When it comes to knowledge sharing apparently Google, Facebook and Amazon are all wrong

The main business model of the most successful tech companies on the planet is quite simple. It's all about advertising.?

Google, Facebook and now increasingly Amazon make a lot. For the former two, most of their revenue is based on other companies paying to position their ads to a highly specific demographic of people. The companies paying for that space then intricately tailor those ads to fit the persona they’re trying to reach?

It's extremely lucrative, to say the least.

We are all very used to it. A lot of us barely even notice how messages change and are being positioned to us as we browse our favourite apps or sites.

I was recently listening to “Plain English” where they were discussing why Twitter hasn't been able to grow this model as successfully, and Elon Musk also very much agrees.

Their hypothesis was based on the experience the user has as they utilise two different apps. Let's take, for example, Twitter and Instagram. Twitter is lean inexperience. You're engaging with content, reading, trying to understand thoughts, insights, whatever context they may be in.?

With Instagram, it is a much more visual, and lean back experience. The ads are also much less obvious as they appear within your timeline. Using Instagram they argue makes you more prone to be in buying mode at that particular time.

?There are countless articles and insights about the world of advertising and from people exponentially more qualified than myself to talk about that particular world.

But at the core is the ability for companies to rely on metrics which confirm the success or failure of a campaign. For every $1 spent it becomes almost an exact science on how you boost numbers, tweak the message and ultimately improve impact.?

Despite the fundamental similarities – a core needs to portray a message and influence change – this is a totally different experience when getting between the figurative four walls of work.?

In most cases, we don’t have anywhere near the same insights, which means that we have no data to act on in order to improve communications and decision-making. And the cycle continues to turn.

Before the internet and the rise in data-driven advertising, we had a similar method to what we're experiencing at work now. It was… broadcast.

It's an extremely old school way of getting a message across and it is rife across the board inside companies. I hear from leadership teams almost every single day that they don’t know how key messages are landing across their hybrid organisation. Apart from anecdotal or volunteered feedback in a survey, they don’t have a real sense.

That leads to typically the communications teams getting stuck trying to convey information to a wide variety of people on multiple platforms with little to no data on its impact.?

That is not a good place to start. How can you make effective decisions for the future with little to no insight into what’s working and what isn’t right now?

I see this time and time through our work at Temporall where we are unlocking data for companies every day from workplace platforms like Slack and Google. This is key to understanding the impact of communication and knowledge transfer and ultimately, bringing untapped data to their decision making.

Here’s a typical scenario we see when we first engage companies currently broadcasting on every workplace platform that people in the company use:

Let's post it in the Slack #announcements-channel.

Let's send an email out.

Let's put it on the intranet.

Let's mention it in meetings.

That’s the best way to make sure everyone gets this piece of information.

That kind of megaphone communications style still seems to be the default in lots of organisations.

Why is there such a jarring difference in the way we receive messages in our personal lives to the way we do in our work lives??

Are Google, Facebook and Amazon all wrong?

There is also a somewhat stigma attached to internal corporate communications. I witness this first-hand where companies of all different shapes and sizes are worried about the “infodemic”. This is essentially where too much information is shared in digital and physical environments. Which could lead to rumour, hearsay and ultimately an incorrect understanding of what was meant by the message in the first place.

But we're in this kind of bizarre stage where the most successful companies that have ever existed are doing it one way: Hyper-targeted communications.

Yet, in our working environment, we’re seemingly archaic about the whole thing. Of course, the final goal is different but it’s all essentially about using the right platforms to send out a message to have some kind of impact.

Why is the workplace in such a different stage?

It's a lack of data.

It's a lack of true insights on how a message has been consumed in the world of work. We have key metrics that all advertisers live by and this is what ultimately needs to take place in the working world. There needs to be more rigour to what works well and what doesn't. We could then get tailored messages that resonate with us and are received on the platform which we prefer to engage with to ensure a greater impact and distribution of messages.

We’re all unique and valuable. We deserve better.

We talk a lot about where work happens and when it happens. Hybrid is front and centre of pop culture right now.

I think it's probably more important to look at how it happens, especially when it comes to communications.

I feel we have the opportunity of a lifetime to reshape how "corporate communications" is seen and allow it to become something that is truly embraced within organisations across the globe.

And step one is the same for everyone: Give yourself a fighting chance through data like you would outside of the company