It’s not one of our trade secrets, so we feel okay revealing that we often use digital communication: eCards, microsites, flipbooks and streaming video. We love digital for lots of reasons: It’s cool. It’s engaging. It’s easy to access.
But we can’t do without digital communication for one reason: measurement.
I can hear the uninitiated now. “Measurement? What? Communicators don’t care about anything besides Pantone colors and paper weights.”
Au contraire, my friend! Here at SimplyConnect Consulting, LLC, we love measuring things. Why? Well, we learned long ago that there are many, many leaders who share the above opinion. They think that communication (especially employee communication) is self-indulgent fluff – something “nice” that makes employees feel good, sort of like team-building events and free soda in break rooms.
Communicators often bristle when they encounter this attitude. They know their chosen profession has the power to change behavior, shift opinions and change the dang world! It’s understandable that they get riled when leaders subtly diss their profession.
BUT, great communicators know that “just knowing” something is never going to get a CFO to open the corporate pocketbook. Great communicators know you have to craft your message for your audience. So for the C-Suite, that means developing a tight business case. And for that, you need data, people. So we gotta measure.
With digital communication, you get a tasty smorgasbord of data points. You can tell how many times your message was seen, how many different people saw your message, how long a user spent with your message, how many times someone returned to your message, how many times a user clicked around on your site, and much more. You can even use surveys to gather feedback about your message and material, so you can improve it, shape it and make it ever more powerful. It’s the complete communication cycle, friends, and that’s AWESOME!!
So, yeah, that’s why we love digital communication. Excuse us, we have to go run some utilization reports now…
