That intersection is where many of us in employee communications are now focused, partnering with digital and emerging technology teams to enhance employee work tools. Not surprisingly, employees are beginning to expect these tools, and rightly so. Social business tools remove barriers and enable connections to make way for limitless creativity, product innovation and information sharing.

This is where the industry is heading. With that in mind, it helps to get senior executives to understand the differences between social media and social business — especially if your C-Suite still equates social media to Facebook’s legendary Farmville app.

Here are a few ways social media differs from social business:

According to this Forrester report, 66 percent of information workers in North America and Europe work remotely. Recent growth of the mobile office stemmed in part from the economic downturn and the accompanying need for operational cost savings. Supplementing that growth is a continual stream of emerging mobile business technologies, which make it easy to collaborate in real time with co-workers across the globe.

And, it seems to be working well for both parties. Not only does the virtual office create greater work-life balance for employees, there are big benefits for companies.

While technology has paved the way to a more flexible working world, communication between employers and their workers has never been more important. Without direct interaction with the organization, their supervisors and colleagues, remote workers can easily feel, well, remote – even with technologies like telepresence, wireless devices and the cloud. In fact, the absence of face-to-face communication and direct supervision can lead to issues like lack of motivation, lower morale and message misinterpretation. Luckily, most such issues are preventable.

Here are five tips for managing from afar:

Keep communication clear, concise and constant. Communication is a No. 1 priority with any employee, but it’s vital between supervisors and their staffers outside the office. Keep virtual workers in the loop using regularly scheduled calls, video chat meetings or email updates. Make messages short and sweet – provide the who, what, when, where and why. Address follow-up questions.

Set expectations and rules upfront. Employees need to know how the organization defines a successful remote working relationship. They also need to abide by certain rules and expectations – how many hours to work each week, assignment deadlines, submission processes and requirements for meeting attendance. Set ground rules in writing upfront and revisit them regularly.

Create a collaborative mindset. Building a sense of “we” not only generates a high volume of great thinking, it helps each staff member feel like an important part of the team. Set up digital collaboration space (e.g., forums, microblogs, intranet communities), and include off-site employees in project planning, brainstorming and feedback channels. Remember them, too, with your company’s employee recognition program.

Build strong relationships. Healthy colleague relationships strengthen both traditional and virtual teams. To develop and build relationships with those working independently, managers must combine constant virtual communication with periodic in-person interactions. Managers should get to know employees on a personal level, provide positive feedback and constructive criticism, and ensure all communication is open and honest.

Be available, reliable and flexible. Remote communication takes extra effort, sometimes requiring leaders to go above and beyond. Managers must be available for employee emergencies and to address questions and concerns at all hours. They also need to be flexible enough to drop what they are doing to address a concern in person, if needed.

What are some other go-to rules for managing remote workers? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

A recent Communications Executive Council study of more than 1,400 global employees found that communications have a significant impact on driving employees’ ability to adapt to organizational changes – twice as much impact, in fact, than typical areas like compensation and rewards. If employees are not “in the know,” they’re less likely to acclimate on their own, let alone encourage others to adjust.

So whether you’re unveiling a new initiative or updating your corporate reputation strategy, make employee communication, education and training the first step in change management.

Use these tips to get started:

1. Build a network
Most of us relate the term “onboarding” to employee recruiting, but you can also onboard internal company ambassadors to spread enthusiasm for an initiative or brand among their colleagues. Start by building a network of employee ambassadors from a variety of different career levels, functions and locations within the company. Then, hold a half-day or full-day training session to gain their understanding and support.

Is your organization global? Use this opportunity to bring employees from multiple locations together. If on-site training is not possible, a Web seminar will work (though it limits two-way communication and interactivity).

2. Design a curriculum
Take a cue from schoolteachers and develop a lesson plan. Before your training session, plan an agenda around what you want your employee ambassadors to learn. Design your agenda by topic, and include learning objectives with each exercise. Put the most important exercises first, just in case you have to cut the training short.

3. Make it interactive
Interactive learning is most effective at capturing employees’ attention and keeping them from constant BlackBerry-checking during a training session. (To that end, consider banning the use of laptops and smartphones during your sessions.) Customize your exercises to the topic you’re teaching. Do you want to capture employees’ input? Develop an activity sheet with questions for participants to complete and present back to the group. Need employees to understand their role in communicating the change? Offer participants a chance to role play. Assign participants to groups and capitalize on the effectiveness (and fun) of team building.

4. Incorporate video and storytelling
Employees respond to storytelling. Show participants a professionally produced video about the change initiative that features real employees and/or customers. Or, give participants inexpensive, mobile cameras and ask them to conduct their own “video shoots” to show the group.

