Posts Tagged ‘engage’

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Effective Messaging is Not Passe

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

As much as many of our social media mavens would like to have it so, the concept of messaging isn’t going away for some time. The methods of delivery are definitely changing, but in public relations, we still have to reach people.

There’s a fashionable trend denouncing “talking at customers” as opposed to “having a conversation.” the trend is going on15 years old, at least. Social media’s recent sprouting of new tools (kind of like a Swiss Army Knife) has made me ponder whether the inexorable decline of mainstream media would lead, finally, to a lack of organizational interest in messaging.

If so, that’s bad news for the PR industry, as Marc Hausman (@StrategicGuy) wrote today.

But I still believe that as long as organizations have objectives, they’ll need messages: crafted, interesting, tailored to audience, pithy, memorable, descriptive, fascinating, thought-provoking and even wise. For that, they’ll continue to need lowly, ink-stained (er, pixel-stained?) wretches who understand the transformative power of words.

A friend once wrote that words are powerful, they create reality. Motivation, excitement, laughter, sadness — in our Western culture, we depend greatly on words.

This becomes even more important in the social media age, when everyone is a publisher, and it’s up to the individual to glean the seeds from the dirt and chaff.  There still needs to be an organizational voice carrying consistent, clear messages to stakeholders. It may be one of many (and it should be), but it needs to exist.

Marc is right — if PR firms rely totally on media relations for their enterprise, they are doomed. Or, at least, they’ll be a lot smaller than they are now. Of course, social media doesn’t scale very well — cultivating a relationship with a blogger takes as much effort as doing so with a magazine editor or a reporter — but the number of people reached is typically much lower.

Now, before the “it’s not about eyeballs” people light torches and scream for my head, let me say that until we better understand the communities we might want to reach in social media, we’re stuck with the lack of scalability complaint.  It holds us back from helping organizations see the benefits to them of social media engagement.

Once we can get a better read on the characteristics of communities, we can make the scale work — it’s not much different than looking to reach readers of a given magazine. But, we need independent data on the communities and a clear understanding of what we can expect, whether we are selling directly to them, or merely engaging them for reputation purposes.

As astonishing as the advances in technology have been over the past five years, we still have audiences and we need words to help us reach, influence, reward and interact with them. We still have objectives to attain and a business to run. And messages aren’t going away just because the means of delivering them is.

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Posted in Public Relations, Research, Social Media, Strategy | 4 Comments »

A Manager Who Can’t Communicate Can’t Lead

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.

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Posted in Internal Communications, Measurement, News Analysis, Strategy | 8 Comments »

Objectives most critical element in measurement

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?

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Posted in Measurement, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 2 Comments »

Discussions you should read

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.

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Posted in News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | 1 Comment »

Ethics in PR: The Social Media Question

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.

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Posted in Measurement, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 4 Comments »

NYT ‘Corner Office’ shows power of leadership communication

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.

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Posted in Communication Skills, Internal Communications, News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | Comments Off

Thinking Theoretically About Social Media

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.

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Posted in Public Relations, Research, Social Media, Strategy | 1 Comment »

Great discussion at [grow] on Social Media dissent

Monday, September 21st, 2009

Mark W. Schaefer writes a great blog, and today there is a terrific discussion there regarding the echo chamber surrounding social media’s expert class, the Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Julien Smith, Beth Harte, Amber Naslund slate.  Namely, Mark observes that we are lacking strong dissenting voices.

Obviously, there are a few people out there who are refusing to drink the social media Kool-Aid — @amandachapel the most notable.  My own experience with social media as a user is putting me in the class of skeptics, not outright refuseniks, but I have been asking about the value of social media in PR and bemoaning the lack of objective, independent research to evaluate the often breathless claims of its moral superiority.

At the [grow] blog, commenter @tamadear offers this important proviso:

Nobody responds well to “You’re wrong; I’m right” dissent, to those who dwell on our weaknesses. It makes us defensive and unwilling to listen.

This is very true, and is why in virtually all of my consulting (both inside and outside organizations) I always assume that I may be wrong and use language accordingly.  There are far too many pronouncements, baseless and unresearched, in all of public relations, but especially in social media.  I have used the term “self-described experts” many times because I have no visibility into the qualifications of the speaker (or writer). Many of them could be literally anyone, and will even call out their lack of qualifications as a benefit of working with them. From Drudge’s refusal to be called a journalist, to Chris Brogan’s declaration that he is not in public relations, I’m often left wondering why I am supposed to regard these people as authorities.

With a tip of the cap to @amandachapel, it’s “caveat emptor” in the world of communication these days — there is big money to be made (a worthy effort that I share the desire to attain) and precious little objective information to help the consumer evaluate claims.  There are also few best practices that include true outcome measurement of the sort Olivier Blanchard describes in his excellent slide show, “The definitive social media ROI presentation.”  My only beef with the esteemed BrandBuilder is that such end-state ROI calculations performed without care lead to assuming that correlation equals causation.  We would love to see revenue increase and expenses go down concurrent with our social media campaign, but what percentage of the improvement is due to social media and how much due to other factors, including simple continuous improvement?

