I recall 17 years ago when “we want employees to manage their own information” became a watchcry.

The idea was to create a repository of news and information and get people to seek it out.  This change from “push” to “pull” was supposed to take the heat off of communicators and bring about a knowledge revolution. Instead, employees voted with their feet, ignoring most all the news we pushed out, especially the stuff that supposedly was “important” — the company strategy, leadership messages and  human resources materials.  We were repurposing news releases in those days, not really originating stories from the employee perspective. We were passive, and we waited for our internal clients to come up with stuff.

Well, that’s not altogether true. We called them and asked, “Got any news?” What we should have done is treated employees as our clients and looked for reasons to do a piece, not expect our leaders and managers to come up with stuff on their own.

All through the years, our best-read materials at Key, Goodyear, National City and other places were stories, not news. They had people and drama and conflict and tension, or at least a compelling new angle on our business, told through example and demonstration, not mere recitation of fact.

At Goodyear, we had our interns do a ton of writing for our intranet, GO.  During their yearlong assignment, they’d cover plenty of news, such as events, quarterly earnings, significant announcements and industry doings, of course. But they also had to originate stories, particularly in the last couple of months of the assignment.

They wrote country profiles, talking with leaders and others about the business situation. They did stories on different parts of the business and people. And they did a multipart series focusing on one regional business, or on the fastest-growing geographies in the company.

These stories got read because they helped employees make sense of the information instead of merely leaving everything up to them.

We began to attract news from all the major business units, increasing our annual story count into the range of 1,200 – 1,500 stories per year.  Over a two-year period, we tripled our monthly GO traffic (visits and pages viewed) and saw a 10% increase in understanding of our company strategy.

How do you get attention, cut through the clutter? Write (produce) stories that matter to your employees, balancing the need for leadership to transmit information with the need for employees to have relevant content available to them.  Do research among employees and leaders to discover what those stories should be, and do it often.

All you’ve got to lose is your irrelevancy.

I’d  appreciate your thoughts, especially about measurement and internal communications. Where might we go in 2012?

My reactions to Judy and Paul are below – about Heather’s piece, I can say only, READ IT.

Judy’s comment:

Fingers crossed @CommAMMO: #corporatecommunications (aka #PR) is going to embrace LEADing (not OWNing) #SoMe for integrated communications.

Integrated communication is not only inevitable, but highly desirable, especially around Social Media. What I’d hate is to have Marketing inserted between Integrated and Communication.  As Judy’s crossed fingers aver, this isn’t an ownership question, it’s a question of leadership. You know my adage: All marketing is communication, but not all communication is marketing. Thanks Judy!

And Paul’s:

@CommAMMO #corporatecommunications the only safe prediction is that 2012 is unpredictable. Yet I forecast an increase in PR spend over 2011.

Speaking as a small businessperson, I hope Paul’s right! But I also hope that the increase in spend includes a modicum for effective measurement, research and evaluation. We CAN measure the effectiveness of communication activity and do so cost-effectively, but not for free. I fervently hope that the extra PR ducats are for issues management, reputation and employee communication, not just publicity and press agentry. Here’s hoping. Many thanks, Paul.

Note: 2012 marks my third year in the land of entrepreneurship and blogging/tweeting. It’s been fun, and I very much appreciate your kind attention to my fevered scribblings. As per lately, I’m blessed with clients, teaching, grad school and family obligations, but aspire to participate in a few chats and cogitate herewith for your consideration. Mazel Tov for 2012!

-Sean

This should be no surprise.  Mainstream hype often produces a big opening weekend, but if the film is crappy, the grosses deflate pretty fast.  It makes sense to be the same in SocMed.  Still, I know there are some SocMed consultants in Hollywood right now trying to convince the studios that all that Twitter and Facebook traffic built on the back of a hot trailer will lead to bigger receipts at the box office.

For the right films, that’s probably got some truth. But for everyone?

That’s why we cannot ascribe attaining squishy communication targets as ROI. They aren’t.  If success is Twitter mentions, Facebook fans and other hype, all that stuff had better lead to business results of some description. Outcomes, baby, not outputs.

By the way, how’d you like Green Lantern? Charlie’s Angels (the reboot?) The Playboy Club (on NBC?) They all got terrific buzz…

This casts the innovation cycle as a change management issue, and that made me think of Harold Innis, the Canadian political scientist whose landmark collection of essays, The Bias of Communication (1951), precede Marshall McLuhan (the Medium is the Message.)

