I blogged recently about the new reality that any communications will leak beyond the intended recipients to all sorts of other stakeholders, particularly departments of the business in different countries.
So how should you construct your communications? Shel Holtz has a nice summary of the implications:
The core message absolutely must be consistent.
...
However, I don’t agree with the notion that you can craft a single communication for each audience. Whether or not you share your external communications with employees, they’ll see it—or, at least, have access to it. The message to analysts ends in analyst reports which find their way into investment blogs, the media message is published on news sites and from there into the blogosphere.
But employees still need the internal spin, and I’m using that word in the constructive sense. In a merger, analysts care about the impact on value and share price. Employees may also care about that—particularly if they own stock—but they have more immediate concerns that aren’t on the minds of other publics (including local communities, NGOs, activist groups, the government, and so on). They want to know about the security of their jobs, the status of existing projects, where they’ll wind up in the revamped structure of the new company and whether their benefits will change.
Spinning stories (in the good way) to accommodate the unique interests of each constituency is at the heart of effective communication. It’s why we research the audiences before we craft the communications.
Of course, defining the boundary line between the "core message" which must be preserved and the "details of specific interest" which can vary from audience to audience isn't easy. But that's why they pay us...
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