Internal email newsletters dont have to be as flat as a pancake. The simple solution is to make them more social.

Do you feel that you’re blasting out a block of trivial drool when you send out your internal email newsletter? It doesn’t have to be that way. Sorry to break the news to you but the problem starts with you.

Here’s 3 steps you can take to fix the situation…

1. Create content on the fly: build a social digest.

It’s monday morning and you have to churn out this email newsletter to the company. You start scurrying around looking for content that’s going to wow your eager employees…in reality you end up with a pile of uninteresting drivel.

Start collecting interesting social content on the fly through out the month, so when you get to actually creating your internal newsletter you have your content already at your finger tips.

I like to pick a topic in advance for the month – say, “cool guerrilla marketing stories. Once i focus on this i tend to bump into good articles as i browse around during my daily routine.

When you find  an article bookmark or clip it in a list you can refer back to. You can use something like the FlashIssue web Clipper that saves articles and displays them into editor for easy retrieval or use the Evernote browser plugin.

 

Don’t over pack your newsletter with huge blocks of text. Just grab a summary and build a mini social digest of content. People like to scan through and read what they want. You dont need to throw the kitchen sink at them.

If you use a “content friendly” email service to create your internal email newsletters it should not be taking you more than 10-15 minutes.

Pick a service that is geared up for using curated content, and not one that requires you to perform unimaginable feats of formatting prowess when you’re pasting in content  – i recommend FlashIssue but i’m biased 🙂

 

Your social email digest should end up looking something like this (click the image to take a better look):

 

 

2. Kick-start a conversation

It’s true, the objective behind internal email newsletters may vary but what ever the case, you should see yourself as the catalyst of a conversation. Be the ring master who introduces interesting discussion topics, not the pastor in the pulpit delivering a sermon.

People want to be engaged, so put some juicy material infront of them and let them talk.

As you create your social digest, make one of the entries is a question. Link it to one of your forums where employees can go and chat about it.

Havent got a forum? Then throw it on Twitter with a hashtag and let them go at it.

I’ve even posted questions on Quora and funnel people to the page to answer and get involved. Quora has a great platform for this; it’s ready to go with no effort on your part.

 

 

3. Ask employees to create interesting content.

Get in touch with your employees and have them talk about something they feel is of interest.

I like to get employees to create a blog post they feel passionate about. Here’s an example from Thomas (our developer / designer).

 

If you’re not set up to have employees create their own blog post, them have them email you a post and you can add it to the blog for them. It’s also a great way to create more content for SEO purposes.

 

So give it a go and start being more social when you create your internal email newsletter.

 

Create a social digest in just 5 minutes FlashIssue

 

 

 

 

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