It was a vision in neon. As my taxi sped along Weymouth’s faded Georgian esplanade, one guesthouse stood out against the twee B&Bs. Its sign read A Knight’s Rest, For a Noble Sleep, the words flashing from pink to blue like a lonely fairground attraction. Above that, an illuminated (and apparently inebriated) knight on horseback reared up robotically. For all its tackiness and seaside cheek, A Knight’s Rest looked strangely wonderful. Two fingers to the tyranny of bland hotel chains.

My visit to Weymouth came courtesy of New Look. This may seem an unlikely home for one of the UK’s leading fashion retailers, and my task there was equally improbable: over the course of the week I would train 50 non-writers, from marketing assistants to legal advisors to warehouse managers, to produce consistent copy for the intranet.

Now, if you’ve ever dabbled in the dark art of ‘tone of voice’, you’ll know that consistency is crucial to a project like this. And consistency is not normally how you’d describe the output of 50 novice writers. No, the word there is cacophony.

Consider my first group: Charlotte (faux fur coat) sprinkled her writing with feel-good fashion words like ‘gorgeousness’. Malik (chunky-knit cardigan) was at pains to translate IT terminology into everyday language. Jim (hi vis jacket), a fan of crime writing, seeped his subheadings in drama and suspense. So far, so idiosyncratic. I began to think about how much work I or another editor would have to do to bring the copy ‘in line with the brand’.

But as the delegates cheerily put pen to paper, I began to question the logic of consistency: why would you want to bury individual expression beneath corporate tone of voice? In fashion terms, wouldn’t that be like asking everyone to wear a uniform? This is the intranet, after all, a place where you get to know your colleagues. And what better way to get to know people than through the qualities and quirks of their writing? (Your personality always comes through in writing – just look at a lonely hearts ad).

In fact, so much communication is user generated now, I’m surprised more companies haven’t switched from Brand Bibles to a more creative approach; encouraging rather than suppressing different voices. One of the most satisfying things about user-generated content is seeing how different people use language, but the narrow scope of most tone of voice guidelines would rule these ‘inconsistencies’ out.

During my week at New Look I met some brilliant characters, the majority of whom relished the chance to do a bit of writing. When their words go live, they will not be perfect. They will not read consistently like the words in a stick of rock. They will need tweaking. But what they will have over the polished copy of other intranets is the ring of real personality. And that’s why New Look’s intranet will be worth reading.

Writing – like the clothes you wear or the hotel you choose – is ultimately a matter of taste. And without the occasional Knight’s Rest, it’s all just Travelodge.

Neil has no idea I’ve logged in to corrupt his peerless integrity, but I couldn’t in good commercial conscience let an article on his excellent writing course go by without a proper plug. You can find out more here. It’s dead good. TTFN, Grant.

If you didn’t catch it on The Hub, here are some pithy (ahem) thoughts on using 2.0 for IC purposes. Enjoy.

There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.
Here’s where we are. Web 2.0 has finally filtered through to the corporate consciousness and IC professionals are being told in no uncertain terms that they need to make it an integral part of their future plans. Trouble is, no one knows exactly how to do so. Not only is there a widespread lack of knowledge about how it all actually works but – more significantly – applications that deliver a measurable business benefit are currently all but non existent.

So, you’ve got two choices. Do nothing. Seriously. You could just keep your powder dry and wait two years for other people to be the guinea pigs for you. The other is to embrace the new opportunities social networking presents and accept that there will inevitably be some trial and error along the way.

Why you need to act now
If Web 2.0 was simply a technological advance, then waiting for other people to iron out the bugs would probably be the smart choice. Ask any of the early adopters who invested in one of the spectacularly fault-prone first batch of Xbox 360s. But social networking is not primarily a technological change. The top 2.0 players like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr did not reach pre-eminence through technological superiority – they simply came up with innovative new ways for people to harness the unique attributes of the web.

In reality, Web 2.0 is (or, in the case of most businesses, will be) a cultural change. Its significance lies in the way it’s changing people’s behaviour; they way they connect, collaborate and share their opinions, ideas and experiences. But why is this distinction so important?

Because technological changes are relatively straightforward. You finish work one evening. Overnight the IT fairies replace your clunky old file server with a leaner, meaner machine. Voila. Okay, that’s a slightly trite example. But the fact is that cultural change invariably takes longer and is far less predictable.

