Red Dawn

It’s another example of a new reality for Hollywood where screens abroad now account for nearly 70% (and growing) of box office revenue, according to the L.A. Times, and studios cater all elements of production to international audiences particularly in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China whose growth has helped studios survive a massive drop in DVD sales.  So, how’s Hollywood changing and can Communicators learn from their efforts?

Casting:  As noted by both the L.A. Times and Wall Street Journal, studios increasingly are casting international stars to broaden the global box office appeal.  For example, in Sony’s The Green Hornet Taiwanese star Jay Chou, of limited English or Hollywood experience, was chosen in part to broaden the U.S. centric appeal of co-star Seth Rogen.  Producers cast Byung-hun Lee, a major Korean movie star, and South African actor, Arnold Vosloo for key roles in G.I. Joe, a film executives worried would be too American for international audiences.  In the end, the movie grossed more than 50% of its $302 million abroad with South Korea accounting for a $16 million alone.

Versioning:  You may have trouble finding some recent blockbusters in foreign countries.  Captain American: First Avenger was retitled as simply First Avenger and Battle: Los Angeles became World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles.  But studios continue to explore more substantive versioning as well.  Producers of The Other Guys sought to re-shoot a key scene involving Derek Jeter with an international soccer star such as Cristiano Ronaldo, and while the player wasn’t available the WSJ quoted the film’s director Adam McKay teasing the future, saying: “It’s a whole new way of looking at movies.  Rather than trying to veer your audience toward the film, just tweak your film to the audience. Next, I’d like to start tweaking movies by region, one version for the Midwest, another for the East Coast, and the South.”

Settings:  Hollywood blockbusters that most rely on foreign receipts are also featuring emerging markets as backdrops for the action.  Fast Five was set in Brazil and did 2x the business of the previous iteration of the series in that country.  Mission Impossible 4 was set partially in Mumbai, Dubai, and Russia, and even Cars 2 featured a host of international locations.  Fast Five producer Neal Moritz admitted to the Times that Brazil “not only was right for the movie but also for the international marketplace.”  Studios are even opting for international locations for their world premieres.  Michael Bay demonstrated his global savviness quoting the BRIC acronym like a Davos presentation when discussing the Moscow premier of Transformers with the Hollywood Reporter.  

Genre:  The growth of the international marketplace is changing the very nature of what Hollywood produces.  For example, a surefire hit in the U.S, Anchorman 2 was shelved because it’s brand of American humor didn’t translate overseas as well as pictures from more global comedy stars such as Sasha Baron Cohen of Bruno and Borat fame.  Indeed, many expect the overall number of comedies produced to decline in favor of action movies that required less cultural awareness to understand. 

Distribution Channel:   Many rural communities in emerging markets are difficult for studios to reach; however, companies like IMAX are opening up new opportunities with portable domes equipped with IMAX screens that broaden the reach of movies beyond economic centers like Shanghai and Rio.  

Production Sourcing:  Despite the growing importance of the international marketplace, Hollywood’s share of box office receipts in many international locations is actually declining against improving local competition.  To combat this trend, studios are investing big dollars to produce or co-produce locally developed content.  Hollywood-Bollywood studio partnerships have led the way in recent years with Indian hits like Saawariya backed by Columbia Tristar and even Tamil content produced by Fox-owned joint ventures.  Indian studios such as Reliance MediaWorks are supporting this trend with the development of top flight studios so Mumbai scenes in Mission Impossible no longer have to be shot in Vancouver.

So, how does a Communicator follow the Hollywood playbook?  To sum: Make multiple locally resonant versions of your content featuring stakeholders from different regions, with exciting but easy to follow themes, through creative distribution channels that reach all audiences.   Or partner with local content producers than can help you reach those audiences but add to the complexity of message development. 

Sound easy?  Well, here’s how the CEC can help…

Managing Communications Across Global and Virtual Teams

An Overview of Cultural Values that Shape Interpersonal Communication

Brazil Country Profile

India Country Profile

China Country Profile

Bear with me a second, but that whole process kind of reminds me of a desperate Corporate Communications team retreat.  We know we’ve gotten fat on low-value requests, we haven’t had time to work out our skills, and the direction of our function is starting to feel a bit aimless.  So, the thinking goes, if we just lock ourselves in a conference room for three days to plan, train, and strategize, we’ll be good to go for another twelve months.

But we all know the benefits of many retreats don’t last longer than those cleansing diets, and our needy business partners can throw us off track like a Bears Mug Beer Sunday Beer Special (a Chicago football tradition).  So as a solution, let me introduce CEC’s 100 day plan for lasting improvement to your communications function.   It’s not an instant cure, but we think the benefits are far greater and more lasting. 