This is the point of the dissent discussion — for every Olivier and Mark there are five people claiming that the action of participating in social media IS the return on investment. That’s just not going to fly, and the more the experts try to convince people otherwise, the worse off we all are.  The “conversation” MAY be important — it always has been prior to all of this Web. 2.0 stuff — but aside from questionable research by the people poised to benefit the most from its findings, there simply isn’t much data at this point to declare the social media discussion closed.

What’s your view?

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Posted in Media Relations, News Analysis, Public Relations, Social Media, Strategy | 2 Comments »

Handling ‘No-Win’ Media Stories

Monday, August 10th, 2009

The Taliban resurgent in Afghanistan.  The U.S. House wants to spend $550 million on new jets for themselves. Banks fork over billions in bonuses after receiving trillions in U.S. taxpayer funds.  How’d you like to be the PR folks who need to handle those issues?

When I was relatively young in public relations, our top-five execs were poised to gather up a prodigious pile of cash, stock and options — they hit their targets, and then some, for the year.  The main way they’d done so, however, was to cut headcount by 10 percent across the board.  Preparing the internal communications for that proxy release (which would include the compensation details) wasn’t an easy task.

There were good business reasons for the compensation strategy, not the least that there were contractual obligations — they were owed this compensation. The packages had all been vetted by the compensation committee of the board of directors, comprised only of “outside” directors — people who weren’t also employees of the company.  The goals for the year were bottom-line oriented, aligning the interests of the executives with those of the shareholders.  A substantial amount of the dollar value of the pay was long-term compensation — three years’ deferred. And, the largest portion of the package was in restricted stock and stock options, both of which were designed to keep high-performing executives at the company for several years.

After reading the proxy, I felt reasonably comfortable with the reasons for the high pay.  I wrote a paragraph not too different from this last one in a questions-and-answers document for managers, answering the question, “Why did these executives get such high compensation?”

The corporate treasurer called me, with a smile in his voice, and said, “This is an argument you can’t win. Let’s not try to explain the reasons for the packages. Just say that there may be questions as a consequence of news media coverage and refer interested parties to the Proxy.”

I was pretty disappointed.  I’m a fan of sharing the reasons behind decisions. Of course, the danger here was the snicker factor.

The snicker factor is the likelihood that that people will snicker when they read the explanation, that the intent of being transparent and honest will instead be seen as spin.

The reality is that executive pay is a tough story. The reality is that contracts tend to insulate execs from downside risk, that the independent directors are execs at other firms, their motives suspect… You can almost hear the conversation around the water cooler, visualize the Tweets… “Yeah, right! These guys all take care of their own, they’ll do anything to get their piece of the pie, what do they do around here, anyway?”

Do we only explain if there is a likelihood of winning the argument? That certainly would simplify the measurement of our efforts in these matters. By the way, I’m aware of at least one company that, as a matter of policy, separates proactive and positive PR from reactive and negative PR. They feel like they have a great track record and lots of positive reinforcement.  It’s not exactly what the Excellence Theory calls for (two-way, symmetrical), but it has its fans.

For another firm, staying out of any no-win story was the primary objective, and they did (and do) a fine job of it.

As long as we define our function as one of advocacy — and are above board about it — this makes perfect sense.  In those circumstances, we adopt the model that calls for non-participation if there is no objective benefit to our organization. We increase reputation risk by not participating, but perhaps that’s the main question: How risky is participating and explaining compared to staying away from such controversy?

It seems to me to be a question of certain risk versus uncertain risk — we know the snicker factor will kick in if we participate. We don’t know what will happen if we don’t.

Avoiding the devil you know can be a compelling strategy. What do you think?

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Posted in Crisis Communications, News Analysis, Public Relations, Strategy | 5 Comments »

‘Dr. Doom’ sees $3.6 trillion in bank losses

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

NYU’s econ maven Nouriel Roubini hasn’t yet glimpsed any sign that the system financial crisis is abating.  In the WSJ Tuesday, the “professor who called the housing and credit collapse” and his co-writer paint a horrifying picture of bank losses yet to come, and call for an interesting solution for the government to apply.

  • Getting toxic assets off of bank balance sheets is essential, Roubini writes.  It’ll be a bloodbath for the firms, which will need to reduce dividends as well as cut salaries and bonuses, and there will be failures. Of course, how this is really different from last year, I don’t know.

  • The public relations issues that the ongoing crisis foment are legion — not the least of them will be the tendency of companies to clam up during a time when they most need to speak up. Transparency isn’t situational — it carries myriad risks at any time, but opaqueness also is a risky play.

  • Here are three things the banks should do immediately:

    • 1. Recognize that their employees can help manage the significant customer impacts arising from bad news. Prepare them and their managers and call upon them to reach out to customers all of the time.
    • 2. Take your medicine: The news media is going to focus on the worst aspects of the crisis and its impact on your firm — don’t be surprised by this and don’t try to talk them out of it. The best you can hope for is that your most urgent message (sometimes two or three) can be included in the story.   Don’t ignore “bad press” with either customers or employees — you need to have ongoing dialogue with your stakeholders anyway, so talk about the story and where you felt it went wrong. (but don’t throw rocks at the media, it’ll never work…) The stories are a pretext for conversations.
    • 3. Consistently remind your stakeholders of your commitment to them — and your plans for working through the issues. You gain much more from talking about these things than not.
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