I wrote a paper on how Innis, who saw almost all technological improvements in communication as the path to decline for societies, might view Facebook (answer: not happily.) This material came back to me as I thought about the concept of disruptive innovation, which gets written about favorably nearly all the time. After all, do we want to give up discount retailers, community colleges, cell phones and doc-in-the-box medical clinics?

Christensen likes disruption — he sees it as the only way we move forward. But I can think of the dark side of such changes fairly easily.  Ask Kodak about digital cameras. They had the technology well in place for eons, but failed to grasp how it would change conventional photography.  Of itself, digital photography is more of an evolutionary innovation, but ever-smaller chips and other, seemingly less important innovations shrunk the cameras, improved the quality and let Canon and others rule the space.

Innis would call that shot — he’d have seen the negatives early on.  It’s a change issue, and in a change, only infrequently does everyone win. Usually, someone loses. We have cheap cameras, and professional photography is going the way of the iceman.  I’m now looking at innovation as a problem, and suddenly the reasons why companies grapple to make the creative, innovative and inventive processes cogent and repeatable makes a lot of sense.  So too the difficulty of organizational learning, and of knowledge collection and application, and the issues around losing talent.

Innis said:

Mechanization has emphasized complexity and confusion; it has been responsible for monopolies in the field of knowledge; and it becomes extremely important to any civilization, if it is not to succumb to the influence of this monopoly of knowledge, to make some critical survey and report. The conditions of freedom of thought are in danger of being destroyed by science, technology, and the mechanization of knowledge, and with them, Western civilization.” (Innis, 1951, p. 190)

Just thinking out loud here.

There are a few things that worry me about this type of focus. Among them, Whither internal communications?  Subject matter that targets employee engagement often has little direct effect on revenue. Even attempts to get employees to “think like owners” and “spend each dollar like it was your own” have to have only the most tangential effect on savings. Does that mean we shouldn’t attempt to help employees identify with the company? Avoid communicating the benefits of working there? Forget about generating employee ambassadors?  I hope not.

What about corporate social responsibility? Helping to create the environment where the organization can thrive is critical, but doesn’t turn up consistently on a balance sheet. There’s research that says people want to do business with companies that match their own ethical priorities, but that’s not the same direct connection as conducting a product PR campaign focused on sales.

Investor relations and government relations have different impact than direct sales – it’s part of the public affairs world that, like CSR, has a roundabout relationship to sales. Do we stop doing that? (BTW, I’m aware that these are usually separate departments, but stick with me, please.)

As apocryphal as these cases might sound, there’s a real danger in thinking of PR only in the direct-sales case. Our profession is wider than that.  When we seek to measure only in ROI terms (a financial term with a financial result), we unnecessarily limit ourselves and start to think that if one sees everything as a nail, every tool looks like a hammer.

Reputation and issues management should be critical to strategy development. Third-party endorsement and the two-step flow to influencers are still relevant.  Sales-related PR isn’t wrong or bad — it’s just not the only relevant game in town.  We have other tools in the toolbox that serve different purposes…All marketing is communication, but not all communication is marketing.

The essence of collaboration

We think of integration as logical for organizational communication. But there’s resistance to integration as well, from budget jealousy to outright turf wars preventing even the low-hanging fruit from being plucked.   As I wrote earlier, we can realize a lot of the benefits of integration by adopting a step-by-step process, starting with communication, proceeding to coordination and finally to collaboration. These are the 3 C’s.

Collaboration is working jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor (adapted from Merriam-Webster). The key difference between coordination and collaboration in our context is discrete effort: when we collaborate, we decide to combine our efforts toward completion of an activity. Here are two examples from my own history.

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company operates a decentralized communication team, with the geographic business units in Asia, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Latin America and North America each operating its own communication team.  The heads of comms for each have a dotted line back to the chief communication officer, but budgets and functional reporting is to the business unit, usually to the unit president.

Goodyear moved along the 3 C’s spectrum slowly. It used to be that sharing strategy and plans was strictly ad-hoc; some units would forward a couple of pages to the CCO, some would give only the broadest outline. That made it very difficult to represent for the function with any sort of context, let alone establish common processes.  Best practices among units didn’t circulate well, and even budget visibility was limited.

