A short while ago I came across this article on the BBC about “Americanisms” in the English language (being a non-native English speaker, “ideas coming out of left field” confused me for many years too!). Given my personal fascination with languages, and also because our very own CEC team is split across the “pond”, naturally I shared this with my colleagues. After poking a bit of friendly fun at the phrases each of us in the UK or US say, at the end of the day we must admit that we all use these little catch phrases in our day to day speak, and that sometimes things do get “lost in translation” when interacting with people in other countries (sometimes, even when we both speak the same language!).

As companies become more and more international, communicators experience increased difficulties when crafting messages for their diverse global audiences.  I often hear members say things like “we want to make sure we act and sound as ‘one company’ and convey a consistent image, but we also want to sound sensitive to the local culture” or “we think we are being culturally aware in our messaging, but we’re still perceived as too American” [or too Swiss, Japanese, etc.].

How can communicators stay consistent in what they’re saying across markets to convey a unified company image, but at the same time be relevant? And even before thinking about content, how do you even prioritize communications for each market so that you’re not communicating too much and having your messages ignored? Read More »

When I was a kid, we had a piano in the house. It was an attractive piece of furniture in our family room. I say that, cause no one in our family knew how to play it (beyond say, “Chopsticks”).

But (for reasons which still elude me), we once had it professionally tuned. Now, I’d seen pianos being tuned before. It’s done electronically with a device that analyzes each note and indicates whether it’s flat or sharp. But the guy who tuned our piano had no device — cause he was totally blind.

Think about it. A blind piano tuner (watch the video). Born without sight, this guy’s hearing was so super-sensitive, he could immediately detect the slightest imperfection in each note, and adjust it back to pitch-perfect just by listening.

To him, an out-of-tune note is like a physical discomfort, and he’s the doctor who relieves patients of their pain.

In some ways, that’s what we communicators do. Only not with musical notes, but rather, with words. When we hear something that’s not right — we just know. It gets under our skin, and makes us uncomfortable. In some cases, it triggers our gag reflex and makes us wanna lose our lunch. And we’ve gotta fix it. Read More »

“Hope for the best – plan for the worst.”  I’ve heard this saying many times in my life, used in a wide range of contexts.  Most recently, it came up in a conversation with a CEC member in the Financial Services industry who was referring to his company’s approach to crisis communications.  He emphasized how little room for error there seemed to be these days, mentioning that, despite prudent business practices over the past few years, the public still considered his company “guilty by association,” simply due to a general loss of confidence in the industry.  Trust had eroded and scrutiny was on the rise.

Data from CEC’s sister program, the Corporate Ethics & Leadership Council (CELC), confirms that this is not an isolated perspective.  A recent study of corporate leaders reveals that 77% believe media scrutiny has increased, while 82% report a proliferation of new risk types.  These developments combined with the continued rise in citizen journalism and fluid information flow are making communicators feel more vulnerable to crises.

Faced with such a risky environment, it might seem difficult to truly “plan for the worst.” After all, this assumes that your company can create a comprehensive list of potential crises as respective plans. And while I won’t recommend that you don’t plan for individual scenarios or try to prevent crises from happening (check out our latest resources on avoiding crisis), I do think there are some things that companies should do to ensure that they are prepared to respond effectively when a crisis hits. Read More »

Line managers are critical in ensuring success when making a major organizational change. As we know, they have the greatest influence over employee behavior, and can play a particularly vital role in contextualizing change for their teams.

Both intuition and experience, though, tell us that that line managers aren’t always up to this task. Many simply aren’t strong communicators, and the turbulence of change can disrupt even those who are strong the rest of the time.

How does your organization prepare managers for the additional stress and difficulty brought on by change? Many communicators are so pushed for time that they simply rely upon managers to muddle through. Others provide manager training of varying quality, to help managers cope with the increased demand of navigating the change.

Assessing for change-readiness

Significantly fewer companies, however, formally assess how ready their managers are to lead the change before it all begins. Although everyone knows how important they’ll be, many organizations enter a period of change without a clear view of their managers’ strengths and weaknesses; often, it’s only as the change unfolds, or else retrospectively, that managers’ skill gaps become evident. Of course, by this stage, it’s too late – the damage is done! Read More »

I found myself walking into the closest branch of my bank the other day to take care of a transaction.  The people at my bank are super nice.  They always go the extra mile.  They always offer me coffee, which I always decline.  Really, they have the customer service thing down.  But for all my fond feelings towards them, I mostly just resented having to drive all the way to my bank to take care of a transaction that I would rather have handled remotely on my own.  The reason—I didn’t want or need their advice—I simply needed their logistics.

