The only way that I can cope with the New England Patriots Super Bowl XLVI defeat this morning is to focus solely on the ads. Overall quality and entertainment of ads was down this year, but three themes of significance for communicators and one clear winner for its targeted message and online experience stand out.

Three Trends and One Winner

1. Ubiquitous and Unique Hash Tags
Advertisers made sure that the entire experience—from pre-game “leaks” to the in-game 30 second spot to online chatter—united around one theme. The use of clever hash tags was no exception. Audi carried its Vampire theme over to its hashtag #solongvampires. GE tried to get people talking about #whatworks after showcasing how its people and factories create great, useful stuff, like the turbines that create beer.

While the hash tags were fun to comment on in real time, did they have an impact on the conversation around the brand? Somewhat. Cute or complicated hash tags may have just made it a bit too tricky for Tweeters to make use of it. For example,  mentions of Audi were 50% higher than that of its hash tag. So what have we learned here? Clever hash tags might be fun to brainstorm, but for the “Big Game” where buzz around the brand is key, it might make more sense to just stick with your brand or company name.

2. Employees as the Voice of the Company
Employees—and factories—took center stage in this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads. Eager to demonstrate a commitment to America’s people and products, companies like GE, Best Buy, Turbo Tax, and even NBC Sports let their people share why they love the work that they do and how it contributes to improving the American way of life. Here at CEC we say “Bravo!” Why not tap into the passion of your employees (that passion must exist, of course, before you can harness it) and share an authentic message?

3. Fellow Consumers and Cool Experiences Tap into our Emotion
An emotional connection with the company—be it in the form of shared values or some other feeling of ownership or investment—is the number one driver of a stakeholder actively supporting your company by sharing that positive sentiment with their friends (CEC Influencing Stakeholders, 2010).

Companies tapped into this emotional connection to drive conversation around their brand in two ways. First, Doritos, as it did last year, handed over the commercial-creation reigns to its consumers. The wildly funny Doritos “Slingshot Baby” by chip eater Kevin Wilson and the number-one ranked “Man’s Best Friend” by Jonathan Friedman showcased the fantasies of Doritos lovers. Second, other companies, notably Cadillac and Chevrolet showcased their car operating under “extreme circumstances.” Cadillac featured its ATS driving circles around competitors on Germany’s “Green Hell” while Chevy let boys be boys and take the Chevy Sonic bungee jumping, sky diving, and making a music video with OK Go.

Taken together, each of these trends bear witness to the maturation of Marketers and Advertisers continued navigation of   the labyrinth of online vs. TV, social vs. promotional, and entertaining vs. informational. Given the complexity and the cost, what do you think the future of Super Bowl advertising looks like?

And the winner is…

Honda CRV

Why it works:

• Stakeholder-centric: This ad didn’t so much as target a demographic as it did a psychographic: anyone  who’s feeling a bit antsy about taking the next “big leap” in life and worried that they won’t get to do all those fun things before saddled with life’s obligations.
• Integrated with social…in a way that people want: So lots of ads (if not all?) were designed to get viewers participating in online conversations about the company or product, especially via Facebook. The site for the CRV wins, in my opinion, because it invites visitors to share something we love sharing anyway: our dreams. “Before I make the next leap in life…” makes it easy for people to share and fun for those visiting the site to see what their peers are dreaming of. Unsurprisingly, trips to Europe, running a marathon, and learning a new language top the list.
• And yes, Company-centric: Most of us remember the commercials, but not the names of the companies behind them. In both the Ferris Bueller-inspired (mimicked exactly?) “Matthew’s Day Off” spot and others, I thought Honda did a good job of showcasing the car that is designed to help each of us fulfill our leap lists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VhkDdayA4iA

So what’s your take? What other trends did you notice? Which ads were HORRIBLE? Which ones made you laugh?

Other Favorites:

• Cars.com “Neck” had me singing “Ooh, baby I want that car” all evening. Can I download it on iTunes?
• M&M’s “Just my Shell”: it was fun and funny, and I like the song. A good, happy moment in some otherwise “heavy” ads.

