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)