Is Germany the world’s emerging internal communication powerhouse? For 11 days back in March, I travelled the length and breadth of the country and met with practitioners of all stripes–and found an industry on the verge of a breakthrough on several fronts.
While the day to day practice of IC is still rudimentary in places–stuff of the “newsletters and posters” variety, German practitioners are embracing social media and social communication with abandon. Their national IC community is organized on the Xing network rather than in a dues-consuming association, and new ideas from outside are absorbed more through Twitter feeds than conferences or publications.
At the same time, new software applications are being adopted in major companies like Siemens and Deutsche Telekom that give sanction and voice to genuine bottom-up communication.
The piece can be found on Melcrum’s Internal Communication Hub at http://bit.ly/9tm2xE.
Mike Klein--The Intersection 