Worst Ads:

• Coca Cola’s Polar Bear spots seemed wildly out of touch with this year’s mild winter in North America.
• Bud Light Platinum. Looking just like the Bud Light you buy in an aluminum bottle at a Nats game, Bud Light Platinum missed a huge chance to differentiate itself. Wouldn’t you like to know it has 2% more alcohol than Bud Light? Or that it was a blue glass bottle on the screen?

CEC Related Resources

• Boost Your Audience Understanding
• US Stakeholders: A look behind behaviors
• Global Stakeholders: A look behind behaviors

CEC Related Blogs

• 2011: Lesson from Super Bowl XLV Ads: Americanize Your Message
• 2010: Boost Your Advertising Impact: Lessons from the Super Bowl
• Don’t Just Allow Office Pools, Encourage Them!
• I LOVE Beer! Unfortunately, So Do Teenagers.

Red Dawn seems to have all the ingredients of a surefire Hollywood success.  It’s a remake of a successful 1984 film featuring Charlie Sheen and  Patrick Swayze about a group of teenagers banding together to save their small U.S. town from a Soviet invasion.  The new cast of up and coming stars have already been featured in blockbusters like Thor and Transformers and seem tailor made to appeal to the tween and teen audiences that have fueled recent hits like Twilight and Harry Potter.  So why is MGM spending more than a million dollars to digitally edit the finished film and delay its release until November 2012?  Because in the new version the invading force is a Chinese army, and in Hollywood today, you do not want to upset the Chinese, who sanction only 20 foreign movie releases per year.  (The “digitally re-mastered” enemy moviegoers will see is led by a much less commercially important North Korean force).

It’s another example of a new reality for Hollywood where screens abroad now account for nearly 70% (and growing) of box office revenue, according to the L.A. Times, and studios cater all elements of production to international audiences particularly in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China whose growth has helped studios survive a massive drop in DVD sales.  So, how’s Hollywood changing and can Communicators learn from their efforts? Read More »

There has been a rapid growth in available communications channels in the last couple years.  This channel explosion places an unprecedented pressure on the communications function to design a strong channel strategy to use these efficiently and effectively.  All of these new channels present an opportunity for communicators to reach out to large audiences and spread information and messages with rapid speed. But it also takes lots of more of communicator’s time to navigate these channels and measure and evaluate how effective they are in their usage.

While many communications teams have a dedicated channel and/or social media person on the team, every communications professional (regardless of your specialization) needs to have a good grasp of channel management. As part of my new project focused on designing a channel audit diagnostic, I have spoke to several of our members to figure out what types of channel related metrics (data) would help communicators use channels in more efficient and effective way.  Here are some of the challenges faced by our members that we are hoping to help them solve with the new channel audit diagnostic:

1. Tracking Usage

Most communicators I spoke to have a good idea about the overall channels usage in their company. They can tell what percentage of their mailing list typically opens their newsletter; how many people listen on to their webinars; or how many people showed up for their CEO/Employee roundtable. However, while lots of communicators know their absolute numbers, they can rarely benchmark themselves to other comms functions in other companies to see how well they are really doing in these metrics.

2. Measuring Comms Effectiveness

While usage numbers are important, high usage is not the same as high impact and effectiveness.  At the end of the day, what really matters not how many people read your blog, but how many of them actually went and took action or modified their behavior because something you said really resonated with them. Many of the communicators I spoke to express a desire to be able to determine better which channels are more/less effective in helping them drive real behavioral change-related outcomes among different groups of stakeholders.

3. Impact of Channels on Employees’ Productivity

A big part of modern communicator’s job is not just to use channels effectively, but also to ensure an organization-wide efficiency in channel usage across the company.  Not all channels are created equal when it comes to boosting employees’ productivity, and some can even be detrimental to it (30 Facebook updates a day, 20 corporate-wide emails in over-worked employee’s inbox). Consequently, communicators need to worry not only about their own channel effectiveness, but also focus on guiding the employees and other functions on how to use channels to their advantage in productive manner.

