets, partner activities, competition and other newsworthy material. Who knows if one of the dissenters actually read it they may have learned something.
Today we have Digg, Delicious and other bookmarking tools to manage and share what we read on the Web. I started using Delicious two and a half years ago to track my company’s press hits and other articles of interest. It was easier than downloading or creating PDF pages and I could easily mail the link to team members. I still have the same challenge of generating interest among co-workers about our markets, customers, partners and competitors and a few may still complain when I email the link.
Internal marketing to your employees is important to keep them abreast of what’s happening in your organization as well as customers, competitors and other stakeholders. This information feeds into your marketing strategy and communications, especially if it is in direct competition to your brand. By using RSS feed out of Delicious I have been able to integrate those bookmarks into our corporate intranet so that employees will see the links when they login. This allows them to consume the information when they need to as well as click thru to the larger library of links on Delicious.
To ensure that your bookmark site will be used and become the place for employees to look, don’t shoot them the link in an email. Make them go to the site and see the amount of information available and they will see the value of the tool and your efforts. Use tags to order and arrange your links to make it easier for groups and finding information as you add to it.
You can view my Delicious bookmarks at http://delicious.com/bmcd67
Have you used a bookmarking tool to market to your internal audiences? If so how well has it worked?