5. Develop a toolkit
If your change initiative is complex, consider equipping employee ambassadors with toolkits that contain supporting materials. Your toolkit can include talking points, frequently asked questions and graphics to use when talking to other employees. Providing the proper materials up front can ensure the most effective delivery of your message.

6. Encourage dialogue
Dedicate time at the end of the training session to answer employee questions and concerns. If you think participants will be reluctant to share feedback in front of the entire group, ask them to break out into small groups and think through any questions. Have each group nominate a spokesperson to pose the questions.

7. Recognize participants
Recognition is a great way to gain buy-in and encourage participation in the initiative. At the end of your training session, acknowledge your new employee ambassadors with a tangible gift such as a customized certificate of recognition, small gift relevant to your company’s product or brand, or creative award (e.g., “Most Innovative Team Award”).

8. Measure success
Give participants an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of the training. Ask them to rate their understanding of important learning objectives, and include one or two open-ended questions to allow for input on how to improve the training. Use the evaluations as a benchmark to measure results and fine-tune programs along the way.

The past six months have flown by! We hope you’ve enjoyed our posts and insights about internal communications or, as we like to call it, business-to-employee (B2E) communications. We have a lot more planned, but wanted to take a moment to thank you, our readers, for helping make B2E Comm a success.

Chances are, many of the employees in your organization are Millennials. (Full disclosure: I’m one, too!) Understanding how Millennials think and work is essential, then, to your employee communications strategies.

Here are a few tips on effectively communicating with this generation.

1) Get Connected. Millennials are also called “Generation C” because they are the most digitally connected generation in history. According to Nielsen’s U.S. Digital Consumer Report, they:

• Watch 27 percent of online videos
• Are 27 percent of visitors to social networking sites
• Own 33 percent of tablets
• Use 39 percent of smartphones

Best practice: Embrace this connectivity by providing internal mobile applications that give employees access to company resources 24/7. A growing number of companies – including GE, IBM and Standard Chartered – are building customized internal mobile applications. California-based biotech company Genentech has created about 20 mobile apps for its employees. These apps range from the highly specialized (a database of molecular compounds) to the generic “Get a Room” app, used for finding and booking conference rooms, or “Peeps,” an employee directory.

2) Don’t Compete – Collaborate. For Millennials, everyone on the soccer team received a participation ribbon and high schools had multiple valedictorians. Millenials value competition but hold teamwork and collaboration in higher regard.

Best practice: Instead of offering individual-based competitions (such as who can make the most sales), gear company challenges around departments and business units. Encourage employees to brainstorm new ideas together instead of pitting them against each other. Want more proof of collaboration winning over Millennials? Take a cue from The Hunger Games.

3) Think Viral. Video is an established, highly effective communications tool. This extremely popular medium (YouTube receives more than 2 billion views a day) is well received by the C-suite and easily shared among co-workers. Perhaps most importantly, video drives people to action at six times the rate of print. Consider this Pew Research Center statistic: 1 in 5 Millennials have posted a video of themselves online – more than three times that of any other age group. Engage camera-happy Millennials by putting them in the director’s chair. Call for employee-produced videos they can upload to your intranet or dedicated microsite.

Best practice: McDonalds integrates video and photo-sharing with Flickr and YouTube – platforms Millennials already use externally – into its intranet. Ikea’s intranet features “IKEA Stories,” a video collection of employee interviews

4) Share and Tell.  Millennials are a highly social and community-oriented generation used to sharing their lives via social networks. With 75 percent of Millennial employees using social networking sites, mimic these expectations internally. Offer social business platforms for employees to post status updates about their work, develop a profile and share ideas in communities of like-minded colleagues.

5) Get to the Point. Don’t mince words with Millennials. Short and to-the-point videos, emails and articles will be better received than lengthier materials. It’s not because they have short attention spans, it’s simply the way they typically communicate: through smartphone texts, 140-character tweets and one-line Facebook updates. Watch this (brief!) video about Millennials’ “information snacking” tendencies.

When it comes to engaging this connected and tech-savvy generation, keep this in mind: Millennials are communicating and information-sharing 24/7 in their personal lives – and those external experiences shape their internal expectations.

Are you a Millennial? What are your communications preferences? Tell us here.

As part of what Nielsen and NM Incite define in their U.S. Digital Consumer Report as the “Connected” generation, I am especially interested in how 24/7 digital communications and emerging social networking sites are changing how we communicate and how we search out information.

