Communication Ammo, by Sean Williams

Robin hosted #ICChat on 16 Nov. 2010

Robin Farr (@RJFarr) took the reins of #icchat, the Twitter-based discussion on internal communications, Tuesday, and did a great job. We again had more than 20 active participants (it’s building strength!) and more than 200 tweets. For a recap, read Robin’s blog, Inside Out, or have a butcher’s hook at the transcript, here.  Thanks Robin!

Next #icchat is Tuesday, 30 Nov., 2-3 p.m., North American Eastern Time. Hope to see you there!

Adding to what already is a stressful and extremely busy schedule, some accursed miscreant has hacked my Hotmail address and is merrily sending multiple spam emails to my contacts. I’ve contacted the relevant authorities, but it may be a few days before everything gets sorted out. I’ve sent a note from my CommunicationAMMO address, which I hope will assuage bad feelings. Basta!

Why in Heaven’s name do people do stuff like this? It moves me to profanity, vulgarity and raises my blood pressure.

A pox upon those wretched creatures!

By Geoff Barbaro

A few years ago, Mark R. Rayner, who has been chair, director or CEO of some of Australia’s largest companies, including multinationals National Australia Bank (NAB), Mayne Nickless and Pasminco, was asked to describe the characteristics of excellent communications departments.

He came up with this:

• Contribute significantly to the way business relates to internal and external publics
• Interpret the current and future social and political environment for strategic commercial planning
• Encourage the integration of responsibility for dealing with social and political matters with other management aspects

Too many communicators get stuck on a navel-gazing approach to communications, without recognising the other characteristics where immense value lies for CEO and organisations. Building relationships through communications is only part of the equation.

Communicators, whether internal, external, specialist or generalist, are ideally placed to contribute to the environmental analysis stage of strategic planning, as well as contributing to the need for environmental awareness in everyday operations.

By their nature, they consume and monitor media, regardless of the field they work in. They are interested in people, the world around them and how the two interact. Their position within the organisation means that they get to hear a lot about the internal and external concerns of staff and management.

Interpreting the environment, especially the social and political environments (using those terms in the broad sense), is an incredibly valuable asset to a company, much more so than the ability to write a newsletter, and is every bit as valuable as designing an integrated and effective internal engagement strategy.

But it is also a big responsibility and involves personally taking some risk.

Fae Robinson recently noted “the future doesn’t exist but we live in an evidence based culture that thinks it does” (thanks to Maree Conway for the quote). Given the future doesn’t exist, interpreting future environments can only occur within frameworks in which we can be wrong. But taking that risk and backing your judgement is part of being a valuable business leader.

Encouraging the integration of responsibility for dealing with social and political matters with other management aspects raises its own problems, especially having knowledge of leadership and management aspects. It is also a risky thing to do because it requires communicators to challenge other managers in other disciplines, regardless of respective levels within the organisation. But again, this is part of being a senior business leader. Do you think Chief Financial Officers don’t challenge Human Resource Directors about the integration of fiscal responsibility with human resource needs?

To add value to an organisation, communicators need to do more than organisational communication. You are not going to progress to the senior levels of an organisation by communicating alone. Nor is measuring every little thing you do and running to the CEO with graphs and tables showing that people actually took notice of what you did going to take you a long way. These actions are about you, not organisational success, and business leaders focus on and contribute to the overall success of the organisation.

Bring all of your attributes and knowledge to the organisation and identify areas where you can help others achieve organisation goals.

Take some time to read IABC Victorian Chapter President Jen Frahm’s post on “A Seat at the Big Table” and ask yourself whether you are actually ready to pull out the chair and aim for senior management. Also be aware there’s nothing wrong with wanting just to communicate, as long as you understand there’s a career plateau where you will come to rest.

If you are ready, you must broaden your focus beyond the immediate demands of communications and define the ways that you can contribute to success utilising every bit of skill and knowledge you can bring to the values, vision, strategies, environment and capabilities of an organisation.

And I look forward to seeing many more of you in business leadership positions!

Geoff Barbaro successfully utilised more than a decade in communications as a springboard to strategic planning, business leadership and values based management. He is an Associate Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management and a member of IABC. He is a Director of Corporate Growing Pains, a consultancy that helps organisations remove passion-bleeders and success barriers from their organisations. You can follow his business on Twitter @CoGrowingPains and him, personally, @Geoff_Barbaro.

I am gravely concerned about the paucity of effective measurement (as would befit a member of the Institute for PR Measurement Commission!).  On Wednesday night (8 Sept) I did some judging of entries for two IABC chapters.

Even for “Online Communications” — Websites — nearly all lacked basic measurement: measurable objectives!  For the love of our profession, please read “Guidelines for Setting Measurable PR Objectives” from the Institute and authors Forrest W. Anderson, Linda Hadley, David Rockland and Mark Weiner.

This update from a paper by Anderson and Hadley from 10 years ago (a “Gold Standard” paper in its own right) is approachable and designed for use by you and me, not just the academic world.

Regardless of whether you’re into internal or external communication, using social media within or without the enterprise, you need to have solid objectives. (end of rant!)

Radian6′s Amber Naslund had a great social media trend piece 28 July. One topic was measurement. She writes, in part:

Now the discussions center around what, specifically, businesses should be measuring in their own context of goals and objectives, what social data points actually matter in a business context (and how they’ve evolved from more traditional metrics), and how to derive insights and map out plans based on what we learn.

I commented that the measurement move from outputs through outtakes to eventual outcomes in mainstream media measurement would be repeated in social media measurement.  We do a lot of descriptive measurement in both spaces — tonality, reach, message congruity and share of voice/discussion merely observe what is happening, with little connection to behavior on the part of the recipient. It’s a somewhat passive perspective, in part because the formation of opinion is so complex. Pesky humans — always drawing on multiple influences before deciding on something.

The next phase is outtakes (sometimes called communication outcomes).  Web traffic, email open rates, click-throughs, changes in awareness or understanding gleaned through surveys still don’t connect to revenue or expense as directly as the C-suite would like.  In some organizations, that’s not a problem. The boss trusts the communicators to do their thing and is satisfied that the thing is meaningful for the business.

The Holy Grail is measuring business outcomes, answering the question, “how does communication activity affect the bottom line?”  Much social media case work is on the marketing side of the line.  Just as our cousins in advertising can establish a minimum number of impressions needed to predict number of qualified leads (and sales), they can use e-commerce to assign dollar values to social media activities.  The boss understands the advertising/marketing impact on the business a lot better than the PR impact because of that frame of reference.

We know that reputation depends much more on actions than on words. But, is there a minimum number of media impressions (regardless of social or mainstream) required to move public opinion positively regarding reputation matters, rather than sales-related matters?  Does increasing your share of voice/discussion with positive messaging lead to improved awareness, favorability, etc. ?

What do you think?