7 ways to make internal comments work for you

You’re enabling comments on your site, and it’s turning into Dodge City. Here’s how Mayo Clinic moved from controlling the conversation to facilitating it.

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When Mayo Clinic launched a jobs website, employee commenters began demanding a location identifier.

Before social media, it would have taken weeks or months to gather and act upon feedback from the hospital group’s 60,000 employees.

Nowadays, internal comments speed the response.

“The very same day that we ran the article about the website launch, we made a change to the functionality of the website directly based on comments that came in from employees,” said Annie Burt, manager for institutional communications.

Many leaders—often encouraged by communicators—have been taught to control the message. The trend at Mayo, Burt said, is “moving from controlling the message to facilitating the conversation.”

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