- Have you heard the terms push and pull communications?
Do you know the difference between them?
The quick version is that push communications
are ones that are directed outwards to an audience,
announcements, newsletters, advertisements,
publishing status reports to distribution lists.
These are all communications that are
being delivered with intent to a specific audience.
Pull communications are a bit different.
This is communication that the audience is opting to see.
Maybe they are monitoring an online forum.
Maybe they're participating in a chat group
or an online community, either at work or privately.
The important thing to focus on is that the audience
is there because they want to be, and as such
are a little more likely to have a connection to it.
Why does this matter.
Well, let's say you wanna get information
out to your organization about an important change.
You can always send out an email announcement,
but you have no control over who actually opens
and reads that email.
With all the competing information
in the recipients' mailboxes,
you might not make much of an impact, right?
But, you've also got a collaborative tool,
like Slack, or Yammer, or Spark,
where people have self selected
to create and join various communities of interest.
Although communities in team spaces are more often
used as places for pull communications,
they can be leveraged for targeted
organizational push communications too.
Team members are already looking
at these groups for information.
You can utilize the message threads
as another place to broadcast your message.
Now, a word of caution,
I'm not telling you to spam every community in your company
with information about the picnic.
What I am advocating is a strategic use of existing channels
to get better message penetration
to a specific, desired audience.
If there's a change coming
to the way purchase orders are processed,
and the finance team has some existing communities,
I would highly recommend adding a post to their groups
to let them know about it.
By the way, I would probably give them
a link to where they can learn more,
rather than publishing the whole ball of wax in the thread.
You need to work within the framework of the tool.
So, you probably won't get to do
any fancy formatting, either.
You may need to coordinate this with the group admin.
That's actually a nice and courteous
thing to do, just saying.
But, why not communicate by utilizing a forum
where people already are?