Posts Tagged ‘communication methods’
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
As we PR people feel our way along in social media, the marketers are declaring the End of Times for everything else. Anecdotal evidence shows that big companies are pulling big money out of traditional advertising and funneling it into social media, and that bears examination. But as I’ve said, I’m not ready to write obits for ma
ss marketing/advertising in favor of “marketing to a segment of one” right this very minute.
I first heard that phrase (Marketing to a segment of one) from the lips of Steve Cone, legendary marketer and then-CMO with KeyCorp. He was the architect of dropping the “Corp” and/or “Bank” from the company name in favor of the symbol you see at right.
That made Key one of just three companies in the US bearing an eponymous symbol for its name. Shell and Apple are the other two.
Key made a strategy of getting people to see the Key logo and associate it with “bank,” as in, “I need to stop by the Key on the way home.” The idea, Cone claimed, was to stop thinking of mass marketing — with all of its efficiency and logical, numbers-driven strategy, and think of “marketing to segments, eventually to a segment of one.” So then came emerging affluents, wealth management, small business, middle market, large corporate — all of those categories based on grouping customers in some logical way, then changing strategy to target them.
This requires information about customers and prospects. When it comes to social media, that information is scattered to the four winds, unless you’re on Facebook. Twitter’s foray into geo-location, Foursquare, and many other social media firms are trying to gather as much data about YOU as possible to facilitate what is a pretty old marketing model.
Just as at the onset of the Web Age you had hundreds of companies popping up to “help” companies enter the Internet realm, now at the onset of the Social Media age you have companies popping up to “help” companies enter this realm. The part that twists my noodle is when companies purport to know how to measure social media come up with yowlers — like the Vitrue Facebook fan value imbroglio, the Altimeter study on correlations between social media activity and stock appreciation, and now Vitrue’s assertion that frequency of mention in social media is somehow a reflection of its social media reputation.
Vitrue offers a chance to compare brands in a handy Flash gobo that produces a cool pie chart. Just for fun, I compared Ford (which Vitrue pronounces its winner) with a couple of random words — sure enough, pop “the” in there, and you find upteen thousands (OK, 134,000) ‘somethings’ and the aforementioned cool pie chart. Ooh, and there’s a bar chart too! So kewl. W00t!
I could go on for 1,500 words, but won’t. It’s another cow pie pretending to be a metric. Resist this assault on rational thinking.
Tags: @commammo, Blog, Communication AMMO, communication experts, communication methods, communication vehicles, effective communication, evaluation, Facebook, measurement, Public Relations, reputation management, Research, ROI, Social Media, Steve Cone, Twitter, Vitrue
Posted in Measurement, Social Media, Strategy | 2 Comments »
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
Will all that’s been going on lately (teaching class, presentations, conferences, client discussions) I’m a little behind on my reading. Good thing Google Reader keeps stuff around for me. Two pieces from the Harvard Business Review website (AP Style says that’s OK now) bear a close read, one on the use of Twitter-type tools for internal communications, and the other summarizes several new perspectives on business strategy.
Tools such as Yammer have brought Twitter capabilities (microblogging) into the enterprise. Authors Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd cover the cases of LG Electronics and Meredith Corporation in using Yammer and Socialtext to reduce the lengthy process of designing training programs and communicate speedily and across silos, respectively. Use Microblogging to Increase Productivity is worth your time.
In Strategy By Any Other Name, Walter Kiechel notes that speakers who usually discuss business strategy have been shoved aside by economists and journalists talking about the global financial crisis. He finds, however, that strategy has just gone a bit underground — it’s showing up “all over the place in contemporary management literature, albeit sometimes under different cover.”
Kiechel covers a lot of ground, with links to many resources. One that looks particularly interesting is The Power of Pull, by John Hagel and John Seely Brown. Their core thinking is that the old economy “was based on ‘push,’ forecasting what would be needed or what would sell and then mustering resources to fulfill that demand. The new world is one of ‘pull’ — find people and resources exactly when you need them, attract them to you even before you know they exist, and then pull the best from within them, and yourself, to achieve your potential.”
Certainly Hagel and Brown’s idea has history — we communicators have been trying to puzzle out the push vs. pull argument for a really long time (at least as long as I’ve been in this career, anyway.) I’m eager to add the book to my summer reading list.
In the meantime, check these two pieces out — and if you’re not reading HBR in some form, get on it.
