In Session

As we come to the end of our Communication Cookout, I’m compelled to think about the future of our profession. The dessert is a dilly: Mission Hill Pears with Rhubarb Compote. Perfectly ripe Anjou pears are grilled until tender on a cedar plank, then treated to drizzles of lavender-icewine reduction, rhubarb compote made with late-harvest Vidal wine, honey-whisky sauce and a dollop of whipped cream flavoured with vanilla bean. The recipe was developed by a friend of mine, Michael Allemeier, who is the winery chef of Mission Hill Family Estate, the leading estate winery in Canada. Unlike me, Michael is a true chef, with incredible instincts, and he has taken some of my ideas and gone quite a ways beyond them in this recipe.

And so the metaphor to go with dessert is about pushing ourselves beyond our normal boundaries and using new technologies to enhance our communciations.

Yes, I’m talking about “social media” — the world of blogs, podcasts, wikis and streaming video. Web 2.0, as some call it. And in this area, my friend Shel Holtz is my Michael Allemeier. Shel, through his blog, A Shel of My Former Self, and his co-hosted podcast (with Neville Hobson), For Immediate Release, has opened my eyes and ears to this new world. At Shel’s prodding, I launched a blog about employee communication, For Your Approval. And, inspired by For Immediate Release, I created the Barbecue Secrets podcast, an internet radio show that celebrates the many pleasures of outdoor cooking.

Shel and his fellow cyber-libertarians have been preaching the gospel of social media for some time now, talking about the “collision of technology and communication” and positing a glorious future in which organizations engage in a refreshingly open, transparent conversation with their customers, employees and other stakeholders. The new technology is an enabler, unleashing the hidden power of the individual. By embracing social media and encouraging blogging and podcasting and such, corporations will gain a competitive edge. Their customers will be thrilled with the increased human contact, and their employees will all become enthusiastic brand ambassadors, lifting everyone to new levels of service and innovation.

Obviously we’re not there yet, and some might call the evangelistic zeal of the Shels and Nevilles of the world a bit of wishful thinking mixed with shameless self-promotion. Not me. I absolutely love it, and I have not been this excited since the advent of desktop publishing 20 years ago. We are on the edge of a huge and positive change in the way organizations communicate, and every one of us should be paying close attention to the social media phenomenon, even though it has not hit the mainstream yet.

Internal communication in large organizations has gone through a dark age over the past decade, with the blind adoption of Intranet and e-mail and the nearly complete abandonment of print. In the process of embracing the Internet, we have inadvertently disenfranchised millions of front-line employees by throwing away our main link with them — the print publication.

Finally, the new social media arrive, and although they still cannot replace print, they do encourage something that does not happen very much in today’s large organzation: a real, honest conversation. Social media are designed to encourage dialogue, debate, creativity and collaboration.

Just as the pears of our dessert are infused with the aromatic flavor of cedar and enhanced with innovative flavor combinations, let us infuse our organizations with refreshing new ways to communicate, enhanced by new technologies that make it easy, once again, to have a simple conversation.