One of my favorite parts of the job is moderating and reading the conversations on our member discussion forums. Recently, questions around Communications’ mission statements in both our External Stakeholder Relations Forum and our Employee Communications Forum caught my attention. I have been wondering about Communications missions and how the function positions itself to business partners in the last few weeks, as we work on our main study for this year Unlocking Communications Business Impact…what if with our function’s mission statements we are creating the wrong expectations with the rest of the organization on what kind of value can Comms add? When I speak with CEC members, I often hear frustration that Comms is seen as a service provider. Are we setting incomplete perceptions with business partners through our mission statement, and limiting our full potential to contribute to business results – or even the way we view our own role as communicators?

With these questions in mind, I went on the lookout for other CEC research around mission statements to see what commonalities I would find to the ones shared on the discussion forums…to paraphrase, some of them include: Read More »

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

Brazil is one of the hottest countries in the world at the moment, not only as the host of the next World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, but particularly due its rapid growth and rise as one of the key emerging economies – Brazil just recently overtook the UK to become sixth-largest in the world. So it is not surprising that many members ask us about what it’s like to communicate with Brazilian audiences and how to message differently in this market. Brazil is not just the land of samba, football and beaches, but also a country of hard-working people, where relationships are key to successful business partnerships, and where internet and new technologies are rapidly expanding like in other emerging economies.

In our research of the Brazilian culture, wediscovered that internet usage is increasing in Brazil and that social media is extremely popular among online audiences, which means that there is an opportunity to connect with audiences through this channel (and actually 70% of Brazilian companies already use or monitor social media channels).

As communicators, what can you do to become smarter about social media usage in Brazil, and what does that mean for your work? Here are three somewhat surprising trends about social media in Brazil: Read More »

Last week we wrote about CEC’s upcoming research study for the year, and how communicators need to focus beyond just improving perceptions and more on actually getting stakeholders to DO something and modify their behavior. We also talked about how this requires close collaboration with business partners because behavior change is hard in general and something that Communications can’t do alone. But, getting business partners to work with you on impacting behaviors is only half the battle. Communicators themselves will have to change the way they currently do things, if they are to really do this well.

Change is hard, for every human being, even for us as communicators (who often have to communicate about change!). So I started thinking about my recent conversations with many heads of communications and wondered why that is? Why do communicators find it hard to let go of some of the activities they do to increase share of company’s voice across channels and audiences, and start to focus more on those audiences’ drivers of behavior? Some of the reasons that I have heard in my member conversations that I found interesting include:

1. Communications’ own perception about where and how to add value: with so much emphasis on highly visible activities around building the company reputation, the brand, and creating a “one company” vision, Comms views itself as the owner of reputation (not of behavior change). If we do these well, we get a pat on the back from senior leadership…and who doesn’t like to be praised in front of everyone?!  While reputation and image are important (and CEC has resources to help you with these big initiatives), focusing on these big things shifts attention away from the places where you can actually affect behaviors and outcomes. Read More »

Wondering what product marketing techniques work best with customers in China? Need to craft an employee brochure for your Brazilian plant and not quite sure what would be culturally appropriate or resonate better with that country’s audience? Need to keep up with trends among GenXers in different countries? CEC has got just the resource for you – our new Iconoculture-powered Stakeholder Insights resource center.

I’ll show my nerdy side here but Iconoculture is my second-favourite source of insights (after our CECInsider of course!). For those not familiar with Iconoculture, this sister company to CEC specializes in deep analysis of stakeholder behaviors and preferences around the world. Iconoculture’s global insights around stakeholder trends and cultural observations can be great for inspiration about structuring your communications for different geographies and demographic groups.

What Can You Use the Iconoculture Stakeholder Insights Resource For? These insights can be helpful for gaining a better understanding of your audiences, including: Read More »

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

CEC members often talk about the challenges with communications strategies in China – anything ranging from understanding the culture, to working with local agencies to identifying the influential media players, to building the company brand in the market. This interest in China is hardly a surprise as many companies either operate there already and are learning from their mistakes, or are considering entering emerging markets for new sources of growth (and especially China, which is the fastest growing among them, and one of the most important global economies at the moment).

China remains a challenging environment to do business in for many western companies, as Chinese culture and the socio-political nuances of the country are very different from home markets. Arguably, the Chinese PR landscape is one of the trickiest aspects for a communicator. As part of CEC’s A Communicator’s Guide to China, we looked at some of the key trends in the PR industry there, including: Read More »

One of the key activities for communicators in terms of reputation building is stakeholder engagement. Members tell us that they focus heavily on stakeholder engagement activities and are trying to be smarter about it – prioritizing key, influential stakeholders and keeping a pulse on what they are saying about the company. These activities involve not only monitoring for risks and potential issues, but also take the shape of more proactive engagement through thought leadership events, engaging and meeting with industry leaders, and promoting good corporate citizenship efforts.

