There was a time about five to ten years ago when an employee communicator would be called in, and the boss would say “I was just at a conference and saw this awesome technology, we’ve got to do this now.” This push to adopt new technology, without any regard for strategy, or tactical plans, or the embedded technology, was a predominant trend for quite some time.
Bob Libbey calls this the “bright, shiny object syndrome”. As the former VP of Corporate Content and Channels at Bristol Myers Squibb, and former Head of Digital and Social Communications at Pfizer, Bob tried for a while to warn against tech for tech sake - to convince leaders not to confuse the means with the ends. His point was that technology was a delivery tool and the focus needed to be on content. And he was not alone in this message. For a while, content was king.
But…. technology has improved so greatly in recent years that Bob feels that employee communicators need to start balancing content and technology more evenly.
In 2021, the focus is more about making sure that you can deliver your content in a way that it will be seen, rather than only focusing on the narrative itself.
For example, in a recent Velaku webinar Bob said if you have a segment of your audience who wants content delivered a certain way, or wants to share it a certain way, it doesn’t matter how good the content is if they never see it. You need modern technology to get the content to employees in the way that they want it and can use it - with the least amount of friction and the greatest ease of access.
At Velaku we call this employee-centric content management. And it’s fairly similar to the core principles that marketers use to reach their audiences.
As Bob said, it’s important to balance - and move towards the middle of that continuum between content and technology or delivery mechanisms. Content is still of paramount importance, in Bob opinion, but as we said in promoting our webinar, it takes two to tango.
