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That’s what has happened this year atMonsanto. In our May issue, we interviewedGlynn Young, the company’s Director of Issues &Employee/Electronic Communications, abouthow Monsanto is using its blog, Monsanto According to Monsanto, to begin engaging itscritics. But the blog is just part of the total effort,one that began with the smaller step of postingposition papers, written in a more informal stylethan traditional press releases, in an area on thecorporate website called For the Record.Then the company took a bigger, morecontroversial step: it began publishing itsemployee newsletter,
Monsanto Today
, externally.Monsanto had already overhauled thenewsletter, moving everything onlineand bringing in external news viaNexis. “We included all the bad andcritical stuff, and doing that hascaused a lot of internal questioning, but we are trying to help employeesunderstand the whole context we’re operating in,” Young says, emphasizing that “employees lovethis newsletter.” The usage statistics bear thisout: between 55 and 65 percent of employees areaccessing the newsletter at any given point in the week. Using Microsoft SharePoint, employeescan write and publish their own storiesinternally; news is posted as soon as it breaks. Young describes it as in-house journalism: “It’s very realistic, not all smiley face.”Then, Young says, the thought was,“Let’s self-publish our own news.” Theresult was the MonsantoToday.com, which is “almost the same as what ouremployees are seeing.”Moving the publication externally was the culmination of debates abouttransparency and the employee newsletterdating back to the early 1990s, when someemployees were mailing copies of the newsletterto customers. “You can’t assume that something you do internally is going to stay internal,” Young says. “So you have to write, manage, andproduce it like it’s going to be on the front pageof
The New York Times
.It paints a morerealistic picture.”
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But what if you threw a transparency party and nobody came?Once
Monsanto Today
was online, Glynn’steam started its associated blog,giving employees and thecompany’s critics and customersa means of direct interaction.They created a Facebook page. But the key piecethat connected all the efforts and actually drovetraffic was Twitter. Young describes how it happened: “We were trying to figureout what to do withTwitter. As we gotsome experience andstarted posting things to it, we began to noticean interesting interplay between the blog, thenewsletter, For the Record, Twitter, andFacebook. Like a little communication systemor network. Twitter and Facebook are nowdriving traffic to the corporate website. We’renoticing traffic going directly to a particulararticle; interestingly, in some cases the activistgroups are becoming our best publicists—whilethey are complaining they provide the link.”Many of Monsanto’s followers (currently around 1200, 500 more than two months ago)are journalists, activists, and competitors. InJanuary, Monsanto had no voice in the ragingdiscussions about its activities. By May it had become the host of a growing, engaged groupthat provides a means forthe company to take partin the conversation. It worked because the teamgot three things right:
news release date opinion
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