Online PR: News and Views from ://CORPORACT

G20 Planning for April Fools

Businesses around the Bank of England in London have boarded their windows up in anticipation of the forthcoming G20 protests, with demonstrators expected to converge on the Bank tomorrow (April 1st).

President Obama is likely to receive a warm personal welcome in Europe but analysts say he will almost certainly meet resistance over his plans to revive the embattled world economy.

The G20 summit is being held at the Excel centre in London's Docklands on Thursday.  Watch out for those April Fools who will come out to disrupt everyone's day.

Social Media Gets Employees Talking

During a period of corporate upheaval, or when external news from the world of businesses creates anxieties leading to a crisis of confidence in businesses and low employee morale and productivity, the role of effective internal communications takes on greater significance.

However, although everybody understands and talks about the significance of internal communication, not many organisations manage it efficiently or have an information flow that runs in all directions throughout the organisation -  not just from the top down.

It’s no surprise then that the “communications” element of internal comms has been hooked into the world of social media and been recreated in the form of Yammer.com  - a tool designed “to get employees talking and boost their productivity”.

Yammer aims to encourage people employed within companies to interact with one another around the projects, tasks and issues they have.   It’s free to employees but the boss has to pay – employers can join a price of $12 per employee.

Interesting business model from Yammer.com.   As an employee, do you say what you think knowing that comments can be viewed by the boss and you could pay the price, and, if you are a the employer, will you pay the price to hear what your employees think?

://CORPORACT is an award winning online corporate communiciations company.

Long Life Comes at a Cost in Japan

The Japanese are living longer because of healthy diets, strong communities and easy access to medical care. In 1963 just 153 Japanese celebrated their 100th birthdays compared to 19,768 new centenarians in 2008.

But long life comes at a cost.  The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has decided to reduce the size of the congratulatory silver cup given to centenarians and inscribed with the Chinese kanji character ‘happiness to all’.  From now it will be 9cm in diameter rather than 10.5cm.

How would this apply in the UK? 

Like Japan, the adult population in the UK is living longer and the health of the population has improved steadily over the last century in spite of increasingly unhealthy diets and problems with access to national health care.  The population is also getting older.  By 2026, half of the adult population in the UK will be over 50.

Messages from the Queen are automatically sent on a person's 100th, 105th and subsequent birthdays.

With more and more people celebrating their 100th birthdays, I wonder whether the Queen will resort to technology or social media to process en masse her congratulatory message to centenarians in the future?