By establishing an HQ position dedicated to increasing both communication and coordination, Goodyear was eventually able to establish a common planning process, combination bottom-up and top down.  With the intranet circulating best practices (often just a short story detailing what PR event had occurred and the results), in short order teams within units began to collaborate, borrowing event strategies and communication content from one another and working on cross-functional projects. Members of the corporate communication team were even invited to speak at regional communication meetings.

At National City Corporation following a determined effort to increase communication and collaboration across the communication function (see my posts Use 3 C’s to Work Together and The 3 C’s Toward Integration: Coordination), Marketing reached out to the retail communication group for assistance with a new campaign.

Corporate Communications worked with other units on materials development, retail asked for Corporate Comm help for a retail investing project, and Corporate Communications, Legal and Investor Relations formed a cross-functional team to work on financial PR releases. Even the measurement program benefited from collaboration, with marketing asking Corporate Communications to research the impact of news media coverage on a direct mail campaign, and corporate comms working with marketing to include unpaid media in its regular brand research (See “Measuring Company A”), and the Risk group asking for Corporate Comms help in understanding the impact of media on reputation.

Both of these cases marched steadily from communication to collaboration.  At both companies, there also were situations where they got stuck — a business process optimization team struggled to get past the communication stage, for example, and never made it to collaboration. But even in that case, the visibility of budget spend and the decision to coordinate several business unit and function-specific process improvements still demonstrated value.

It’s hard to truly integrate departments for a lot of reasons — the desire of executives to control their expense profiles top-to-bottom, among them.  The financial folks will want to add a fourth C — consolidation — which often seems like a synonym for integration. No leader wants to give up either headcount or budget willingly, regardless of the benefits – alignment, consistency and efficiency among the most frequently noted.

However, if we apply the 3 C’s effectively, we can gain all the benefits of integration except the financial ones.  For a lot of organizations, that’ll work just fine.

Gotta hit the bullseye (creative commons)

True or False: The point of social media for business is to engage with people.

That statement is being used as a club to pummel the reluctant into the social media world. Remember the glory days of the dawn of the World Wide Web?  Businesses needed Web sites because customers who weren’t on the Web now would be soon… Because people would look up your business on Yahoo! or Alta Vista or AOL to try and learn about you…Because it was so cool to be on the Web!

It took a while to get there, but now the idea that a business could be viable without a website is ludicrous. It may well turn out that way for social media too.  But back to the first sentence — there’s a defensible body of wisdom that says social media for businesses isn’t about direct selling (Southwest Airlines excluded, as well as other online businesses), it’s about engagement.

So how do we know if our audience/stakeholders is/are engaged?

It could be blog comments, Twitter @ replies and RTs, Facebook “likes” or any number of seemingly independent activities. But do those activities really constitute engagement in a meaningful way?

I surmise that there needs to be more independent research to answer that question. As well, I wonder whether engagement really matters to the business, which is the pregnant elephant in the living room in measurement circles. I’m most concerned with what happens as a result of engagement than of engagement itself.

But I am comfortable with the notion of engagement as a goal, a weigh station on the way to a business objective. To use the academic vernacular, it’s likely an outtake — a measurable step on the way to business results — rather than a business result of its own.  Though some folks have averred that those who engage with a brand are more likely to spend and spend more than those who do not, the research is self-serving — it’s coming from firms who have a vested interest.  Open up the methodology in that black box and let’s have the math types run it through a wringer!

In the meantime, go ahead with your plans to engage publics — just be sure that engagement is in service to something that matters to business results.

The short version: If you get stuff from a company to write about (even if they don’t demand it be positive), you are expected to tell your readers. If what you say is deceptive or misleading, you could be blogging from the Hotel GrayBar — or at least be a little lighter in the cash department.

But wait a second, what about free speech?  Journalists don’t need to disclose if they get free stuff!  Well, let’s just say that the Government — and the Courts — have ruled that your free speech is secondary to the rights of consumers.

I don’t think I can argue. But you can — just read the paper first.

No Measurement!

Being a measurement evangelist feels like really hard work sometimes. On the one hand, I haven’t been at it long enough to complain — witness the indefatigable Katie Paine and Angela Jeffrey, who’ve been toiling in the trenches for, well, a long time.

But there surely are situations where measurement is unnecessary, right?

For example, you’re, I don’t know, Walmart. Your stock is suffering, there are employee lawsuits, and one of your stores has been destroyed by a tornado. How much measurement do you need to do to know you’re media coverage is, well, tortuous?  It’s likely that no amount of proactive management is going to turn your story around — at least not meaningfully.

