May was a big month here at the CEC – we wrapped up our biggest research initiative of the year and presented it for the first time at our headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

For me, the most memorable moment in discussion came during a segment on media monitoring.  This topic can seem quite mechanical – the sort of thing you’d assign to a mid-level person on your team.  But the discussion in Arlington really brought home for me just how strategic it needs to be.

Most of the comms executives participating in the discussion described what I can only characterize as a disjointed approach: one tool for traditional media, another for blogs, another for twitter, and so on.  For a few, responsibility for each type of monitoring (traditional vs. social) even resides in separate groups or departments.  Now, a few folks did describe more integrated systems.  But even in those cases, typical reporting is channel by channel, perhaps with some overall statistics on company mentions, tonality, and/or share of voice.

Does any of this describe your department’s approach? Read More »

I don’t need to tell anyone that today’s communications environment is very different to even 10 years ago.  I set up my first email account 10 years ago and only checked it once a week (I’m pretty slow at these things); now I spend most of my waking hours searching the web, checking email, and pretending to know what I’m doing on social networking sites. When we talk to our members about the changes they’ve seen, there are three things that they typically refer to:

• The decline of traditional media—most commonly the hit to newspaper circulation
• The sheer amount of communication “noise” that we are all exposed to on a daily basis (fun research by University of California on this)
• An explosion of new channels—most of which fall under the category of “social media” (there are so many I can’t keep up—foursquare is the latest to baffle me)

While all of these characterizations are true, there is one fundamental flaw: they are just the symptoms of what’s really going on.  Read More »

I’ve learned a lot about learning over the years.  Some people learn best by reading.  Others by listening.  Some people need to have a sensory experience in order for a new idea to lock into their brain. No one style is better than another, it’s just that we’re all different.

Many communicators, for instance (being the verbal maestros so many of us are!) learn best by talking.  Sometimes words just blurt out of our mouths (ideally not in the midst of eating a Sloppy Joe) and as we hear ourselves speaking out loud, a new thought begins to take shape.

Such a blurt occurred recently for me during our first-ever Preview of our new CEC Annual Executive Retreat series, “Influencing Stakeholders in a Networked Environment.”  In discussing the new reality of influence–the idea that people today are much more likely to listen to and believe ideas from “unofficial sources” (real people) as opposed to anything we say in our “corporate” communications–I blurted out the not-quite-fully-formed thought, “There is no such thing as social media.” Read More »

By Rebecca Canan

If you’re like me, you regularly get hit with social media newsletters, blog posts, and expert proclamations that all declare they’ve found the definitive new social media search engine or analytics tool (e.g., ”13 Essential Social-Media ‘Listening Tools!”).  However, when I begin playing around with these “essential” tools, I’m often disappointed either because (1) they miss too much or (2) they pick up too much.  This prompts me to ask, “Which free tools are actually worth the time???”  Based on conversations with (often frustrated) communicators and CEC’s research, I’ve assessed some of the popular search tools available and provided a quick review of what they can—or can’t—give you.

As context, here are the basic criteria I used when reviewing a monitoring tool:

• Is it actually free? (If the answer is “no”, it didn’t make my list.  This happened with a couple tools like Jodange and Filtrbox.)
• How relevant are the results?
• How timely are the results?
• How comprehensive are the results?
• Is the interface easy to use and interpret?

In addition to the popular tools that I reviewed in the table below, I came across these other fun tools: Read More »

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… Read More »