Last week, the evolution of CEB technology enabled me to remotely view our debut meeting of 2010 on Influencing Stakeholders in a Networked Environment.  This seemed like a great time to take a page from the online game commentary of ESPN’s Bill Simmons with a Retro Diary of last week’s CEC meeting…

10:03: Rick DeLisi, our day’s presenter, begins by highlighting CEO consensus about a return to growth-oriented priorities in 2010.  While our audience seems to be in agreement, I hope the news on Yahoo! Finance of a 200pt decline in the Dow at the moment is not a bad omen for our day.

10:53: Our research team introduces a great 2×2 framework for expanding “active support”—i.e., the population of stakeholders who have positive sentiment about the company and are inclined to talk about it with others.  It’s similar in spirit to CEC’s 2009 framework for employee mobilization, though with different twists on how Comms can hit that upper-right “sweet-spot” in the four-square.

11:30: This may well end up being the biggest moment of the day.  A robust analysis revealed that stakeholders’ “emotional connection” with a company far outpaced actual company experiences, corporate citizenship, trust, and other factors in making them more likely to actively support the company.  It reminds me of a recent Slate article about a tortured but prodigious memory manipulation expert who found that companies responding to a crisis can actually get stakeholders to alter their memory of the initial event if they respond on an emotional (rather than a rational) basis.  In fact, that concept may be underlying the arguments of those who want Obama to adopt a more emotional, even Clintonian “feel your pain” posture in confronting the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

11:45: As the research begins to clarify how Comms can generate active support by enhancing stakeholders’ emotional connection with the company, we are introduced to an ethnography process from Southwest Airlines that helps them get a better understanding of underlying stakeholder values.  My first thought was that such research was a luxury, but when you think of how pervasive the technique is for brand managers and product developers, it’s hard not to see this as the next frontier in the professionalization of our function.  (I just hope I’ll never have to justify my organizational system to a Comms professional that tries to observe me in my natural working habitat.)

2:30: Really cool idea here from National Instruments. A social media manager posts opportunities for employees to respond directly to stakeholders with shared (company-related) interests based on a sophisticated online listening system.  For all those who I’ve spoken to about activating our employees as advocates, this seems to be your model.

3:45: In examining why people make the effort to demonstrate active support for companies, CEC has uncovered three basic principles. Basically, doing so must make people feel 1) cool, 2) smart, and/or 3) helpful.  It’s amazing the simplicity of the finding given how this study is clearly the deepest into neuroscience we have ever gone.  It also completely resonates with why I forward on a piece of content: because it may in some way make me seem cooler, smarter, or more helpful to my friends (as if that were possible!).

4:59: Day concludes with general consensus among our audience that indeed this research represents the future of our function and a journey we will be on for a long time.  Maybe sensing our room’s confidence and clarity, the markets have rallied throughout the day to close virtually even.