Close Corporate Communication Gaps and Avoid Duplicate Content Here’s How - The Writers For Hire

CLOSE CORPORATE COMMUNICATION GAPS AND AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT: HERE’S HOW Your company’s hiring manager has a great human-interest story about a group of employees who donated vacation days to help out a sick co-worker. She shared the story in an email the people in her department but the story never found its way to the company’s social media director. Nobody outside of the HR office heard about it. An engineer from your company just presented an award-winning whitepaper at a global conference. Your clients would benefit a lot from the information, and it could even be re-purposed into a great editorial for an industry publication. There’s one problem, though: The paper hasn’t found its way to the marketing team. Your company’s VP of marketing creates a beautiful, informative new brochure but half of the company doesn’t know it exists. The sales department starts writing a totally new brochure. The CEO starts writing another one. None of the new brochures look or sound alike. We could go on but you probably see where we’re going with this: communication gaps lead to missed opportunities, duplicated work, and wasted time and resources. This happens with all sizes of companies, in every industry. Everyone assumes that they’re communicating and sharing, but they’re often unaware of what’s going on in other departments. But how do you close those gaps? How do you ensure that your company’s departments are communicating and sharing information? Here are a few strategies to help you improve communication across all of your company’s teams and departments: 1. Establish a point person/content manager to keep track of all content, across all departments. This person should be responsible for keeping up with everything from digital and print ads to whitepapers and editorial content to internal newsletters. 2. Invest in digital asset management software. If you need a starting point, check out the solutions provided by Widen Collective,  Brandfolder, and Libris. All three solutions have high customer satisfaction ratings and are designed to be user-friendly. Widen’s VP of Marketing Jake Athey cites Widen’s depth of design, highly integrated platform, and responsive service. Brandfolder incorporates a â€Å"visually elegant UI† and a â€Å"unique twist on folder hierarchy,† according to Product Marketing Manager Laura Hamel. On a budget? You can even use free cloud storage options like Google Drive. Whatever you choose, make sure that you organize your content in a way that that makes sense and is easy to search/browse. 3. Spread the word. Once you’ve got a point person and a cloud-based library in place, it’s time to let everyone know about it. Use email, intranet, and/or your company’s internal social media accounts. Include important information like the name and contact information for your new content manager and login info for your storage system. 4. Establish a â€Å"communicate before creating content† policy. Encourage everyone to check in with your content management point person before starting a new project. A simple Skype message like, Hey I need X type of content, or Do we have a brochure about X? should help cut down on duplicate work. You could also use your company’s intranet to share and exchange quick updates about the content you need, the content you have, and share any other useful information. 5. Consider project management software. If your company creates a lot of content, a project tracking tool might be a good investment.Tweet this Project management software allows real-time collaboration, and it helps ensure that everyone is on the same page. Web-based project management tools such as Asana, Wrike, Basecamp, or Trello) are ideal for workforces that are dispersed across geographic regions. To learn more, read reviews, and compare platforms,  g2crowd.com is a handy resource. 6. Have monthly or quarterly and check-in calls. Your content manager should conduct regularly scheduled calls with key people from   each department to ensure that everyone is in the loop about new or updated content. 7. Keep your content up to date. It’s important to review your content library periodically. This will give you a good opportunity to update, discard, and revise your content as needed.