Communication is a difficult beast to pin down. It lives and continually evolves. Thus, increasingly, today's formation of opinion about companies, products, and services is happening within online communities - in a tone completely different from traditional push communication used in the corporate world. Many enterprises are not ready for this change.
Organizations should reach out to their communities and strive to attract and retain them. The corporate website can even become the activity hub for an online community - if approached correctly. For this purpose, enterprises have to make an advance effort and aim for:
- openness and transparency
- a platform for productive information and opinion exchange
- willingness to enter into dialogue
- providing the community with appropriate information and entertainment offers - in one word: communitainment
Mitteilerei assists enterprises in setting up a communitainment strategy. In a joint discussion with enterprises as well as their PR and marketing agents, we develop offers for community dialogue - for online as well as offline contexts.
To this end, Mitteilerei cooperates with freelance artist Wolfgang Traub (who, by the way, has drawn all the illustrations presented on this website). Conjointly, we plan and create communitainment materials - individually designed for the respective enterprise, objective, and target community.
Why Communitainment?
Employees increasingly merge their private IT (particularly web) usage behavior into their work environments. The analysts from Gartner have labeled this mixture of professional and private IT usage "consumerization" - and it's spreading like wildfire.
Enterprises have to react to this trend: Getting information about IT has to become more entertaining - any other approach is outdated.
In consumer marketing and on YouTube, almost anything is possible - but why should stimulating communication be restricted to marketing and web 2.0 settings?
Why not present information about a new product version tongue-in-cheekly with cartoons?
Why not create a white paper in a comics format?
Or a useful but funny animated how-to film?
Communitainment replaces "announcing" by "getting people on board" - customers, partners, employees, users, project participants, etc. Communitainment speaks to individuals on a personal level, arouses their curiosity, motivates them to become involved.
What Kinds of Projects Suit Communitainment?
Marketing and PR aside, the main operational areas for communitainment in IT environments are those IT projects directly touching corporate culture, such as:
- security awareness
- green enterprise
- service management
- virtual desktops
- social networking
What topics are on your mind these days? Could a communitainment approach help you? Ask Mitteilerei.