Currently, most stakeholder engagement is focused around reputation risk management and justifying or positively reinforcing existing reputation activities. Some of the ways in which communicators manage reputation with stakeholders include:

• Stakeholder mapping and monitoring: this involves keeping a pulse on what stakeholders are saying about you, so that you may identify and preempt potential risks. Think of this one as good “housekeeping” to prevent issues or crises from rising. For example, Monsanto utilizes stakeholder-centric monitoring to prioritize issues for specific stakeholder groups. Other companies identify and prioritize reputation risks by mapping “degree of sensitivity to issue” against “strength of company position.”
• Stakeholder conversations and thought leadership: more proactively, communicators identify influencers and discuss issues of concern with them to establish the company as a thought leader in the industry. This is in addition to other thought leadership and executive communications programs. Chevron for example, holds thought leadership stakeholder discussions on important issues to the company.

These tactics are great if you, the Communications team, were the only ones engaging with stakeholders! But more and more it is your business partners and employees who have more frequent interactions with stakeholders.  Adding additional pressure is the fact that the external environment is becoming increasingly complex as stakeholders become more resourceful about how they access information and form perceptions about you.

The problem is that business partners and employees don’t necessarily know all the risks to reputation as they are having conversations with stakeholders, and won’t think through those interactions as strategically as communicators do. Read More »

I recently watched the movie Outsourced and despite being filled with cultural stereotypes and exaggerations, it highlights how a lack of understanding of another culture can create miscommunications and impact business results.  It also reminded me of my university course on intercultural communications where we looked at how different cultures influence people’s perceptions and interactions.

We did role-playing exercises where we were assigned specific countries and had to simulate business negotiations or casual conversations. I probably learned more practical and valuable lessons in that course than in most of my core business classes. Having now lived in three different countries, I am more aware of how the culture I grew up in shapes my communication style and what to be mindful of as I work with colleagues from diverse backgrounds.

We communicators need to build our own cultural awareness, as our companies become more global and are made up of more culturally diverse teams. In fact, CEC’s Competency Diagnostic found that building global perspective and cultural awareness is the biggest competency gap for communicators (Just only 13% of the communicators we surveyed excel in this area).

Cultural awareness is important in three scenarios:

1. Supporting leaders in business partners as they develop global strategies.  As one member told me, “As we expand in emerging markets, we really don’t have a good understanding of these cultures, and we have had to learn through painful mistakes.”
2. Collaborating with our globally dispersed teams:  Another member revealed, “We want to make sure everyone on the team has a voice, but this is not always easy—in some cultures, it is not acceptable to speak up, and we surface problems too late.”
3. Messaging to audiences around the world: How do we effectively customize messages so that we are sensitive to local culture and language limitations?

How can you as communicators increase your own awareness of other cultures? Of course you can’t possibly get to know every country in the world (and true, each individual is different), but you can start building the foundations of your own global acumen and cultural awareness through a couple of useful frameworks:

Read More »

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 »

In our recent toolkit for Managing Communications in Global and Dispersed Organizations, we looked at a flexible governance framework to help communicators make decisions in the moment about escalating situations centrally or handling them locally. Many of the activities that local communicators have to manage are pretty straightforward and low sensitivity.  As such, the corporate communications team doesn’t need to get involved with these decisions – things like handling a local media enquiry, creating a local press release, or organizing the regional office’s quarterly volunteering event. In these situations, the best solution is to equip local communicators with tools and support so they can “get on with it” and are not sitting around waiting for help from corporate.  This way, corporate also doesn’t need to get bogged down with minor decisions and can focus attention on bigger issues.

How can local communicators become self-sufficient so that corporate only gets involved in those most critical or ambiguous/sensitive situations? Below are four tips for effectively supporting local communicators:

1. Understand local communicator needs

• TIP: be an active listener – ask smart questions to understand what local communicators need and what kind of support they currently lack
• CEC Tools: check out these Quick Tips for How to be a Quality Listener and our other Dialogue Self-Service Tools Read More »

You may have seen us write about crisis communications lately and the importance of building a preventative culture  – that is, being prepared to respond to a crisis situation without harming company reputation and thus avoid the risk of becoming another NewsCorp. One important (although seemingly small) step of being well-prepared is knowing how to communicate well during breaking news that affects your company and subsequent handling of enquiries from the media. This post brings to you some key steps to think about when creating news/press releases and more generally handling questions from the media.

Many communicators’ tendency will be to immediately think about the channels through which to release the news, but there are some pre-steps to consider before distributing the information.

Firstly, before even thinking through how to write the release, decide if the event is worthy of a news release or if you should communicate about it in some other way. Consider these questions:

• Would my company’s brand/reputation suffer if I don’t put out a news release?
• Would there be legal implications? (i.e. might we be accused of a cover up if there is no official statement?)
• Can we stay ahead of the story and limit damage by being proactive in offering information?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, it is best to issue a formal news release.

Secondly, once you have determined that issuing a release is the way to go (and odds are in most cases, the answer will be yes), think through what it should contain. Aside from the more obvious tips of having a catchy title or avoiding typos and grammar mistakes, there are three key steps you always need to consider and think through before you even begin to write your news release: context, format, and content.

Read More »