Take flexible working. For more than a decade we’ve been promised a revolution in the way we manage our work/life balance. The reality is that even now most organisations are struggling to adjust to the implications of this change, and flexible working is either a matter of swapping an hour here for an hour there or simply not an option.

We’ll look at the nature of the cultural change that Web 2.0 will demand of your organisation in a moment. The important point here is that if you’re going to be equipped to embrace the benefits of social networking when it matures, you need to plant the seeds of that cultural change now. Otherwise, when the time comes you’ll simply be giving people tools they have no interest in or ability to use.

Things are gonna change ‘round here
Even today, communication within an organisation overwhelmingly travels through the y axis: vertically, from top to bottom and – when a mood of egalitarianism takes us – from bottom to top. So, the Board tells the senior managers and the senior managers tell the line managers and the line managers tell the team members. Or the other way around. The IC team’s job is to manage this flow effectively, making sure the flood of information is channelled into neat little streams that (to extend the metaphor) irrigate the right people. It’s manageable. It kind of works. And, best of all, it’s a known quantity.

But here’s the thing. If we had a penny for every time an organisation told us that one of the most insurmountable problems face by their business was a tendency for people/teams to work in ‘silos’, we’d have retired to live the high life many moons ago. We claim to live in the Information Age, yet genuine cross-functional knowledge sharing is a remarkably rare best.

Our contention is that social networking has the power to add an entirely new dimension to the IC model – the much sought-after x axis of horizontal knowledge sharing. While peer-to-peer is not the only application of social networking – a CEO’s blog, for example, is a useful way for people to keep abreast of the latest developments – it is certainly the most credible and appropriate.

Giving Twitter feeds exclusively to the executive team, for example, is a woeful underuse of its potential. The power of micro-blogging lies in sharing a high volume of ‘snippets’ that can be searched, organised, redirected and responded to, revealing insights and trends that may otherwise have remained hidden; not as a forum for a limited number of individuals to espouse the company line.

This, of course, is antithetical to the ubiquitous command-and-control style that (to a greater or lesser extent) almost all organisations are built around. There are understandable anxieties about a lack of control of the messages that go out. But this control has always been an illusion.

Come for a drink with us after a bad day at the office and you’ll soon realise that people have always been able to communicate ideas the ‘Company’ may not approve of. The difference here is that, through social networking, these views – both positive and negative – can be harnessed to make changes for the better or stimulate innovation rather than being frittered away into the ether.

Put simply – and whether you like it or not – the future lies with those individuals and organisations that understand how to use social networking to connect with their colleagues and, indeed, the world outside the business. Influence is born of relationships, and increasingly social networking is where these relationships will be forged.

You better be ready. Because you know your competitors will be.

What not to do
We mentioned earlier that you could always take a step back and wait to see what happens. Who knows, maybe all this Web 2.0 stuff is a fad? You could just hop on the Web 3.0 bus when it turns up. But what you simply can’t afford to do is take the actively Luddite approach. By which we mean:

DO NOT BAN FACEBOOK

Or Twitter, or Bebo, or Flickr or Delicious or any Web 2.0 site. We understand the temptation. Why should your employees spend salaried time essentially chatting with their friends? The same argument was made when email become prevalent. While some still deprive their people of this tool, the overwhelming trend was for company after company to relent and end the email embargo. Let’s learn from history and not repeat our mistakes.

If that doesn’t persuade you, here are three practical reasons why a light touch beats a heavy hand:

1. Unproductive people are unproductive people – if they aren’t on Facebook, they’ll be fashioning increasingly large rubber band balls. On the flip side, productive people are exactly that, and deserve your trust anyway.
2. We’re talking about changing your culture to embrace the benefits of social networking. So, why would you prevent your people from becoming experts in it?
3. Like email, social networking is rapidly becoming seen as a ‘basic right’ as the lines between company time and personal time continue to blur. You might not agree – but are you willing to disillusion your existing staff and alienate potential recruits?

Test the waters
The adoption of Web 2.0 doesn’t have to be a binary decision – ‘you’re either in or you’re out’. Like anything new, you might like to dip a toe before diving in. A simple way to do this is to ‘borrow’ some of the core mechanics of a social networking application and use them for a specific, limited (and therefore controllable) purpose. Here’s an example.

