The Employee Newsletter and Really Simply Syndication

In the prior post I defined a number of Social Networking technologies and what they are normally used for. Our starting hypothetical, replacing the print version of an employee newsletter, frankly, just screams Blog. Unlike many other Social Networking techniques, a blog can remain directive in that, like this one, it can have one author with many readers (you can stop laughing anytime now.)

Blogs are designed specifically to host the same kind of articles and photos normally seen in a newsletter, while allowing for shorter posts and links to other resources of interest. In the case of our "hypothetical", an existing intranet page can be slightly rebranded and reorganized to fill this role, and remain sited on an already well-known and public Internet address.

The only realistic limitation with the Employee Newsletter in the form of a blog is the “opt-in” problem. Simply providing the message and advertising the site location internally is unlikely to see widespread adoption, and it doesn’t provide any medium for more urgent communication since the slowly changing nature of the content does not encourage staff to regularly visit the page.

One solution suggested was to co-opt Email as a means of notification by providing a link to the new story when it comes out. This suggestion can overcome the Opt-In issue, but at a heavy price. For an organization like mine, which has many employees in the field (and without corporate email accounts) the difficulty and propriety of maintaining a list of employees home email accounts for work related communications is a nightmare. Beyond that, even for employees with work accounts, such Email can easily become little more than spam to them, getting buried in the ever increasing email load. Also, we optimally want our newsletter to be directive not collaborative like email is, and therefore routinely advertising new stories via email will inevitably lead to more and more recursively generated email responses, which is what pretty much sunk the concept of ListServ’s (which attempted to leverage email in a similar fashion.)

An alternative to using Email is to use RSS (Really Simple Syndication.) While unlike email RSS still requires some form of simple opt-in, its flexibility and simplicity as well as its increasingly widespread adoption will encourage the maximum possible participation.

RSS

RSS revolves around the concept of subscription rather than a particular application. Its flexibility is that the subscriber decides the method of presentation by selecting the application he or she wants to use to subscribe to the site.

For our hypothetical, staff members at work can be subscribed as a team through SharePoint as pictured. The feed is typical in that it shows the latest headlines in a gadget on each team’s site; if someone has an interest in a particular post they can click on the link and be taken to that story. Or they can click on the title and be taken to the page. The communications person(s) publishing the story need do nothing except create the post. The RSS will update itself automatically.

The biggest advantage of RSS is that the user can select which application he or she wants the headlines to appear. If the person is Email centric to the point where they insist upon it (although I do not like it much) they can subscribe thru Email with most email systems, including all versions of outlook

One of the most popular methods, my own favorite for home use, is to fit the RSS feeds onto the personalized home page of your subscribed search engine, such as iGoogle, My Yahoo, or MSN, in the form of a widget or gadget or web-part or whatever else it's called this week.

This method is “work independent” since the person would be able to subscribe their search home page which will make it showup on any of their computers, including ones at home.

The final option I’m going to cover, although by no means the last kind of feed reader is the most mobile, and can be applied to all employees with company cell phones, or given as an opt-in to employees to use with their own phones. That is the cell phone news reader.

The cell phone reader seems to be an excellent option for our hypothetical, since it does not require access to a computer at work or at home and does not interfere with people who prefer other methods or have access to different means.

One downside, or course, is still getting people to subscribe, in that all RSS types still have an opt-in component (as well as a means for people to opt themselves out). But this can be mitigated in our case, first by placing the reader at all team SharePoint sites to enroll everyone who works at a desk, and second to provide the option and (quite simple really) instructions on how people can subscribe on their home search engine, or finally, for those people completely isolated from all other technologies, subscribing their company cell-phone.

The limitation to the company cell-phone distribution method is, most often, the type of account more than the phone, since all of the modern phones have readers built in. Still, in some situations, while the phone itself will support RSS, the account the phone is on may not.