Tags: communication experts, communication methods, communication vehicles, discuss, effective communication, internal communication, Media Relations, PR measurement, Research, Twitter
Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Vitrue, a social media marketing firm founded in 2006, snagged an AdWeek article this week when it announced that it had caculated the value of Facebook fans. It’s $3.60 per fan. What’s behind the valuation? A rash of assumptions, according to a piece on the company’s Web site.
Why do I think this is wrong? Let me count the ways:
- Their data is proprietary. The company says it manages 45 million fans and drew the data from a sampling across industries, but they don’t specify the amount of the sample, the specific firms involved or any other information that might provide clarity as to the methodology. No one can cross-check the data.
- They make several assumptions: They say they looked at the ratio between wall posts and number of fans — asking how many fans have the potential to see a post. This is similar to using circulation in a print pub. Fine. But unlike circulation (audited) or even Nielsen Ratings, we’re assuming that all fans have an equal opportunity to see, and we’re assuming that a wall post is equivalent to an ad. Then, they say that multiple posts have equivalent impressions — two per day totals 60 million impressions on a one million fan page.
- They then say that these impressions are free, “similar to earned media.” But we know earned media is not free — someone had to do some work to make it happen. This is one of the insidious problems with ad value equivalency — there certainly are costs associated with generating earned media, and they must be accounted for.
- Next assumption, cost per thousand impressions. They settle on $5 CPM, based on nothing — wouldn’t this number depend on the specific outlet? How about some science instead of conjecture? Multiply it out using their figures and it totals $300,000 in monthly value for the two post-a-day million fan page. They show it like this:
1M impressions x 2 posts x 30 days = 60M impressions >>> 60M impressions / 1000 x $5 CPM = $300,000
But what I believe is most egregious is the idea that engagement on Facebook is really just a game of increasing advertising impressions. This is totally contrary to how social media is designed to work. It’s push-focused instead of relationship-focused. It’s shouting from the rooftops instead of talking to your neighbors.
Look, everyone has to make a living — advertisers are pretty comfortable in their “metrics every marketer is familiar with,” as Vitrue’s article says. But marketers need to wake up — measure something meaningful! I don’t know, but perhaps the fans are actually doing something that increases their intent to purchase? That improves their understanding of the product? That makes them have a more favorable attitude toward the company? That they bought something?
Surely any of those is a better metric than one based on made-up numbers, bad methodology, weak assumptions and false equivalencies.
Harrumph.
Tags: communication methods, communication vehicles, effective communication, Facebook, measurement, PR measurement, reputation management, Research, Social Media
Posted in Measurement, Media Relations, News Analysis, Social Media, Strategy | 14 Comments »
Monday, April 12th, 2010
It’s become almost a cliche. The conventional wisdom is that organizational communication requires “transparency through every aspect of corporate communications,” as Brigham Young University’s Dr. Brad Rawlins wrote in 2008. Openness, authenticity, successes and failures, ongoing discussion and abandoning the drive to maintain a perfect corporate image. Dr. Brad’s colleagues at BYU, Dr. Rob Wakefield and Susan Walton looked into this assumption and found it wanting, according to their presentation at the 13th International Public Relations Research Conference in Miami in March.
Rob and Susan argue that there are two flaws in the practice of transparency that need to be clarified, as per the summary of their paper:
- Transparency often is interpreted as being completely open at all times — but there are times when it is in the best legal and moral interest of entities to not disclose, and in these times this is the most ethical stance for both organizations and their stakeholders; and
- Entities increasingly are self-proclaiming “transparent” communication, when investigation reveals that the claims are smokescreens to deflect actual lack of openness and honesty.
The authors conducted a series of interviews with seven senior level PR execs or consultants who work with PR leaders around the U.S., asking when, specifically, transparency is needed and good for organizations and society; when it’s better to not disclose information; and in what situations does transparency actually harm stakeholders?
I can’t do justice to Rob and Susan’s thinking in such a brief post, but in short, they learned enough to come up with an alternative to transparency — not a new theory, they hasten to say, but a different perspective: Translucency.
Something translucent lets in light, and one can see the rough outline of things, but those things aren’t entirely visible. Rob and Susan say there are four key considerations under which translucency can and should occur:
- Translucency is a commitment to communication to your stakeholders — not an advance commitment to what that communication will contain.
- Translucency occurs when credibility as already been established.
- Translucency might be most effective when there is reason to believe that an organization’s arguments and data are rock-solid, but not persuasive.
- Translucency is most effective when and organization already has put in place a process and structure for bringing greater light of information through the glass.
No one seems to want to admit that there really is a thing called “too much information.” Rob and Susan do a fine job offering a possible filter to address that problem.