I would love to hear your thoughts on some of the new challenges you face due to the channel explosion, and what measures/metrics you have in place to track one (or all three) of the above.  As well as how are you making all these new channels work for you!

And make sure to check out some of our great channel-related resources:

Channel Selection Tool

Social Media Latest Outlook

Mobile Technology Latest Outlook

This blog is part of our Building a Global Mindset Series to help communicators increase their own cultural awareness and global perspective.

As more companies are growing both their operations and their sales in India, supporting that growth and building a strong company brand become priorities for the global PR team.  But maintaining truly global perspective and awareness of the nuances in each of the countries where the company operates is a daunting challenge.

India may be a welcome bright spot in this landscape, as the PR in India is very much in keeping with – and in some ways ahead of – trends in the United States and Europe.  Trends Western PR professionals will find familiar:

• Empowered consumers who do their own research online and are more influenced by peers than by company messages.  Social media use in India is by some metrics higher than in the United States and United Kingdom, although its character is quite different – smart phones rather than computers.
• Breakdown of audience silos, reducing the influence of specific media outlets and making it impossible to compartmentalize messages
• Professionalization of PR, including the presence of major global PR firms in the Indian market. Read More »

This blog is part of our Building a Global Mindset Series to help communicators increase their own cultural awareness and global perspective.

Crafting and executing communication strategies when entering a new market is hard. This is especially true if the cultural DNA of the country in question differs widely from home markets.  So, it’s not surprising that we get a lot of questions from our US and UK members about communicating effectively in Brazil –  an intensely multi-cultural society that is also one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

If you are tasked with steering your company’s communication efforts in Brazil, one of the first thing you will need to do is understand communication technology trends. Appreciating ground realities will help you leverage technology effectively across key activities such as PR, CSR, and employee and consumer communication.

Here are three key trends that you should know about technology in Brazil.

1. Mobile phones are ubiquitous: Although only the well-to-do can afford “luxuries” like landlines, mobile phones are commonplace – Brazil has 116 mobile phones per 100 inhabitants. While text messaging is extremely popular in Brazil, mobile internet usage is also increasing with 29% of Brazil’s internet users browsing through their mobile phones. In fact Brazil’s middle-class, spends most of their 3-4 hour long commutes consuming digital content.
2. Internet penetration is low, but rising fast: Unlike mobile phones which are extremely popular, Internet is not widely available to the masses. While currently 22% of the population have access to the Internet, this number is expected to up sharply by 2015. Mobile phones are expected to break the digital divide and drive the growth of internet penetration in the coming years. Another thing to keep in mind is that Portuguese is the most popular online language, not English.
3.  Sociable Brazil leads social media usage: Brazilian culture is equally social online as it is in real life with 91% of Brazil’s online population using social media. In fact, Brazilians carefully craft their online persona – activities such as posting messages or joining communities help Brazilians reflect their desired image. Moreover, while social media is synonymous with Facebook in many countries, it’s Google’s Orkut which has traditionally been the most popular in Brazil. Facebook though has seen a whirlwind growth in 2011 with its user base tripling in a year.

CEC Members: Check out our full Communicator’s Guide to Brazil for recommendations on how to leverage these technology trends as well as to navigate PR, CSR, and employee and consumer communications in Brazil.

What challenges have you experienced steering your communication activities in Brazil? How are you dealing with these challenges?

CEC Related Resources:

• Building a Global Mindset: A Communicator’s Guide to Brazil
• Building a Global Mindset: An Overview of Cultural Values That Shape Interpersonal Communications
• Global Perspective/Cultural Awareness Resource Center
• Managing Communications Across Global and/or Virtual Teams

CEC Related Blogs

• Employee Communications in China
• Lost In Translation: How Cultural Values Shape Your Communications

This blog is part of our Building a Global Mindset series to help communicators increase their own cultural awareness and global perspective.

