Posts Tagged ‘communication messages’
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
“As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.” It’s been years since Peter Drucker offered that bon mot, but it certainly seems to be truth. The New York Times’ Corner Office feature, which runs Sundays on page two of the Business section, talks to business leaders of all stripe, and each of them has something to say about the importance of communication to their business style.
Dec. 6, Joseph J. Plumeri, Chairman and CEO of Willis Group Holdings (the insurance broker whose name now graces the former Sears Tower in Chicago), was Corner Office’s subject. He said:
I spend 25 percent to 30 percent of my time calling my associates — whether they had a family problem or pulled off a great deal and brought in a new client, or saved a client. Two-minute phone call, or handwritten note. I can’t begin to tell you how important that stuff is. E-mails are easy, but sometimes they get in the way of really feeling how somebody feels about your effort.
Is it time consuming? Yes. But that’s what you’ve got to do…
Plumeri goes on to say that helping people understand and believe in the choices the company makes is essential to realizing business vision.
On Dec. 13, Nancy McKinstry, CEO of Wolters Kluwer, a Netherlands-based information services company, says “Every culture is very different in how people make decisions” as she relates how her leadership style changed over time according to the communication styles of her team.
In the Netherlands, where our company is based, people really want to be heard early in the process. So if you just go to someone and say, “I want you to go take this product and enter this new market,” most likely the first response they’ll say is, “No, and let me tell you how that won’t work.” What they really want to say is, “I’m not going to commit yet to that objective until we have a chance to really sit down and explore how we’re going to do that, what your expectations are, and how we measure success.”
Then, when I work with my Italian colleagues and the Spaniard colleagues, what you find is they can’t always tell you how they’re going to get something accomplished, but they manage to get it done.
Shocking news, really, that one’s leadership team expects to have a clear strategy in place before acting, and wants the freedom to choose how to accomplish the goals they’re responsible for.
What concerns me is how few middle managers (or even executive managers) have undertaken the sort of self-examination that both McKinstry and Plumeri evidently have. In 20 years, I’ve met only a handful who embrace the power of participative communication. By the way, they’re the leaders who typically win in the marketplace.
Why don’t more organizations evaluate the communication strength of their leaders? One reason is the perception that you can’t hold people accountable for “soft” skills. Yet, we know that there are very strong correlations between effective communication behavior and employee understanding and comprehension. So, if we want an informed, educated workforce which understands the business and their role in it, their managers will need to be the ones providing context and leadership.
Therefore, let’s evaluate communication skills among managers and come up with ways of helping those managers improve and thrive. It’s not too difficult a concept.
Tags: @commammo, Communication AMMO, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication skills, communication vehicles, effective communication, employee, engage, evaluation, internal communication, leadership communication, manager communication, measurement, PR measurement, reputation management, transparency
Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, News Analysis, Strategy | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
One smart PR pro told me years ago that even the best road map is useless without a destination. Because so many communicators are struggling to understand the role of strategy in a world of fascinating tactics, it can seem like the universe is throwing map after map to us, shouting “you need this right now!”
When I step back from “being strategic” (quite a trick for someone once called, with some derision, “strategy boy”) it is no exaggeration to say, echoing the travel metaphor, that the best strategy is useless without an objective.
Strategic objectives need three things: 1) a benchmark. You need to look back to see where you’ve been. 2) A target. You need to look ahead and see where you’re going. 3) A time period. You need to articulate how long it’s going to take to get from where you were/are to where you want to be. If you’re missing any of those things, chances are good that you don’t have a strategic objective.
The trick is, too often, we set objectives with no clear understanding of where we are, let alone where we were. That’s where research comes in. It’s right out of PR 101 — start with research before you launch a campaign — and we find lots of reason not to do the research. Sometimes it’s related to cost, sometimes to our own skillsets. We like to think of ourselves as creative geniuses, unencumbered by such trivialities. This attitude is especially prevalent in media relations, where our relationships and seat-of-the-pants skills can mean so much in a crisis; when things go right in our activities, that can reinforce the perception that PR is art, rather than science.
Of course, our “gut” is merely the application of our accumulation of experience, both in terms of time and in terms of education. We think we know what our employees, or our customers, for example, know/think/feel about our organization, when we could remove any uncertainty with some simple research.
But, I digress — the objective-setting process is even more important when considering social media. Too many organizations are jumping in without a clear idea of what they want to accomplish. More on this topic to follow.
