Sexyness

One major reason for the communication cone-view on intranet is that intranet lacks sexyness. The mental image of intranet policy amongst professionals is made up of geeky IT stuff and unwilling audiences that need to be motivated and sent on writing courses to post and pull content. Although the concept that internal communication is very relevant for productivity and well being, this is seldom translated in a strategy, let alone appropriate tools. External communication and marketing on the other hand seem more concrete and less problematic. It’s a striking fact that marketing has an almost guaranteed support from management, something that doesn’t come as natural for internal optimizations. However, the recent financial and consequently global economic crisis may bring changes in this pattern.
An important contributing factor to the unsexyness of intranet is the fact that internal communication is often invisible to the outside world. While the whole point of sexyness is its visibility. Another, related and clear distinction between internal communication (IC) and marketing communication (MC) is that IC is not about selling, while marketing sexyness is exactly that. It is no wonder that sexyness and sales are an item in marketing.
Most internet innovations of today are marketing driven. They all have to do with business models and ways to make money. The rule “Money counts and time is limited” (and vice versa) has left an online track of trials and errors (and successes) of often short-lived developments in online possibilities to try business models. What started with simple bannering, using animated gifs, is now moving into advertising in online video and gaming. Innovations such as social blogs became marketing as soon as corporate blogs became sellable new tools for businesses or upgrades to content management systems already in use.
The simple observation that marketing hypes are often simply transfered to the internal virtual worlds of organizations, without adapting them, causes several communication problems we face on intranets today. The strategic scope of internal communications does not equal a marketing scope. The effective application of marketing tools such as flashy digital magazines in internal communication lies in its adaptation, not in it’s copying.
So, requests regarding intranet or digital internal communication often refer to the sexier stuff from the www-marketplace. This has been the case over the last decade or so. But although the online communication tools may have changed over time, the overall mental framework of commissioners, to apply these tools effectively, has not. Innovation rush tends to cover the what-does-it-do?, the how-can-we-build? and especially the when-do-we-have-it?-questions. The why-question is often skipped, simply because ‘everybody is doing it’ seems a good preemptive answer. Innovation in communication therefore often appears to be about technological innovation and not about improving communication.