Gone are the days of spending hours at an overcrowded mall to find a fabulous new pair of pumps. Now, just hop online and you pretty much have any store at your fingertips. And, according to this Forrester, shoppers seem to love it. E-tail – online retail – is expected to increase 62 percent by 2016.

This instantaneous information delivery also applies to consumer reviews. You no longer have to call friends to ask for dining or entertainment suggestions; just do a quick search on Yelp, or any other user-generated recommendation site , and VOILA! – instant feedback. Think online recommendations don’t matter? These stats might make you think twice.

My point is that all of us, especially those of us in the “Connected” generation, are finding new ways to search for, consume and share information. But have you thought about how these social-based tools are changing how employees do the same for work-related information?

When you compare what’s happening to us as consumers (social media) to how companies are changing internally, it makes sense why the industry calls it “social business.”

Think about things like finding colleagues with a certain expertise, brainstorming a solution to a customer-service issue or reading company updates on leader blogs.

For those of us working in employee communications, social business is the intersection where how we work, what society expects and emerging technologies come together. Employees are consumers, too. And they expect the same experiences outside their company to happen inside the firewall.

Now you tell me: How do you define social business at your company? And where do you see it heading in the future?

Stay tuned to b2ecomm.com for more insights on social business and how these emerging tools can improve employee engagement.

That’s why companies pursue copyright infringement – or perceived infringement – so vigorously. It might also explain why star music couple Beyonce and Jay-Z filed to trademark daughter Blue Ivy’s name within weeks of her birth.

Here are a few tips to consider as you mull over your next internal program or campaign naming project.

• Keep it simple. You want a catchy name, but avoid convoluted spelling or fads that will look silly down the line. Leave that to the imitators. Names should be easy to remember and equally easy to say. Keep it short and to the point.

• Get input. Not only will this generate more and potentially better choices, it’s a great collaborative exercise. But don’t let your list get too lengthy – ask a small brainstorming group to develop a short list. You can always ask a larger team or even an entire company to vote on your favorites.

• Tell what it is. Consider tying your name choice to what you are naming or its significance. If, for example, you are a printing business offering high-quality prints at low prices with a quick turn-around … Joe’s Printing doesn’t quite express that. Quality Quick-Print, with a tagline “Where you get more for your money, faster” might be closer.

• Beware the acronym. Face it: We are a society of abbreviators. In our 140-character max Twitteresque world, we have become expert at whittling down a name, any name, to its lowest common denominator. Someone will inevitably give the selected name the “alphabet soup” treatment, reducing it to an acronym. That’s not always a bad thing. Many acronyms work just fine. But, if you have named your new workplace committee the Safety Hazard Information Team, you might want to rethink that. (I did warn you.)

• Don’t get lost in translation. If you’re part of a global team or you’re naming a product with a worldwide market, put your name through a foreign language filter. Even the most innocent of names in English may have a less than desirable translation in another language. And if it’s a product or company name, make sure someone else hasn’t beaten you to it.

Have you ever found yourself playing the name game? Leave a comment and tell us what happened or share your advice on creating a name.

You might recall the story of The Little Engine That Could that chugged along saying “I think I can, I think I can,” as a valuable lesson in optimism, or The Boy Who Cried Wolf as a powerful example of the importance of honesty and credibility.

These childhood stories – and many others – provided guidance for us when we were young. There was a moral to each story – a life lesson that we learned along the way – to help guide our actions and direct how we should behave.

While the storyline may have changed, stories can still provide guidance to us as adults.

Content Matters: Honing Your Storytelling Skills

Stories that engage employees and drive business or transformational change are well-written, meaningful and motivating. They inspire an action, provoke thought and translate across multiple channels and geographies.

When developing a strong story, keep a few simple principles in mind:

Identify a clear theme.
A story must be more than a series of events. It must have a theme from which everything else flows.

Decide what’s at stake.
Begin your story with a great opening line that reveals why the stakes are high to help frame why the story is being told and grab employees’ attention.

Establish a story arc – beginning, middle and end.
The “stakes” start the story off in the beginning. In the middle, a change occurs to shift the direction of the story or add interest. At the end, the story is wrapped up with key takeaways (or lessons) or a call to action.

Make critical choices.
Only include details that support the overall theme or message.

Show, don’t tell.
Use examples and relevant descriptions to really show what you mean.