Or, you’re a big money center bank — yep, the titans of capitalism currently getting the lion’s share of blame for the financial crisis (some of which is just wrong.) Can’t you make an educated guess about your coverage?

Aside from my personal financial stake in getting Walmart or a big bank to hire me to help them with measurement, I’ll give you three reasons why you should not measure – and three reasons why you should.

Forget Measurement When:

1. You cannot make a difference. Sometimes business will hand you a dirt sandwich, and you have no choice but to eat it. There’s no need to weigh the sandwich, examine the types of dirt , evaluate the sandwich-maker, etc. Just eat it and move on.
2. You’re unwilling to do what it takes to make things better.  Often, the worst media situations are when you’re “making tough choices.”  Layoffs, facility closures, moves from one city to another, hiring more executives. The path to turning the story around leads through the organization revisiting its management decisions — deciding not to outsource, keeping the plant open and operating, renovating existing headquarters rather than pitting your incumbent city against somewhere else.  See #1, above.
3. It’s more expensive to measure than the program your measuring.  Advanced statistics are miraculous. We absolutely can measure the specific impact of public relations/communication activity on the bottom line. We just need a lot of data to isolate our impact from everything else that influences the bottom line.  That costs money (not as much as you might think, but still,) so let’s spend wisely.

Do Measurement When:

1. You care about whether what you’re doing is working or not. You have objectives, and hopefully, they’re specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound (S.M.A.R.T.) They have a benchmark, target and timeframe. So, if you don’t measure, how do you know whether you’re making progress?
2. You know you need to change.  Make data-driven decisions! Your intuition is flawless, of course, but as I’ve said many times, the days of PR/Communications being able to wave a hand and say, “trust me” to the c-suite are over.  A former boss told me, “facts and data win the day,” and that’s good advice.
3. You need numbers to share with the numbers people.  Qualitative, quantitative, no matter. There are times when the people you need demand numbers. Measure to give them what they need.  Share of voice/discussion, peer comparison of tone of mention, trends in coverage overall, message presence/absence, correlation of coverage to Web traffic. Do measurement when you need to do it!

There is one other reason to do measurement — though more accurately, it’s research we want to do, not only measurement.  It’s the right thing to do. It puts us on a firmer foundation. It informs our opinions and enhances our credibility.

What’s your view?

Michael Schwabe, thunder::tech

For the marketing folks, the advent of sophisticated handheld devices like iPhones, Blackberrys and tablet PCs is an irresistible draw to push messages out. Michael Schwabe of thunder::tech, an integrated marketing agency, made that abundantly clear at the May 12 meeting of the Cleveland Chapter of IABC.

Schwabe covered a high-level set of interesting uses for smart phones and always-on Internet geegaws — provided your main goal is to sell stuff, one way or another.  This is no knock on Mike, he did a great job — the title of the talk , after all, was “mobile marketing.” Applications for your iPhone to facilitate ordering.  Websites optimized to look good on a Blackberry screen, QR and AR codes that make it easy to snap information off a flyer or add content to some kind of arrangement that isn’t there beforehand.

Perhaps most fascinating (and a bit disturbing) were the applications that use GPS to tailor sales appeals — you’re at the mall, and American Eagle texts you, saying: “Hey, Sean, check out the sale on jeans we’re having at the AE store?”  Holy Phillip K. Dick!

Amid all of this talk about relevancy, situational marketing, search optimization, SMS, Web display ads, and in-application advertising, I just had to ask about application to public relations (broadly defined.) Mike’s response was a good one, albeit a little limited. He talked about reaching media members where they want to be reached — pitching via text or email, etc.  He’s right, but my follow-up questions are more targeted. Here’s what he said in an interview by email.

Sean: I get the mobile applications when it comes to media relations – but what of reputation management, or issues management?  What about using these tools for building stronger relationships among our stakeholders?

Mike: It’s a very interesting and complicated question and I’m glad we have this chance to discuss it more. Reputation and issues management in a mobile world really translates to PR practitioners being available 24/7/365. Because so many people have their mobile device by their side both day and night, it’s seemingly expected that we are open to communicating at any time. There’s positives and negatives to that.