As the world’s most populous country, fastest growing economy, and stereotypically hard working culture, it’s no wonder that so many companies are focused on expanding their footprint within China. That said, it can be a great challenge for multinational companies to effectively recruit top Chinese talent and build engagement with their current employees.  This is due to paradoxes in the Chinese culture including values of traditionalist versus advanced practices, material success versus relationship-driven business exchanges, and socialism versus capitalism.

This environment leads communicators to ask questions like “will our internal social media investments be effective with our Chinese employees?” “How should we prepare leaders and managers to drive dialogue in an environment where employees may naturally be inclined to let their boss do the talking?” “What values matter most to potential employees in this market?”

We would love to hear your experience with employee communications in China and thoughts on these questions (comment below.)

In the meantime, based on conversations with numerous MNCs and working closely with our peers in the HR space, we’re tracking some of the key trends in employee communication specific to working in China, including:

3 Trends about Employee Communications in China:

1. Chinese Employees Increasingly Choose Chinese Firms over MNCs:
While a higher number of Chinese work for multi-national corporations, in the past 4 years there has been a 19% increase in employees’ preferences to work for Chinese firms. For many, this stems from a fear that recession-hit Western companies lack growth opportunities and have a glass ceiling. Read More »

As soon clock struck midnight a few weeks ago on January 1^st, many of us vowed to change ourselves for the better. We thought, “Ah January, a fresh start to a brand spankin’ new year. 2011 is out and 2012 is IN BABY!”  We vowed to lose weight, eat healthier, and take that trip we’ve been talking about for years. We made a COMMITMENT to self-improvement otherwise known as a New Year’s Resolution.

Yet as WeightWatchers programs and gym memberships increase this month, we all know how this story ends. Right about now, we start to forget our resolutions and revert back to our old habits. “Better luck next year, thanks for comin’ out.” Usually, I’m as guilty as the next guy — but NOT this year. This year is different. This year, I’m taking a new approach starting with these steps:

1. Define the goal – It’s tough to accomplish any goal if you don’t know what it really is. For example, instead of trying to “lose weight,” chose a definitive amount you want to lose.

2. Be realistic – Baby steps, guys. Most people become discouraged and ditch their resolutions because they set the bar way too high. Set realistic acheivable goals.

3. Create an action plan – Once you know what you want to achieve you need to consider how you will get there. You need to understand the actions necessary to accomplish your goal.

4. Write it down – This is the most important step of all. Putting goals on paper makes a resolution more tangible, more real. When you physically see a goal your chances of staying the course improve.

In my experience, resolutions don’t stop at improving our personal lives. We also want to improve professionally. If you’re reading this blog post, chances are you want to improve as a communicator. As we know, simply saying, “I’m going to improve,” won’t get you anywhere. Use the system that works with personal resolutions and apply it to your professional life. Take your personal development one step further and use CEC’s Individual Development Plan. 

Now is the time to set clear expectations for your career and discuss a direct approach to improvement with your manager. Here are a few resources you can use to create a solid IDP:

• Skill Development Grid - Use grid to define your goals - Where do you want to go with your career? What are you trying to accomplish? You can think big with longer-term goals. But understand that it takes a series of short-term, realistic goals to get there. Use our to set CLEAR expectations for different levels of skill development.

• Skills Maturity Assessment - Not sure what skills you need to improve? Use this assessment to find your development areas.

Mangers – if you want individuals on your team to improve, use this IDP to set concrete expectations and a plan of attack. Communicators – if you want that promotion, use this IDP to go get it. Trust me, defining your goals, understanding what it takes to get there, and writing it down will get you there. To see what this looks like in practice, take a look at these four examples:

Individual Development Plan: The Presenter

Individual Development Plan: The Influencer

Individual Development Plan: The Consultant

Individual Development Plan: The Coach

Related CEC Resources

Skills and Roles Topic Center

Modern Communicator’s Skill Set webinar

How to Guide Your Career in Communications

Own Your Professional Development

Do you enjoy building relationships and view conflict a positive means of arriving at a solution? Are you comforable addressing potentially contentious issues, but find that data and tools make you anxious? Do you recognize the power and relevance of communication measurement methods, but struggle to contextualize data into recommendations or actions? If you answered “yes” to any of the above, chances are that you’re an “Influencer.”