Use video to make stories more meaningful and engaging.
Supplement and humanize the story by taking a multimedia approach, including the use of video. When delivered through the right channels and with the right approach, video can connect with employees on a level that no other communication can by:

• Sharing multiple voices/perspectives
• Increasing leader visibility
• Simplifying processes or complex concepts through visuals
• Striking a human or emotional chord
• Provoking a thought that inspires, excites, prepares, motivates and connects with employees

End strong.
Think about what you want to leave people with. Your ending should be simple, but memorable. It should provoke a thought or inspire an action.

What do you think makes a great story? Tell us in the comments.

This is the second of a two-part post on storytelling. Read our previous post on storytelling here.

It’s no wonder then that more and more companies are using storytelling to help drive behavior, mindset and culture change within their own organizations. When done well, storytelling can show employees at all levels of an organization exactly how you need them to think, act and behave.

Getting Started

When it comes to driving organizational change, it is important to remember that storytelling is a process. Stories need to be repeated. They need to be reinforced. You cannot expect a change overnight.

Here are a few tips to help you incorporate a storytelling program within your organization:

1. Know your organization.

Consider developing online “quick polls” or conducting employee focus groups or surveys to “take the pulse” of your organization. You can use the initial results as a baseline to understand where employees in your organization are in the continuum of transformational change, as well as measure your communications’ effectiveness.

2. Stay focused.

Focus and simplicity are key to good storytelling. Understand what you’re trying to accomplish and then focus your communications around a few simple and compelling stories. As those stories take hold, refresh them with a few more.

3. Identify, capture and manage story leads.

Determine the best way to engage employees across your organization to help identify stories – and more importantly – get them to you. Tap into recurring management or leadership meetings to gain insights and perspectives, or create a recognition tool for employees where they can share positive feedback about their colleagues.

Track your efforts with a document or tool – whatever format works best for you – organized by topic, location, department, business unit, etc. This will not only ensure you have stories when you need them, but will help you easily identify what topics or groups may require more focus.

4. Take a multi-channel approach.

Use all of your channels to tell stories. Intranets, newsletters, emails and in-person events are all good storytelling vehicles. Video is a particularly powerful medium to use both online and during in-person meetings. Its impact lies in its fundamental and universal ability to show, and not just tell, a story.

5. Make it credible – and two-way.

Storytelling that is done well is believable, tangible and credible. Employees need to see real, actionable examples to understand what is possible by changing a behavior, adopting a certain mindset or acting a certain way. Establishing a forum (online or in-person) where employees can share their stories with each other helps reinforce that the stories are genuine.

6. Get leadership onboard.

Your leaders set the tone for your organization. Nothing sends a stronger signal that “this really matters” (or doesn’t) than leader behavior. When appropriate, weave stories into executive communications (in-person meetings, videos, webcasts) to help you move the needle in the right direction.

You now have some ideas to get started. Can you think of anything else to add?

Stay tuned to b2ecomm.com this week; we’ll explore the elements that make up a great story in a future post.

Most communicators are prepared to deal with an external crisis. As internal communicators, we’ve found many of the same principles can apply to cultural crises. Here are a few applicable lessons learned from the recent Goldman incident.

Understand that perception is reality. Goldman Sachs may or may not have a “toxic and destructive” culture, as Smith asserts, but now that the claim has been made, the organization needs to address it head-on with its employees. Such high profile criticism erodes morale. Not only does the firm need to underscore its many policies and programs currently in place to support ethical business conduct, but leaders at all levels of the company must model that behavior and instill it within their staff.

Engage in honest dialogue. Successfully addressing internal challenges in any organization requires honest dialogue. It takes courage, especially on the part of the senior leaders who often are several steps removed from the “truth” of the organization. If Goldman Sachs is in fact suffering a moral decline, Smith wouldn’t be the only employee aware of it. This is a great opportunity for leaders to open up, be more candid and talk about what they’ve learned from Smith’s resignation. They need to identify any cultural weak spots and share what changes they’re making to improve the situation. Even more important, this is a time for the firm to listen to employees’ reactions to the resignation – and to the firm’s business practices – so concerns can be both heard and addressed.

Seize the opportunity. Painful though it might be, every crisis provides opportunity. For Goldman Sachs, this is an opportunity to draw a line in the sand and honestly assess the state of their organization, then change what needs to be changed. Think about it from a personal standpoint: We’ve all had wake-up calls that force us to become better people and teams. What separates great leaders and teams from others is their ability to learn from mistakes and exercise resiliency through their crises.

Make it last. Finally, Goldman can turn these lessons into a compass for future behavior. Making tough cultural changes now (if needed) and reinforcing them through behaviors and programs over the coming months and years gives them a “never again” moment around which they can continue to rally.

Most organizations have taken and survived hits to their culture (though few quite as public as this one). What are your tips for survival?