Employees as a channel

There is a lot of energy going into "knowledge workers" these days, previously known as "employees."  But most of that energy is focused on one aspect of the employee-content problem -- improving productivity with collaboration.  That's certainly a noble pursuit.  Anyone pursuing it should really take a good look at the impressive collaboration features in the upcoming release of Office 12 and SharePoint (requires IE).

But employees are not only collaborators and generators of content, they are also a channel for content to reach customers.  More often than not, they are a very unreliable channel.  We've all had the experience of finding a great offer or promotion on the Web, only to call up for details and find the person at the other end has no idea what we are talking about.  It makes you question the validity of the offer, and even whether you want to do business there.  Why do companies let this happen?

Interestingly enough, all this focus on collaboration is part of the problem.  By thinking of employees as collaborators we remove the barriers to information, make everything easier to find, and think we have informed them.  In practice, employees end up with too much content that is no longer accurate, relevant or consistent with the content you are formally publishing to all the other channels your customers use.

The reason is clear.  With external channels, we understand the need to have formal processes in place to "clean up" or post-process content based on the customer segment, audience and or channel where the content will be used.  In fact, this is why companies buy multi-channel Web Content Management systems.  The system takes "finished" content from a Word document and converts it into something that can be used on the Web, email newsletters, and in printed guides.

This also helps suggest the solution.  Think of your employees as one of those channels.  Yes, they need to collaborate with others in their area of expertise.  But when it comes to keeping them synchronized with programs, campaigns, brand and messages, you need to formally publish to them only the information you would publish to customers themselves -- perhaps with some additional notes and commentary (the "teacher's edition" if you will).  The same infrastructure can be used.  Employees still go to the intranet, corporate search or portal to find information.  But now, those systems are fed content by the same multi-channel Web Content Management processes that you use for your external channels. More importantly, you can now segment, remove, change or expire the information so that employees get the same view of it as your customers.