What about your communication planning process? Does it start with objectives?
Tags: @commammo, Blog, Communication AMMO, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication vehicles, effective communication, employee, engage, evaluation, internal communication, measurement, PR measurement, Public Relations, reputation management, Research, ROI, Social Media
Posted in Measurement, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Several good ones:
Rich Becker — great discussion in the comments on social media concepts…
Brian Solis — Do we need to redefine “influencers?”
Chuck Hemann — What impact on social media use/adoption does organizational culture have ?
Paul Seaman — The Excellence theory says PR is about fostering relationships. Paul disagrees.
Tags: @commammo, Blog, Communication AMMO, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication vehicles, effective communication, engage, evaluation, internal communication, measurement, PR measurement, Public Relations, reputation management, ROI, Social Media, transparency, Twitter
Posted in News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
In the political firestorm that engulfs the United States, one side claims the other has no principles, whilst the other claims their opponents show a slavish devotion to ossified beliefs that make no sense in modern America. Moral relativism, one side’s rhetoric goes, has brought our society to the brink of destruction. Outmoded thinking, the other side’s speaking points read, has made our country a cruel, Darwinist dystopia, where “survival of the fittest” is played out in policy. For some reason, the ongoing debate of tea parties and new Fascism makes me think about public relations.
The collapse of centralization of news and the growth of social media is fueling a similar decamping in our profession. On one side, those who believe that social media is an incarnation of evil, bent on destroying the concept of objectivity and authoritative sources, not to mention the homicide of the public relations industry. On another side (there are more than two), those who see social media as the democratization of information and the dissolution of concentrated media power, elevating ordinary people and adding to the diversity of voices in the media mix.
The ethical questions percolating for me these days relate to our role as PR people in participating in social media. In the sense of the “Excellence Theory,” social media should represent the triumph of two-way, symmetrical communication; active engagement of organizations and their stakeholders, seeking mutual benefit. But it seems to me that organizational participation in social media is still largely an asymmetrical game of persuasion, of message sending rather than dialogue. Marketers dominate the conversation online, devaluing PR objectives regarding reputation in favor of metrics focusing on revenue generation. Organizations continue to struggle to find applications for social media inside the enterprise (speaking broadly here; fully aware there are exceptions), as despite efforts to embrace openness and multi-directional communication, command and control is difficult to release.
The dilemma for practitioners is especially acute for agencies and suppliers, and the ad value equivalency debate is an example. AVE has been discredited for years, but is still in common use because many clients demand it. They understand it, and AVE provides a shorthand description that they find useful. The Institute for PR Measurement Commission recently condemned the practice, with one member writing that just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s right. When a client pays an agency and asks for AVE, we should say “no,” goes that argument. But the fear is that, “If I don’t give them AVE, they’ll go find someone who will.”
On the social media side, should all organizations use social media? What is our ethical responsibility here? I’d be hard pressed to say that everyone should embrace social media. I cannot make that claim, that is, if I care about giving good advice to my client. It’s not much different than telling a client reflexively that they need an intranet, or a newsletter, or a video. I need to understand the client’s objectives before I jump to tactics.
That doesn’t even address the more serious ethical challenges represented by social media.
Look at the Astroturfing issues, from fake blogs to agency staff commenting on client products. Is the free market of ideas and caveat emptor sufficient to rein in those who have no compunction about engaging in such tactics?
I have always been an idealist with respect to media, seeing the years between Edward R. Murrow and Watergate as the pinnacle of journalism, heroic reporters, courageous editors and committed publishers digging for The Truth, all with peerless ethical grounding. The disappearance of even the pretext of objectivity in journalism (reaching its zenith — or nadir — with MSNBC/Fox News/The Washington Post/New York Times) has disgusted me, even as I admit that objectivity was a goal, not a reality according to my own journalism professors. We could aspire to objectivity and embrace fairness, something few media outlets now even attempt, at least by my crude measure.
Certainly the outright failure of the trust equation (media, government, business all suffer), should be laid bare here. One must evaluate the media’s biases and objectives, and caveat emptor reigns there, as well.
People determined to do wrong will find a way if their personal ethical compass permits. Maybe that’s the scariest part of all of this. We’re relying on individuals to manage their own ethics in a time when ethics are subjective, not objective, and right and wrong are relative concepts.
