Between Tuesday and Thursday last week, we gathered once again to celebrate smarter internal communication at the Melcrum Summit & Awards 2014, at the Excel in London.
Every year, this is a great chance for us to get a better idea of the changing role of IC, share thoughts, ideas and expertise with other professionals in the industry and broaden our network of peers. It is three days of “carefully curated inspiration” in the form of talks, webinars, presentations and brainstorming sessions. All of which helps us to improve the services we can provide, and allows us catch up with some old friends from the world of IC and employee engagement!
The Summit
We were blown away this year by the quality and insight of what was on show at the summit. Each presentation offered valuable and groundbreaking insights into the role of structure, strategy and storytelling in internal communication, and what trends to expect in 2015. Often using their own experiences as a guide, attendees shared with their peers what they had learnt about the role of internal comms in today’s business.
Presentations included an interesting lightning talk by Victoria James from employee engagement award-winning AstraZeneca on how they engaged a global workforce with video, Tom Barton of Capgemini on how he tries to align internal and external comms messages and Paul Dolan of Happiness by Design on how we can better observe employee behaviour.
Candid camera shots, captivating content, visually-inspiring videos and interesting infographics captured all the action, and all the best stuff was shared live, moment by exciting moment on Twitter using the popular and trending hashtag #melcrumsummit! Follow us on twitter or check out our Google+ page to see the action as it happened, or for a summary of all the talks, check out Melcrum’s Live Video blog from the event.
Get S.M.A.R.T
On the last day, the INVOLVE team put on our own brainstorming session at the event, encouraging the audience to develop their own SMART solutions to the most relevant comms challenges highlighted at the Summit. We identified these challenges as:
Working with leaders
Catalysing change through digital
Increasing brand value through IC
Changing behaviour, not minds
The role of IC – development & management
We grabbed the audience’s attention with free goody-bags, and held it with quick fire discussions and a fun and innovative game of Get SMART Trumps! In our fun version of the popular card game, each comms solution became it’s own top trumps card, and was given a score out of ten for each category on the S.M.A.R.T scale:
Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-based
It was a fun and involving way to get attendees thinking about what good looks like, using the 2014 Award Nominations as stimulus, and then using that to create SMART solutions to the challenges above. Thanks goes to everyone involved with the organisation of this year’s Summit. Thank you to Melcrum, and to all the speakers, attendees and organisers for another great event, and congratulations to all the deserving award winners! See you all next year!