Apparently, I’m typical.  For years we’ve worked to entice our banking customers into our branches with the quality of our customer service—wooing them with friendly faces and a hot drink so that they’ll want to entrust us with their financial future.  But by the time they’re easing themselves into our comfy chairs, they’ve already made their financial decisions—they’re simply there because they have to be to finish the transaction. Read More »

Ongoing change is a new reality. In the last two years, employees worldwide have experienced, on average, 3.5 major changes (enlarge graphic to the left). That means that most communicators have spent a lot of time planning for and talking about change. To help you craft a change communication plan that works, I suggest that you ask yourself the following 5 questions:

1. What is the desired stakeholder behavior change?
2. How will this behavior change impact the stakeholder?
3. What information should we share with stakeholders about the change?
4. How do we help leaders and managers to drive stakeholder behavior change?
5. How do we sustain change over time?

These questions will help you craft a change communication plan that builds your employee’s agility—their ability to adapt to any change—because as you plan to communicate about one change you are really:

• Creating communication systems that connect employees to people and information
• Equipping leaders and managers with the skills to help employees make their own decisions
• Enabling employees to lean in to change (rather than simply process and accept that change is happening to them)

Let’s take each question in a bit more detail. Read More »

If every corporate Twitter account was deleted tomorrow, what would happen?

Social media has come to define the way many people use the internet. But even two years ago the terrain looked much different (RIP MySpace) and it’s anyone’s guess what the next two will bring (good luck, Google+).

Twitter is currently the third most popular social media platform, so it provides a huge potential audience for companies. But realizing that potential may take more effort than we’d hoped.

That’s why we’ve been investigating what best-in-class Twitter strategies look like. CEC members we’ve spoken to so far have had some interesting things to say about the evolution of their Twitter strategy and plans for the future.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

What’s the value of followers?

• CEC Hypothesis: The size of your Twitter following is not important; the degree to which your followers share your message is. Followers are a crude metric of popularity but we have an inkling that winning the Twitter game really won’t have much of anything to do with how many people click ‘follow’ on your profile. How do you value your followers? Do you have monthly objectives to increase your followership? How do you do that? Read More »

It was with extreme irritation that I discovered this weekend that London’s department stores have already begun to stock their shelves with Christmas goods! It seems that the countdown to 2012 has begun already, and although in my personal life I have no intention of thinking as far ahead as the presents I’ll be buying my family, in our professional lives it’s definitely the time of year where we’re obliged to start making our plans for the year ahead.

We at the CEC are no different, and in our never-ending quest to stay at the cutting edge of the Communications space, it’s vital to us that our agenda be set by our members most pressing needs. With this in mind, we recently polled our clients to identify where we should be focusing our energies with our upcoming work.

Check out 4 trends that we’ve observed from the data:

Observation #1: Engaging employees with corporate goals and supporting change remain the top priorities for communicators

CEC research indicates that the average employee experiences 3.5 major changes every two years, ensuring that the need to navigate these turbulent times, and maintain employee engagement at the same time, remains high on every communicator’s agenda.

• Thoughts from CEC: Check our studies, Mobilizing the Workforce for work on engaging employees around organizational objectives, and Building a Change-Ready Organization for work on supporting organizational change management. Read More »

We have just released our annual 2011 Aggregate Benchmarking Report highlighting the key communications budget trends for 2011/2012. In my previous blog, I highlighted the growing importance of staff in communications budgets; but there is another interesting trend that we found from our data: Companies are decoupling their communications and marketing departments’ budgets.

While in 2007, 33 percent of communicators reported that their communications department’s budget was part of the marketing budget, this percentage fell to 21 in 2011. In addition, the share of marketing related expenses in communicators’ non-staff budgets also fell by 10 percent between 2007 and 2011. Read More »

As the world becomes more and more connected by technological innovations, it’s no wonder that communicators have become far less reliant on reactive response strategies. Waiting for a reputational threat to arise before thinking about solutions just won’t cut it. But no matters how fast information spreads, communicators — even those well-armed with response tactics — can only move so quickly.

Communicators are successfully enlisting line manager support in limiting reputational risks by erring on the side of simplicity in developing tools and processes for managers to use. Clear decision rules guiding the frequency, nature and venue of stakeholder interactions — plus making clear when to involve the communications team — line managers can play an essential role in local stakeholder engagement.

Line managers represent a powerful resource in identifying reputational threats as well as mitigating risks through engagement with key stakeholder groups. In companies with widely varying stakeholder groups across many locations, managers are much better suited to handle the basics of local stakeholder relations than a centralized corporate communications team. Leading communicators account for the real challenges in developing line managers as players in stakeholder engagement.

Read More »