Positively, a perception of always being available is a great client relationship point. It moves PR practitioners from being vendors to trusted advisers. The other side is that PR professionals need to find a personal and professional balance in their lives (as I believe every professional does). We need to ask ourselves when “accessible” becomes too accessible.

Right now, the effect of mobile on the core concept of media relations is that it speeds it up – accessibility, surveying, RSS reading, etc. Also, the 24/7 nature of the job that mobile technology allows us really plays into the true nature of crisis communications.

However, I can easily see more dynamic impacts in the future – dedicated applications and websites for pushing information and taking inquiries, for example – imagine if we could easily mass email a news release from our phones. The problem isn’t so much that the technology doesn’t make all of these things possible; it’s that no one has blended them together to make an ideal tool set.

S: The entire “integrated marketing communications” universe puts public relations into a box beneath marketing, with all our activity required to offer sales support. How does the mobile explosion affect all of the things that aren’t direct sale support?

M: I would respectfully disagree that “integrated” means PR must support sales. If PR departments allow themselves to be put into that box, then they need stronger leadership. However, aside from that possible tangent, it’s really the same comparison offline as it is online – which I think gets lost much of the time when you start to think about tackling an online campaign. Consider the reputation of the company or the products and services you are promoting. Each company or client has plenty to offer in traditional media relations, mobile just accelerates the access to the information.

To make these efforts effective, consideration must be given to how you are found online. If you want to rely on mobile to drive conversation, you have to have a mobile-ready website that’s easy to navigate with easy to find contact information. Further, the proliferation of social media and it’s accessibility on mobile devices mean you have real-time access to your consumers. Find out what they want and use that informal method of research to drive immediate messaging reactions or possibly multivariate testing opportunities. For some fun reading, I think the list presented here is interesting, and while it may not provide “must-use” tools as the title says, it does a good job illustrating how PR pros can use mobile technology and apps to get things done quicker and on-the-fly.

S: What sort of interest in internal communications applications have you seen? (and if not, why not? )

M: The best examples have been the mobile-enabling of company calendars and sales and support materials. Where there’s been a shortcoming is in mobile-enabling branding and media documents.

As your employees travel or are on the road for a day, the flow of information is still going – the media cycle does not stop – something your readers are no doubt aware of. With mobile networks getting faster (3G and 4G technologies), there’s no reason to limit anything you would get on a desktop plugged into your company’s network to just that desktop. Make it mobile, but do it intelligently. Make sure files are easy to download and content is easily findable. The best examples I’ve seen are executed on a tablet like the iPad where companies will develop a tablet- ready website and password protect it to give only internal groups access to as much of the same information that their intranet or local server does. Another way to Web-enable and protect a lot of the needed information is through cloud computing, which is a subject in and of itself.

There is hesitance to Web and mobile enabling much of this information and that hesitance usually comes from IT departments – we love them because they keep us running, but we turn and stomp out of their offices when they throw around their weight with arguments like, “It won’t be secure so we can’t put it online or give you access to it outside of the office.”

While that is a valid point, it’s also frustrating. All we want to do is serve our customers or not have to worry about coming into the office to get that file we forgot, but the security risk is sometimes too great. What if you could access all of your company’s financial and trade-secret information on your phone and then you lost your phone or it was stolen? There are numerous reports of it happening with laptops and mobile devices can be an even easier target. While I can’t disagree, I think there has to be a happy medium to give PR pros on-the-go access and still keeping the information secure.

S: Thanks Mike – I appreciate you taking the time!

What I surmise is that if we see PR only in the media relations or sales support view, we’re going to lose, not just our credibility, but also our jobs. We’ve seen lately more evidence that building relationships across our constituencies is more important to our organizations than simply increasing the volume of opportunities to see our messages.  Regardless of relevancy, message fatigue and competition are going to put a lot of stress on the traditional marketing environment.

I can see how exploiting the two-way (or multi-way) capabilities of mobile could lead to discussion between our clients and us — as well as between end-users and organizations. All of that gets not only to sales opportunities, but also to brand-wide communication. The ability to put such a powerful tool in employee hands alone means much for the cause of collaboration, at lower cost and more efficiently overall. Bringing customers, prospects and employees together by the palms of their hands is a very intriguing prospect.

This week on #icchat, we’ll tackle video in internal communications — still relevant or old hat? Join us Thursday, May 19 at 10 a.m. North American Eastern Time on Twitter. Just search for #icchat (though using TweetDeck or TweetChat makes Twitter chats much easier to handle…)