One excellent example of inclusion are posts on intranet forums, blogs, and/or a Facebook page that is only open to company employees. This is a shift from where corporate communication professionals used to create all the messaging through which the company told its story to internal and external audiences. In the old system, communication was a highly controlled medium for distributing official company messages. Employees who received those messages became part of the passive audience, pretty much like members of the public.
Now, we’re seeing organizations let go of some of that control as they provide portals and space for more collaborative messaging. This is a variation on what we refer to as user-generated content (where people post blogs or on social media for public consumption), and is what we’ll refer to as employee-generated content instead.
One great example of inclusive employee-generated content includes internal blogs (written and/or video) that are created by employees outside of the communications role. These are employees who have a strong interest in writing, and become the equivalent of citizen journalists for the company. They can take pictures of company events with their phones or cameras, create blog posts about products being used, report on company events, share ideas about innovation, and much more. If the company wants to make those messages external, then those can be shared (and polished if needed) by the corporate communications team.