Tags: @commammo, Communication AMMO, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication vehicles, effective communication, employee, engage, internal communication, Public Relations, reputation management, ROI, Social Media, transparency, Twitter
Posted in Measurement, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 4 Comments »
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
It’s usually on page two of the Sunday New York Times business section. A short Q & A with some notable business leader that covers the usual ground – “How do you hire? What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?” This week, Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, is on the hot seat, and she joins a long list of her peers in crediting effective communication for much of her organizational effectiveness.
There isn’t anything particularly earth-shattering in the interview, and truth to tell, there usually isn’t. But I continue to be heartened by the focus on communication as a business process that I see in this feature almost every week. Faust says:
“I spend a huge amount of time reaching out to people, either literally or digitally, and with alumni networks all over the worl, so that I can connect. Leadership by walking around — that a digital space now, it’s virtual space. An enormous amount of my job is listening to people, to understand where they are, how they see the world so that I can understand how to mobilize their understanding of themselves in service of the institutional priorities.”
The interviewer says, “But you can’t make everybody happy.” Her reply:
“No, you don’t make everybody happy, but if people feel they were listened to, they’re going to be much more likely to go along with a decision.”
If that short conversation doesn’t motivate communicators to see themselves as something other than a media publicity machine, I don’t know what will. We, alone in the organization, are well-equipped to counsel leaders on communication effectiveness. Yet, we too often cede this skill to Human Resources (“Well, it’s really about training people, and that’s HR!”).
We are the experts at communication. We understand why dialogue and discussion among our employee base is important. We know what a good presentation is and how to help improve the level of communication in our organization. If not us, whom? And yet, most of us would rather work with a reporter on a media story than do the hard work of remaking our organizational culture from hierarchy to high performance. We rationalize that choice by claiming that the media story has more impact on revenue. But the jury is still out on that, except for marketing communication and product PR. I submit that we’d positively affect reputation in a measurable way if we focused more on making our leaders and their teams communicate better.
I’ve been reading the Corner Office in the Times for years. I haven’t yet seen an executive say that media relations is a core leadership function.
Tags: communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication vehicles, discuss, effective communication, employee, engage, internal communication, Media Relations, PR, Public Relations, reputation management
Posted in Communication Skills, Internal Communications, News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | Comments Off
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
“The Wall Street Journal” closes its Boston bureau. “Forbes” lays off a couple dozen this week, with rumors flying of more to come. “The New York Times” is looking for 100 buyout exits. Conde Nast shutters “Gourmet” magazine, and “Cookie,” “Elegant Bride” and “Modern Bride.” It’s a lousy time to be a journalist, eh? But what about being the PR people who pitch these pubs?
With advertising spending falling (or at least reclassifying from print to broadcast and Web), “getting media attention” in the right segments continues to be a critical element of PR activity. But the burgeoning social media market is threatening to change that calculus, if you believe the doyennes of blogs, Twitter and similar platforms. And why wouldn’t it? If we were pitching Modern Bride before, why can’t we pitch Classic Bride, Becoming Mrs. Jones, or The Broke-Ass Bride?
Does a company that makes bride dresses, or wedding catering, or domestic partnership photography have the time necessary to build relationships in social media? Or do they just need a quick ad with a special phone number that offers 20 percent off, a mention in a popular blog?
How many of us will the new behemoth integrated agencies need to help facilitate these processes? Who’s going to pay us to tell them to talk to a bride blogger in Madison, Wisc.?
This is only part of the puzzle — I have written before about the lack of independent and authoritative content in new media. Unless many of us suddenly become willing to pay a subscription fee for such content, it’s going to go away. Perhaps crowds really are wise, and not mobs. Perhaps over time, Wikipedia is more accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica, notwithstanding being horrifically inaccurate at the moment we need factual information, or openly manipulated.
Any of us who care about this topic will need to develop our own ability to engage in social media, build our reputation for accuracy and probity, and somehow compete with the fakers, liars, and spammers. That’s not an easy task.
Tags: @commammo, Blog, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication vehicles, effective communication, evaluation, Journalism, measurement, Media Relations, PR, PR measurement, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in Measurement, Media Relations, News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | 5 Comments »
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
Make a note. It takes practice to handle two conferences in five days’ time. Of course, maybe my energy level would have been higher if I’d been speaking at them instead of attending one (live-Tweeting my way through a couple of days), and introducing speakers and serving as sponsorship chair at the other. Anyone who knows me will aver that I’m a fairly well-smoked ham, so being at the center of attention is exciting for me, rather than exhausting.
