High Road Communications

Zinc Research recently unveiled the results of their “Canadians and Facebook Survey” and it comes with a few surprises. According to the survey results, just over half of all Canadians that are online are now also members of FB. What’s more surprising is the rapid ramp-up of Canadian membership over the three months prior to Christmas. With an average of 5.7 hours a week spent on the uber-popular website, it is clear that Facebook still has legs. One thing found lacking in the report was any critical mention of the intensely popular social networking site. With the relatively recent opening up of the platform to developers, introduction of “targeted ads” (Hey Facebook, I don’t need to lose weight, really), advertiser fan pages and the kerfuffle regarding Beacon or FB’s policy of knowing what you are doing on non-Facebook sites, and in some cases actually publishing this activity has many long-time users fuming mad. Add the recent spam attacks to that and although the legs seem fine perhaps a new pair of shoes are needed to help the website really find its stride.

Email overloadus, document versionitis, date conflictus, call log invisibilitus – these are challenges that all companies and communication departments can relate to.  How many policies and guidelines have you implemented to help manage the flow of information in your organization to keep everyone on the same page?

The boom of sites like Facebook and Windows Live Space has demonstrated that even teenagers understand the importance of keeping relationship information in a centralized location.  So why do communications departments try to piece media databases, monitoring and measurement tools, distribution services, CRM together? High Road client dna13 has an interesting perspective on something they call stakeholder networking, the business world’s version of social networking.

Natalie Sauve