By Melissa Dykstra, Vice President

As I read other blogs and publications about internal communications lately, I’m both excited and a little surprised at how much everyone seems to have latched on to the concept of storytelling as the hottest thing for helping employees understand corporate strategy and change.

In my mind, good employee communications has always been about storytelling. In my early days, I was the editor of an employee newsletter for a large manufacturing company in the automotive sector. I quickly realized, at the ripe old age of 22, that nobody reads the seemingly endless stories about how “moving to an organization made up of strategic business units brings about the change in accountability that will move the company forward.”

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By Aaron Brown, Associate Vice President

During the past few months, I’ve come to the conclusion that being a successful account manager is largely dependent on being a CIO – a chief integration officer. In my eyes, successful integration translates into happy clients, solid results and growing budgets.

As the public relations industry continues to navigate through the convergence of many mediums and the extinction of others, it’s imperative that account managers always have an eye on integrating disparate parts of their clients’ total communications package. Carol Cone of Cone PR in Boston highlights the importance of this in relation to cause marketing. Here are some tips that I’ve found successful:

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By Dennis Brown, Vice President

I got my start in tech marketing as a writer. Over the years, I’ve written brochures, Web sites, ads, feature articles, newsletters, white papers and case studies for a host of B2B and tech clients.

And, with every one of those projects I have asked myself, and was occasionally asked by a client or program manager, “Will anybody really read this stuff?” (Occasionally this question was turned into a declaration, often as an excuse for cutting pages out of a brochure to keep printing costs down: “Nobody’s ever going to read this stuff anyway.”)

As a writer, you feel obliged to answer that question in the affirmative-with some caveats. They’ll read it if we speak to them like human beings in a language they understand, and give them information that makes their job and life easier, and layer that information so they can get what they need by skimming and still have the opportunity to dig deeper if they desire.

The evidence that people do read is overwhelming.

They don’t always read what we as marketers want them to, but they do read. The Web is one of the best examples of that as it has been largely a text-based medium through most of its brief history.

But now that is changing. My ten-year-old son already spends more time watching YouTube videos than he does watching TV.

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