But the stress of pressing the flesh, talking to new people, and simultaneously trying to stay engaged in a sudden spate of potential business opportunities turned out to be rather a bit tiring. I also wondered whether the evil humours surrounding new friend Richard Bagnall and his lovely friend Marian might have attempted to seize me, but as it turns out, a couple o’nights of good sleep returned me to fit-as-a-fiddle status. Just ask my students if I lacked energy 22 October in class… Hah!
But now, devoid of excuses, I’m faced again with the ever-growing list of things to do, with ideas for a paper roaming in my head along with the still-warm and previously mentioned business opportunities. Oh, and I do need still to write a final exam and figure out what I need to do when I teach “Face to Face Tactics” at Kent State in the next semester. I also had slowed the pace of my blogging, owing to the madcap hilarity of the past couple of weeks, but accelerated the Twitter-ing at #iprms09. The social media experiment continues.
So it seems that indeed, I’m finding a bit of normalcy amid the falling leaves and gathering chill. Providence willing, I’ll soon have a fall more complicated — this time by billable hours.
Tags: @commammo, Blog, Communication AMMO, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication vehicles, conference, effective communication, LinkedIn, measurement, PR measurement, Public Relations, reputation management, Research, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in Measurement, News Analysis, Research, Strategy | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 12th, 2009
One terrific side benefit of teaching PR Theory and Ethical Practice at Kent State University this fall has been reading a whole lot of interesting work from outstanding PR scholars. William Kennan and Vince Hazleton of Radford University contributed a chapter on internal PR that got me pondering certain aspects of the Social Capital Theory as it might apply to social media.
Two items in particular in their discussion stood out. 1) The existence of a network of connections and its effect on relationships and related outcomes; and 2) Identification, the extent to which people see themselves as connected to others.
The network, the opportunity to send and receive messages that contribute to the creation, maintenance and expenditure of social capital, is a pretty obvious bridge to social media. A fair number of people think that the network is the outcome of social media use, rather than a tool for some other purpose. But let’s stay on target (we could amble down that path for hours…). My own use of social media has focused on this purpose — expand the network and see what effect it has on my ability to forge a new business. The social capital theory indicates that the network itself takes on a role apart from its human factors; that the existence of the network influences relationships and relationship outcomes.
We can see this effect in action when members of one person’s network interact with each other and cross into other networks — not for the specific purpose of dialogue toward an outcome, but merely for the sake of discourse. That discourse creates additional meaning — leading to different understandings among network members.
Secondly, identification might originate with some kind of common interest or purpose, either large or small depending on the specific subject. The organization typically wants its employees to identify strongly with the organization, to feel strongly connected to it — that’s the heart of much employee engagement activity. Social media users appear to identify with other users — being “in the club” commenting on Twitter gives the users a sense of belonging that they find important or pleasurable. That may be one reason, as Mark Schaefer observed, there seems to be cronyism among the social media mavens. Heck, there seems to be cronyism among users of social media in general.
This all leads me to reinforced suspicion about whether social media can replace mainstream media. With a tendency to see social media use as a measure of self-worth (and therefore to see people who don’t use social media as somehow inferior — “they don’t get it!”), the ability of social media to adopt a third-party objective perspective is compromised. We can debate whether any media can be objective — if you have a strong perspective, people will know where you stand, rather than guessing about it — but making caveat emptor work requires some amount of transparency.
Authenticity can’t be a mask, it needs to be real and grounded in personal ethics so that one can judge the source and properly execute “buyer beware.” Otherwise, the identification among members of the network becomes more important than being honest.
Tags: communication messages, effective communication, engage, internal communication, LinkedIn, MySpace, reputation management, Social Media, transparency, Twitter
Posted in Public Relations, Research, Social Media, Strategy | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
There is an existential discussion going on over at PRConversations. A post by the eminent Toni Muzi Falconi asks the question, “What comes next after Grunig?” — Jim Grunig being the legendary PR pro and educator whose landmark research in the 1980s led to the Excellence Theory of public relations.
