Driving people to act—even in their own self-interest—takes persistence. Getting someone to binge on Netflix doesn't. (Photo: Shutterstock)
A year ago, a colleague at a Fortune 500 company started using MailChimp for internal communications. He eventually canceled the service because too many employees were unsubscribing. It raised an interesting question: should we treat internal communications like marketing? After all, don't we use technologies like mass email, social platforms and personalization in both disciplines?
While I've encouraged HR teams to think like marketers, internal communicators should go beyond their marketing relatives in relevance, response rates and impact. Here's why.
Bite-size or buffet?
Communications and marketing have converged to solve a shared problem: a crisis of attention. A common argument is that attention is fractured between too many competing, distracting mediums. That, in turn, has created tension between the convenience and accessibility of short-form content and the depth and length of comprehensive communications.
On one hand, bite-size communications are colonizing newspapers, magazines, marketing videos and business emails. On the other hand, there's nothing “snackable” about a 10-hour Netflix binge or the three-hour-long podcasts that often top iTunes charts. Human attention spans are not the problem.
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