The World Cup wall planner has gone up in the office and I found an old England flag stuffed in the back of a cupboard, so that's hanging off the side of the TV by Neville's desk. Given that England could well get through the first round we're in for at least three weeks of me pretending I know what I'm talking about when it comes to football.
However, sport seems to be coming up more and more in my working life. I'm working on a project for one of the Premiership rugby clubs and yesterday I had a really fascinating conversation with the guys at Essentially - Bell Pottinger's sister Sports marketing business.
This isn't a lame attempt to plug a sister business; I do have a point to make.
My colleague wanted to talk about how little internal exploitation takes place of many sponsorships. Companies seem to be really good he said, at wringing every last drop of value from sponsoring sports or arts events, but often the internal dimension was largely forgotten or only minimally explored.
He said that often even employee allocations of tickets for events don't get taken up.
Which is real shame as I do believe that one of the key roles of internal communications is to bring people together and make them feel part of a community. Getting involved with a sponsorship is a perfect way to connect people.
I'm not suggesting that we should get better at dishing out tickets for the opera or the Super bowl. I do mean that a partnership with an arts body or a sport creates an opportunity to get staff out there talking about their organisation and sharing the values with the wider world.
For example McDonalds in the UK makes excellent use of its association with footbal - they help crew members qualify as coaches and run a national inter-restaurant tournament.
Or it is great excuse for getting people talking about your brand values - O2 ran an amazing party of their staff a couple of years ago when they took on the rebranding of the Dome.
However, I think there is a small problem facing IC people. We rarely get access to the sorts of budgets that our marketing colleagues are used to playing with. I suspect that we sometimes don't find it easy to get really carried away with the possibilities.
I'm certainly going to look some more at this area - I think there's real potential here for communicators to push the boundaries.
Liam
Bell Pottinger Change and Internal communication