We recently worked with O2 to conduct a company-wide cultural ‘temperature check’ to uncover 11,000 people’s views on everything from their working environment and remuneration to their understanding of (and engagement with) the brand strategy.

One of the research tools we developed was an e-zine where employees could post short comments on a range of questions that were updated throughout the two-week research process. These comments were then dynamically posted to the e-zine so everyone could see what their peers had to say on the key issues.

We ultimately garnered a large volume of bite-sized views on a variety of issues ranging from the day-to-day to the big picture. Does all this sound familiar? Our ‘Twitter Lite’ adopted some of the conventions established by social networking sites to enable us to gain a more textured and human understanding of O2’s culture – enriching and complementing the insights gathered through more traditional research tools.

“Our brand is all about helping people connect, so exploring the benefits of social networking is a logical progression for us,” explained Jenny Burns, Head of Internal Communications at O2. “This project may have been only a small step forward, but it’s provided an invaluable demonstration to the business that these applications can be harnessed for internal communications.”

Another example of incremental adoption is found closer to home. One of our web slingers recently spent his lunchtime embedding our office Spotify playlist in our website (wmwuk.net/musichall). Visitors can see what we’re listening to and even add their own choices to the mix. The day will surely come when an impatient client uses the William Tell Overture to chivvie us along.

All this hints that the immediate future of social networking within organisations may lie in proprietary applications that offer a greater degree of control then their full-blown counterparts. This will limit the impact of Web 2.0 in the short term, but that may be no bad thing at a time when we’re yet to understand the implications of untrammelled peer-to-peer communication.

Don’t panic
If all this seems a little overwhelming, take solace from this:

Your skills as a communications professional are as relevant today as they’ve always been

Remember when everyone said the internet would herald the end of newspapers? Or e-readers would be the death knell of the printed book? In the same way, perhaps it’s best to look at social networking as simply a toolkit of new channels – they are supplementary, not a replacement. Yes, we’ve all got plenty to learn. But all of it will be founded on the skills in empathy, clarity and information management that happily you already have.

In fact, dig a little deeper and you might just find that social networking will empower you like never before. IC has always been just as much about listening as it is about talking. And Web 2.0 comes equipped with a growing set of tools to help you filter, analyse and digest what’s being shared across the social networks in your organisation.

For example, tools like Trendrr will enable you to measure and compare words and phrases being used so you can, say, identify hot issues being discussed by employees. Twitter allows you to search through a seemingly overwhelming volume of tweets to distil a list of contributions on a specific topic of interest. And semantic tools continue to improve enabling you to unearth more textured insights than those that can be achieved by basic word of phrase searches.

So, instead of picturing yourself sat on the sidelines as a hailstorm of uncontrolled messaging rains haphazardly throughout the organisation, imagine yourself sitting at the centre of a web, plucking useful tidbits as they flow past and redirecting them where needed. It’s exciting stuff.

Just one more thing
If you only take one thing away from this little treatise, then let it be this:

We’re all in this together

Whatever anyone might tell you, no one yet knows how to most effectively use social networking tools for internal communications (though it should be noted that plenty of progress is being made on the recruitment side of things – get in touch and we’ll be happy to share it with you).

Perhaps the best first step you can take is to sit down with your agency of choice and simply explore the possibilities of cross-referencing your business and IC challenges with the functionality offered by Web 2.0 tools.

Understandably given that it’s all still in its infancy, people still seem to be getting to grips with the features of social networking. It’s high time we all joined forces to explore the benefits. And those benefits will only emerge from a combination of business-specific insights, communications expertise and functional understanding.

We’ve just finished one of our Seven Deadly Sins writing courses with a great group of IC experts from a large risk management company (who I won’t risk naming).

So, I thought it would be worth sharing a few of the feedback comments. Neil – today’s copy coach – would do so himself but his bluff Northern humility precludes him from doing so.

“Brilliant course, highly recommended, many thanks!” enthused one.

“A fun and valuable exercise,” beamed another.

“When I publish my first novel I’ll add an acknowledgment,” promised someone else.

“Room was a bit echoey,” noted a fourth.

Ah well. There’s always ‘room’ for improvement… What’s that? I should attend the course myself as a matter of some urgency? Well, maybe I will.

If you’d like to join me (or more realistically either join a scheduled session or have one designed specifically for your requirements), you can find out more here.