News, emails, videos from Corp Comm: spam or not?

An intranet manager asked me the following a couple of days ago:

"I am looking for some comparative benchmarks for readership of news posted on corporate intranets. I get fairly regular feedback from senior management here that readership should be higher (uptake on articles ranges from very small to as high as 80% of target audience in some cases) and I would like to find something to demonstrate to them that an average readership of X% is fairly typical. Are you aware of any such benchmarks?"

I referred him to a blog post "Spam from corporate communications?" that I wrote just over a year ago, based on 2 real life anecdotes from intranet managers about corporate emails. Since then, a couple of intranet managers have asked me what percentage of viewership is average for corporate videos.

Do any of you have any figures to share?

Comments

[Harry Chittenden]

Hi Jane, good post.

Don't you think that corporate communicators have the same task as all the rest of us communicators, quality of content? And shouldn't corporate content be carefully styled typographically for easy reading. Thoughtfully worded headlines and liberal use of white space can make a memo from HR much more endurable.

And no memos from people who don't know what a paragraph is.

[Brian Lamb]

What a good questions to ask. What is the real value of news on the intranet? We measure the popularity of news as a task with Intranet readers using our polling technique (http://http://www.customercarewords.com/how-it-works.html>How a customer careword poll works)and we consistently find news is less popular with employees than it is with the comms team (we poll both groups)Having these kinds of figures for your Intranet makes discussions on what to publish and when a lot easier.

[Jane McConnell]

Thanks Harry. What's interesting is how to define "quality".
Brian, can you shed some light on this - from your research what have you discovered that makes intranet end-users like a news item and how does that differ from the comms team?

[Ana]

Hi Jane, I think the readership rate is directly influenced by the frequency of the mass -mailings aka "newsletters" sent to all employees in a period of time. We used to send as many as needed, without much limitations and the readership rates were going down. Once we started to treat them seriously and plan them, the readership rate wnet through the roof. Because people are interested in what's going on, but not 24 hours a day :)

[Brian Lamb]

Jane it would be really interesting to measure just news carewords in a poll but no-one has asked us to do this. Top poll items tend towards the mundane and everyday concerns of employees.

We do know from task performance measurement studies that it doesn't matter how much corporate stuff is placed on the front page, employees aren't even conscious its there.

Comms have to align their content to employee needs and hope they can cross-sell. For comms teams that are charged with communicating change or strategy its an essential message.