CEC research identified 18 competencies that are critical for any modern communicator to succeed. Based on how communicators’ key strengths around these competencies group together, communicators can be categorized into four distinct skill profiles:

• The Presenter—Knows What to Say and How to Say It
• The Influencer—Builds Relationships Across the Organization
• The Consultant—Solves Business Problems
• The Coach—Helps Others to Communicate

In our last post, we introduced the Presenter; today, we’re back with the second profile—the Influencer. Read on to learn how to use your core Influencer skills while making a plan to address development opportunities for continuous growth.

The Influencer
The Influencer is skilled at building relationships with stakeholders across and beyond the organization. She is capable of handling conflicts and disagreements constructively by understanding business partners’ views and finding “win-win” solutions. This quality makes the Influencer a sought-after person for senior leaders and business partners who seek to understand the communication implications of their decisions. Further, she is a skilled communicator and presenter, capable of delivering compelling verbal communication—even on contentious issues—with confidence and sensitivity. Read More »

Communicators often need to use numbers to narrate a story. However, for people who love playing with words, it can be a “scary” prospect to conduct quantitative surveys. The challenge lies in asking the right set of questions, gathering information that meets the desired objectives, and analyzing the data to build your story. The question then becomes, “What is the best way to gather the information required to fulfill my desired objectives?”

When researching on best ways to conduct quantitative surveys, we discovered that launching a quant survey is much more than pressing a launch button that sends out a questionnaire. Communicators need to focus their efforts on building a solid hypothesis to test and developing clear objectives for the survey.

The four steps below will help you get the most out of your survey efforts:

1. Build a Plan – Communicators should think about why they are doing a survey and how they plan to use the results. This involves creating a hypothesis of what you want to show with the study, understanding the central problem, and identifying the variables that influence it. Learn how to integrate the problem and its causes into a description of reality.
2. Spend Time Designing – Once you have the built a survey model, you need to do much more than make a list of questions. Designing the survey involves developing and testing hypotheses as well as thinking about whether you will want to track results over time or not. Read more on survey design to understand how to select your target audience, data collection tools, and the survey parameters.
3. Maximize Participation – Getting a high number of responses on surveys can be a frustrating process. You need to convince a large number of people to take 15-30 minutes out of their schedule to respond. Find out how you can maximize survey participation by creating a launch and promotion plan before even making the survey.
4. Conduct In-Depth Analysis – Sorting through vast amounts of survey data can be daunting.  Start cleaning your data by looking for outliers (high or low responses), which can really skew the validity of your results. Look at how you can analyze surveys and build correlations to tell a story with the data.

CEC Members: Download the complete tool for How to Conduct Quantitative Surveys. This is one of the accompanying tools to Step 4 in Building an Outcome-Focused Communication Plan.

Related Blogs:

• 3 Steps to Be a Better Listener
• CEC’s Top 4 Internal Communications Tools
• Integrate Your Listening Efforts

Related Resources:

• How to Conduct Focus Groups
• Building an Outcome-Focused Communication Plan
• Anatomy of a Business Value-Focused Communication Function

As we close the book on 2011, most of us are probably drafting our plans for how we intend to achieve our 2012 objectives.  If you’re like many of the communicators who I have spoken with recently, you are eager to structure your communication plans so as to demonstrate the value that Communications can create for rest of the business.  Perhaps you’re even using the CEC’s recently published toolkit on building an outcome-focused communication planand starting off the planning process by gaining a deep understanding of your Comms objective and target stakeholder audience.  After all, how can you begin to think about creating an action plan if you don’t first fully appreciate the communications goal?

While this advice might seem intuitive, communicators often lose sight of or altogether fail to consider the specific Comms outcome that they are hoping to achieve through their efforts.  But even more important than asking ourselves “What is the Communications objective that we hoping to achieve?” is another intuitive, yet critically important question — “What is the business outcome that we’re hoping to achieve?”

Reverse Engineer Your Comms Plans  Read More »