Tags: communication, communication messages, communication methods, discuss, effective communication, Media Relations, PR, Public Relations, reputation management, Research, transparency
Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 1st, 2010
Researchers Dr. Juan Meng of the University of Dayton (Ohio) and Dr. Bruce K. Berger of the University of Alabama cut to the chase in their research presentation at the Institute for PR International PR Research Conference. Their first finding? “Though communication effectiveness has been an important concern for organizational leaders, the assessment of communication effectiveness has not been widely applied by using business outcome metrics in organizations.” Sigh.
Meng and Berger used both the results from the 2007-2008 IABC Research Foundation/Watson Wyatt international survey of senior communicators, and a series of in-depth interviews with 13 IABC Gold Quill winners to look for process links between internal communication effectiveness and organizational financial performance.
For me, this represents a sort of Holy Grail: we internal comms experts know that our work is impactful, but have lacked the hard evidence of causality that we perceive the C-suite respects and demands. I was disappointed, yet again, though that first finding is by no means the only one. In brief, the other five are:
- Measuring internal comm effectiveness should be standard operating practice.
- There’s lots of measurement going on, evaluating awareness/understanding; engagement; job performance; employee behavior, and improvement in overall business performance.
- Everyone has good reasons why measurement isn’t as robust as it should be, and they’re the usual culprits — lack of time/money/staff and the pain of finding actual cause-and-effect toward business results.
- The measurement approaches used are employee surveys, employee participation in communication activities and manager surveys.
- Four valuable purposes for internal communication: Explaining/Promoting programs and policies; educating about culture and values; providing information about performance and financial objectives, and helping employees understand the business.
At Goodyear, we made great progress toward true outcome measurement for internal communications, but didn’t quite get there. We did establish a strong link between employee knowledge/comprehension, intranet use and managerial behavior, but never got the chance to take everything to the organizational performance level.
At National City Corporation (the regional bank), our focus from the first day I arrived was on external measurement, for a variety of reasons. But the internal side wasn’t ignored — we were a Gallup Q12 company, and despite the wretched economic conditions and horrific, calamitous financial performance of the company, we still topped 94% participation in the Q12. Right until the last moment, we were using Q12 results in our planning process, as well as beginning to use editorial content more strategically. But, again, we weren’t reaching the business outcomes level of measurement.
Here’s a quote from one of Meng & Berger’s in-depth interviews:
I think the biggest challenge in measurement continues to be convincing clients to spend, not so much the money, but to spend the time. As the industry develops, I don’t have a hard time in convincing them about the validity of measurement, but they are reluctant to actually take the time away from business to actually administer surveys or focus groups or some other measurement tools.
Looks like we have to continue making those tools easier to use and more valuable, even as we continue to scale the mountain tops for the Holy Grail.
Tags: Best of Miami, communication, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication vehicles, conference, effective communication, employee, engage, evaluation, Gallup, IABC, InstituteforPR, internal communication, iprrc, measurement, MiamiPRConference, PR measurement, reputation management, Research, ROI
Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, Research, Strategy | 1 Comment »
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
One of the great professional pleasures of my life involves an academic conference filled to the brim with fascinating public relations research. It’s the International PR Research Conference put on by the Institute for Public Relations, and I’ve attended four of the past five years. That it’s held early in March in Miami, Fla., has NOTHING to do with it!
OK, well, it has a little bit to do with it. The tropical breezes feel especially fine in the icy wake of February in Cleveland, and there is terrific food, shopping, pleasant walks and an excellent pool. But, other than that, it’s all business for three days.
I’ve had the good fortune to present at IPRRC twice; the first time, 2008, I presented a paper with my research pal Dr. Julie O’Neil of Texas Christian University that covered one large company’s internal communication program, focusing especially on the measurement of the work. It won an award, of which I am very proud indeed – the Jackson-Sharpe Award for research by an academic and a practitioner (I’m not the academic, or wasn’t…).
This year, I presented a work in progress, an exploratory study of corporate blogs and Twitter activities, with an eye on whether they’re demonstrating James Grunig’s Excellence Theory – are they conversations? – or other PR theories.
The idea is to see what actually IS in this space for 18 companies – the work is ongoing (frantically; the final paper is due May 1), and I was able to share a few key findings.
- There’s a lot of using social media as a broadcasting tool – no two-way, no evidence of symmetry (mutual change) – and persuasion, therefore, still rules.
- There are a couple of firms that are doing yeoman’s work and engaging in conversations – there are also seven or eight companies who’ve abandoned their blogs since December 2009.
