It is vital.

When it comes to breaking good, bad or scary news to employees, as a rule, most companies are piss-poor communicators. If and when they do think to inform the people who keep the shop running, it’s usually in the form of short, dismissive bullet points. Ick. Your people are your greatest asset! Learn to engage them in conversation! Oops; tangent – sorry.

I understand that spouting your message out to strangers and/or the media is one thing; chatting with your own employees is quite another. So, if you need an example of how to be transparent and validate their fears in times of uncertainty, check out this letter from Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh to his peeps about being acquired by Amazon.com.

Things I heart:

1. Hsieh’s tone, language and message flow serve to validate employees fears while still A) making his legal team happy, and B) talking to his employees like they are smart folks who mean something to him – because they expect and deserve that.
2. He uses a smiley face emoticon AND references “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree???”
3. He apologizes for the “suddenness of this announcement,” as it is not characteristic of the internal culture.
4. He lets employees in his head by sharing the leadership’s strategy behind the agreement: “over the past several months, we had to weigh all the pros and cons along with all the potential benefits and risks. At the end of the day, we realized that, once it was determined that this was in the best interests of our shareholders, it basically all boiled down to…”
5. He invites employees to ask questions and voice concerns to him directly: “please email me any questions that you may have so that we can cover as many as possible during the all hands meeting and/or a follow-up email.”
6. He shares a video from Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos so that employees can see and hear him, get to know his humor and background, and – this is key – discover Amazon and Zappos’ shared “obsession over customers. “

So, what do you think of the Zappos internal (and now external) communication tactic? Do you agree that it’s a good example? Or am I just blinded by my Zappos love?

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Day 4 involved a little less session time and a little more tacos/fajitas/beverages. I did attempt to go to the 11:30 session called “How to Protect Your Brand Without Being a Jerk!” but got tired of listening to the panelists argue with each other and left early.

I did manage to get a lot of work done on Day 4 though, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

The issue for Team Newman is this: AT&T was apparently caught off guard by the SXSWi geek migration to Austin, so our iPhones are useless. And, since our hotel gets its Internet service from AT&T, the wireless speed in our room is painfully slow. Therefore, if we are to get any work done we have to go to the Convention Center (sigh).

You can imagine how bitter we, the Internet-addicted, are right now.

BUT the good news is that we found a place here in Austin called Rio Grande and we loved the food there so much that we ate there twice on Day 4. The best part: they make FlackRabbit-sized mango margaritas! Adorable AND yummie!

We also went to a couple of fun parties where my hand got some fashion henna and my hubby got a cool t-shirt. Then of course there was the Gowalla party. We got there right as the doors opened and scored some free shirts and beer. AND got to meet Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (see above photo). He was quite nice and also very introverted, which surprised me a little.

All in all, Day 4 was great. I’m looking forward to Day 5, especially the “core conversation” about non-profits and web tech.

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• AT&T; Adding Capacity At SXSW To Deal With iPhone Crush (businessinsider.com)
• SXSW killing AT&T; in Austin? (jkontherun.com)

Okay, I know I expressed a bit of concern about whether SXSW would be this big I Heart Twitter! fest or if I would actually learn something new. No worries! I attended three fabulous panels and a keynote address on Day 2. In all honesty, the speakers most certainly did teach/encourage/motivate/challenge me, so if I had to go home today I would feel like I got my money’s worth.

I very much enjoyed hearing from Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, his keynote address was packed out and even spilled into three simulcast rooms. The great news about Tony is that he’s relatively young, extremely successful and absolutely understands that THE BEST way to have productive, customer service-oriented, on-message employees is to create a culture that fosters those things.

If you want your customers to be WOWed, as Hsieh does, then you’ve gotta take great care to hire employees who enjoy WOWing folks. And, “fire quickly” those who do not. Nice the hear that Zappos’s priority is creating and maintaining that culture. “If we hire for the culture fit,” Hsieh said, “the rest just takes care of itself.” He also said that Zappos considers money spent on WOWing customers and training and motivating employees as marketing dollars. It’s billiant, in my opinion.

The panel on Internet privacy was also fabulous. It wasn’t so much that I learned new stuff, you already know how I feel about the importance of knowing your online self. It’s was really just nice to have my obsession validated by really smart folks who are just as freaked out as I am about how little the average person cares about what personal information of theirs is floating around on the Web.

Anyway, there were so many great nuggets of geekdom crowding their way into my head that I thought I might explode a little. You can see my schedule over there…except for that Obama/Dean one. I skipped that to hang with hubby. And that’s okay because the keynote for Day 3 is the same Obama Web-ness, so it’s all good. The topics and converstaions spurred many blog ideas for me, so look for those in the coming days!

In the meantime I’ll leave you with this video of Dave stripping down at the trade show to get a cool t-shirt. We do what we have to do, friends: