The end of the year is often thought of as a time for reflection — and getting things done.

As you close out the year and get revved up for 2012, check out some of our top tools and templates. In the last year, your CEC external communications peers have been using these guides to do their jobs faster and more effectively.

You can also check out our top internal tools.

CEC’s Top Four External Communications Tools

1. How to Write News Releases for a Networked Environment

• What it is: Use this guide to ensure that your news releases are strategically focused, designed to appeal to key audiences and optimized for multimedia use.
• Why it’s cool: The media landscape has changed drastically in recent years. This toolkit will help you stay ahead of the curve by improving your news releases subject, style, media content and format.

2. How to Optimize Your Twitter Strategy to Support Business Outcomes

• What it is: This toolkit walks you through creating a Twitter strategy that focuses on driving stakeholder action to enable business outcomes. It also contains guidance on developing meaningful metrics, getting your tweets shared by others, getting started on Twitter, and selecting monitoring tools.
• Why it’s cool: Tweeting to share is nice, but tweeting to support business outcomes is better. This approach relies on Twitter’s functionality as an information distribution channel for stakeholder engagement, engaging key audiences and improving the corporate reputation.

3. Tailor Messages for Local Audiences

• What is it: Use this series of questions to understand when your audience will be most receptive to messages.
• Why it’s cool: Because generic messages don’t account for cultural differences among local communications teams, it’s essential to tailor the tone, content, and language of messages based on the values of local audiences.

4. Benchmark Your Team’s Budget Allocation

• What it is: This online benchmarking analysis tool will help you in the budget planning process by providing benchmarks for key budget areas, including media relations, social media and your corporate website.
• Why it’s cool: Using data we’ve collected from more than 70 member organizations on 2011 communications resource levels, you can view the benchmark data set through lenses such as industry, business model, organization size, function structure, and geography.

CEC Related Blogs

• 4 Tips to Boost the Impact of Your News Release
• How Not to Waste Your Time on Twitter
• 3 Tips for Customizing Global Messages

CEC Related Resources

• News Releases in a Networked Environment
• How to Optimize Your Twitter Strategy to Support Business Outcomes
• Tailor Messages for Local Audiences