- One industrial giant, interestingly, has subject matter experts blog and then engage engineers and customers in a discussion about improving the product – this is a rarity.
- Twitter as link-bait is quite in evidence.
- The Cluetrain may have left the station, but it’s creeping along a siding, not hurtling on a MagLev track.
This is hardly conclusive or particularly scientific – that’s why we call the paper exploratory. Dr. O’Neil and I have more work to do this coming month, but this paper is intended to be the first of three. Next step is a qualitative discussion with some of the people behind social media at our subject companies, followed (we hope) by a quantitative survey of users of corporate blogs and their associated Twitterverse (we’ll see; that’s going to take some cash…).
In the meanwhile, stay tuned over the next few days as I recount some of the work that impressed me the most at IPRRC this year. Once our paper is done, we’ll share.
Tags: Blog, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, communication vehicles, conference, effective communication, measurement, Public Relations, reputation management, Research, Social Media, speaking, Twitter
Posted in Public Relations, Research | 4 Comments »
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Every manager encounters a thousand communication opportunities every day. It’s a metaphorical statement, but you catch the drift. A thousand chances to add value; a thousand chances to screw something up. The best of them, the leaders, know what to do with those opportunities, and fortunately, it’s not a secret.
Oh, sure, there are “naturals” out there — those gifted souls whose kind and gentle nature makes them magnets for great teams and whose command of language makes them a joy to work for. But most managers aren’t naturals when it comes to communication. They need to be carefully taught.
In my work with literally thousands of managers over the years (quite shocking to have totaled them up last year…), they seem to have two big problems in communicating with their teams.
1. They think more about what they need to say than what they need to listen to, and
2. They fail to consider the audience before deciding on messages, or methods to communicate.
Some of the issue is simple education — many people become managers because of technical expertise. They’re great engineers, accountants or public relations people who get promoted. They don’t have formal training that helps them be effective managers, let alone effective communicators. They often think communication is someone else’s job, except for operational and policy matters.
Yet, they’re often harsh critics of their own bosses — middle managers seldom feel like they know what they need to know. That takes its toll, as resentment builds. Managers feel like they’re going into battle with an unloaded weapon. Pass these four methods along to fill that gap, and use them yourself!
- Think critically about audiences. In this case, the more specifically, the better. It’s not just “employees” — there are groups of employees with differing needs, experiences and objectives that must be considered. Apply the same discipline to the leaders above your level. An exhaustive listing of these potential groupings will help give a firm foundation to your communication plans.
- Consider communication objectives in the context of business objectives. Managers should be specific about what they want employees to think, feel or do as a result of communicating with them. Again, go through the same exercise with your own management in mind. Keep your objectives organized by audience so you can make all communications work toward those goals.
- Evaluate messages. Messaging isn’t limited only to information flowing from you to subordinates. Boil down and simplify to be sure your language fits precisely the objectives for your audiences. As Strunk and White wrote, “Make every word tell.” Your employees, and your boss, will thank you for taking the extra time to do so.
- Finally, you’re ready to consider HOW to communicate. Methods can vary from hot (face to face discussion) to cool (email, telephone) to cold (memo, letter, statement). As you think about the first three items on this list, fit the method to the context. Think of this less from your own preferences, and more from those of your audience, given the objectives you have for them. It’s the essence of receiver-focused communication.
If there were a #5, it would read: “Start now.”
Tags: Communication AMMO, communication experts, communication messages, communication methods, discuss, effective communication, employee, engage, internal communication, manager communication
Posted in Communication Skills, Internal Communications, Measurement, Strategy | 1 Comment »
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 »
Friday, December 4th, 2009
The ever-excellent Don Bartholomew, MetricsMan, provides an overview of some of the Twitter applications that purport to measure “influence.” He says:
Influence is contextual not absolute. An individual may have the ability to influence certain people in specific subject areas. Authority and trust are important constituent elements of influence. Do they have the authority to speak within a particular area and are their words and deeds trusted? The notion of coming up with an influence score without context is inherently flawed. It might be interesting, but it is not actionable.
Read the post, especially if you use Twitter, but even if you don’t, much of the content can be easily extrapolated to other forms of social media. A fair number of social media “experts” are bottling measurement snake oil these days, and the rigorous concepts Don discusses are the antidote for such chicanery.
Tags: Blog, communication, communication experts, communication methods, discuss, effective communication, measurement, Public Relations, Research, Social Media, Twitter
Posted in Measurement, News Analysis, Research, Social Media, Strategy | 3 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 »
