4 posts tagged “new+york+times”

One variable in determining employee engagement is 'happiness'.

A Gallup study at the start of the year broke the news:

"Happy employees are better equipped to handle workplace relationships, stress, and change, according to the latest national Gallup Management Journal survey. Companies that understand this, and help employees improve their well-being, can boost their productivity."

Now it seems that being 'happy' could become an entitlement, in practical terms.

Clive Crook posts about a New York Times report that: "Some prominent economists and psychologists are looking into ways to measure happiness to draw it into the public policy realm. Thirty years from now, reducing unhappiness could become another target of policy, like cutting poverty."

And the ROI could be fantastic for companies: the NYT noted that, while clearly real...

"Happiness seems fairly cheap to manipulate. In one experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire about personal satisfaction after Xeroxing a sheet of paper. Those who found a dime lying on the Xerox machine reported substantially higher satisfaction with their lives."

In the social media age - a digital world in which, as Stephen Fry points out, three months is a human year - it seems MSM business models are waking up:

• Newspapers: The New York Times has dropped its subscription model.
• Television: NBC has moved from iTunes to Amazon, Fox is giving programmes away on iTunes, and George Lucas is stumped.
• Music: The industry is still in internet-denial if it's coming up with ideas like the Ringle and wasting time behaving like the middle child.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Something has changed, and not even agents of calcification can stand in the way any longer, otherwise you wouldn't get TMZ bloggers making the jump to television!

For companies, the signs are writ large. Your communication business model is out of date.

When Tesco can do it well, and even private equity companies know how to stand out, just what questions is your company asking?

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. 

Pownce, the micromedia platform growing faster than Twitter, seems ready to explode following recent mainstream media coverage, including the The New York Times on Sunday.

Basically, Pownce enables P2P file-sharing within a social network (great for a business environment as there are good discussion-tracking functions - but that's for another day).

According to Publishing 2.0's Robert Young, who does a great job pulling together the important bits of recent news around Pownce, music and movie companies should be watching closely as legal download growth is slowing and illegal download growth accelerating again. Cause and effect?

Social networking is circling again. Someone should be buying Kevin Rose and Lee Culver a coffee.