Relevancy to trump privacy and kill print?

Can Web2.0 help ensure corporate communications is relevant and real, and not off the radar for employees? Well, if the evidence presented by Scott Karp on Publicis and Digitas' move into all-digital advertising is a leading indicator of the degree of personalisation to come (think hyper-personal ads in Philip Dick's The Minority Report), then communicators rejoice!

Communicators frequently try to work out how to make a single publication relevant to different parts of the same business. I'm hearing increasing anecdotal eviodenc of businesses again questioning the point of an all-employee printed publication. Been there with Web1.0, and maybe this time there is some real momentum behind the argument.

Karp highlights that the New York Times profile of the Publicis/Digitas strategy is predicated on "greater production capacity...to make enough clips to be able to move away from mass advertising to personalized ads." Some US companies already run multiple versions of an ad for one brand.

Communicators still get one all-staff publication, a newsletter and an intranet site. As with ad agencies, maybe the number of iterations will grow as technology improves. How will depend von a similar accpetance that print is finally dead, even for those parts of the business that cannot yet access digital media. So that's no access to a kiosk, mobile phone or computer outside of work (ah the digital divide). Really?!

As in the ad world, imagine a verically integrated corporate communication function: the digital platforms are there, providing they are wrestled away from IT and the bean counters. And it's possible to get enough content to personalise even the most corporate of corporate messages, as "the personal media revolution and its inexpensive tools are enabling people to cover what's important to them for themselves," says Digital Journalist Terry Heaton (props Shel Isreal for the link and encouragement to take 15mins out to read the post).

So what would the corprate communicton future look like? Personalised digital news for each individual employee, accessible whereever, whenever, however.