PR has long had a love-hate relationship with theories. One hallmark of a true profession is that it has a strong theoretical basis in academic circles. So, the lack of a theory of its own (as near as I can figure) has led to gnashing of teeth and some amount of inferiority fantasy in the academic community.
Many of the most studied theories — Community Theory, Rhetorical Theory, Framing Theory, Systems Theory — borrow heavily from other disciplines, most notably from the general communication studies field. Coupled with PR practitioner resistance to theory in general and the academy in part, scholars for a time were very quick to dismiss PR as a separate profession. They preferred to see it, instead, as a part of communication, journalism, or marketing, and thus not as serious as their intellectual fore-bearers.
Grunig, along with co-researchers David Dozier, William Ehling, Larissa Grunig, Fred Repper and Jon White, conducted a massive study funded by the IABC Foundation to answer the question of why public relations has value to an organization.
In itself, this research wasn’t geared to establish a theoretical foundation for the profession. Instead, it answered two main questions: “Why and to what extent [does] PR make an organization more effective, and how much is that contribution worth economically?” and, “What are the characteristics of a public relations function that are most likely to make an organization effective?”
It was the process of identifying the structural and behavioral aspects of PR departments that led to the idea that Excellence was a theory. In a nutshell, Excellence says that the PR team should be led by a manager who is in senior management, and its work should primarily rely on two-way, symmetrical communication.
It’s this contention that an increasing number of scholars are taking issue with. The foundation of our profession is persuasion (Bernays, Ivy Lee) and the use of language and discourse in service of that effort (Rhetorical Theory) — either one-way or two-way, but definitely asymmetrical.
I don’t pretend to be as schooled in these matters as some of the commenters at PR Conversations, but as an experienced practitioner who is now dabbling in the academe (adjunct prof at Kent State this fall), I’m intrigued by the intellectual exercise. One person says that such navel-gazing (my words) isn’t important — likening the discussion to a college student trying to examine new majors. But our profession can no longer get by with “trust me” as its operating theory. There are solid reasons why we do what we do and recommend what we recommend. The theoretical foundation for these efforts gives us credibility even if we never mention them to our employers or clients.
What is PR, and why is it important? That’s a question worth discussing.
Tags: @commammo, asymmetrical communication, Bernays, Communication AMMO, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication vehicles, Community Theory, discuss, effective communication, evaluation, Excellence Theory, Framing, internal communication, measurement, Media Relations, PR measurement, Public Relations, reputation management, Research, Rhetorical Theory, symmetrical communication, systems theory, Theory
Posted in Measurement, News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | 22 Comments »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
Barron’s this week says that “Digital media and subscription TV are likely to see sizable gains in ad spending as a recovery gains…” A graphic shows that adverts on mobile phones and handhelds are estimated to increase by 33% from 2008-2013, Internet ads will rise more than 10% and pay TV ads by more than 7% during the period. Of course, another chart shows a “U-Shaped” curve for that spending increase, flat through next year. They don’t talk about any of the newest ad ideas though, showing that the social media revolution is still at the fringe of business consciousness regarding driving sales behavior.
Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal talked about the use of Twitter in crisis situations, sharing stories from wine guy Gary Vaynerchuk (@corkd), who got hacked by unsavory characters, and Scott Townsend from a Bartlesville, Okla.-based uniform company who tweeted after an ice storm, and a few others. I can see the application for this type of activity clearly — and I know that my Web traffic increases when I Tweet — so sharing news is great, provided you’re followed. I’ve gotten the most benefit from Twitter to simply meet people and see what others say during Twitter meetings, such as #prstudchat and #icchat. Whether this is building sufficient awareness to help me generate business, I have no clue! Heaven knows I spent enough time Twitter-ing today.
Tuesday at Kent State, the class I’m teaching got into the community theory of PR being advanced by Dr. Dean Kruckeberg of University of Northern Iowa. Fascinating discussion ensued as we investigated the implications of the theory, which holds that organizations are part of society and therefore owe society as a member of its community. I’m too new to this academic stuff, but this challenges me — I tend to be a garden variety capitalist, believing that a company’s only logical responsibility is to its owners, its purpose to make money lawfully. I need to think about this a while…
Tags: @commammo, Blog, communication, Communication AMMO, communication experts, communication messages, communication vehicles, effective communication, employee, evaluation, Facebook, internal communication, Journalism, measurement, PR measurement, Public Relations, reputation management, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 4 Comments »