Day 1-25: Setting Strategic Priorities
The first step in the diet is figuring out what we actually should be working on.  Now, a cleansing diet will have you a brainstorm a big list, narrow it down, refine some language and send you packing with nothing tied to business value to keep you on track.  The CEC plan requires a bit more upfront research with business partners, but if you complete our Anatomy of a Business Value Focused Communications Function, you will come away with a data-driven set of priorities that maximize value to the business based on urgency and current state.  You can even use the data push back on business partners and revisit your work to ensure ongoing alignment.   

Day 26-50: Assess Team Capabilities
The next step is to practice your skills.  Now, a cleansing diet may offer a couple training opportunities during your retreat, but it’s after you’ve been drinking only apple cider vinegar for a week, so your capacity for retention is not exactly high.  The truth is there’s no real substitute for a sustained exercise plan in maintaining health, so the CEC cure includes a customized skills assessment (think of it like a personal trainer), monthly online learning opportunities, and communication skills workshops (because it’s always easier to workout with someone else).

Day 51-75: Create Action Plans
Here’s really where the CEC plan excels: how many times have you left a retreat feeling great but unclear on exactly what the next steps are?  That’s why the second half of the CEC plan begins with our Outcomes Focused Communication Tactic Planner to establish an ongoing worksheet for linking activities to business value and an ROI Workbook to ensure we’re exiting the least valuable activities (basically, it helps you realize that Chipotle just isn’t really that good for you).   

Day 76-100: Establish the Right Org Structure
The last element is all about balance in your function.  If we set the right structure we can balance between centralized and centralized needs, corporate and business unit requests, and audience/channel versus strategic focus while keeping everyone focused on business value.  Sometimes, we just need to add more coordinating mechanisms whereas other times we are going to establish a new structure for the future, but ensuring that we have the organization to support the plans, skills, and tactics previously identified will prevent the inevitable slide back following the retreat. 

So, when you get back from the holidays ready to make a fresh start rather than a dramatic cleanse at your next retreat, consider the CEC’s 100 Day Plan for a New Communications Function, and you will find that lasting change requires no miracle cure at all.

While access to new markets and talent should offer opportunities for market shaping innovation, less than 40% of employees perceive effective collaboration – even in just one location. The results are troubling: innovation vitality (the percentage of sales from new products) is troublingly low to keep up with the necessary pace of growth in these new markets and less than a third of R&D staff in developed or emerging markets report high levels of trust with their global counterparts.

So how is this all a Communications problem (other than the fact that everything is a communications problem!)? Corporate Executive Board research shows that most organizations wrongly attribute these deficiencies to the innovation skills of geographically dispersed R&D centers; however, leading companies instead focus on increasing 1) the willingness of global employees to share and receive information and 2) the strength of connections to actually identify and apply new ideas – in other words, the effectiveness of the communications environment. Two lessons from our research into global intranet platforms suggest some immediate solutions.

1) Humanizing Our Global Employees – A significant deficiency in communication platforms ranging from Yammer to Sharepoint is the belief that the ability to connect is correlated with the willingness to connect; however, our research shows that it’s only when we allow these tools to take someone from a faceless email address to a three dimensional individual with personal interests and experiences do we actually build the trust and empathy that promotes collaboration. One of my favorite result stats from a CEC case study shows that in Sabre’s very human internal social media platform started with largely personal connections but those bonds were a necessary precondition for the professional discussions that now form the majority of the dialogue. Communicators can therefore increase the pace of innovation by focusing less on reaching our global employees and more on deepening the ways they can identify with each other.

2)  Diversifying Employee Networks – This past year we’ve been speaking a lot about an internal connection platform at the engineering firm Mitre.  What their research revealed was that their most agile employees – essentially the ones best positioned to identify and implement new ideas – were not employees with the largest networks but the ones with the most diverse networks.  When I think about our own collaboration tools at CEB they constantly recommend that I connect with the people on the system who are on my team that I talk to everyday, but what Mitre realized is that the best platforms will connect you with people who you may never have known about.  Communicators can therefore help organizations to meet their innovation needs by enabling on and offline dialogue between colleagues that aren’t already communicating rather than just making it simpler for the ones that already are.

Curious to get thoughts from readers: what are you doing to humanize global employees, diversify networks, or more broadly help your organization meet it’s global innovation needs?

CEC Related Resources

• Principles for Peer Sharing and Learning
• Peer Learning Platform (The MITRE Corporation)
• How can I enable employees to build a stronger network of support?

CEC Related Blog Posts

• How MITRE Measures the Impact of its Internal Social Network
• Discussions Spotlight: Using an Internal Facebook
• Can Collaboration Go Beyond Knowledge Sharing?

If you do (and you’re willing to share a scrubbed version of what you put together with the membership), e-mail me at griebj@executiveboard.com because we would love to collect more examples for people to view.  (The #1 search term on the CEC website is “template”).  If not – but you’d like to get there – read on for a virtual tour of the CEC’s Social Media Strategy Builder.

At this point, it might be helpful for me to refer you to the CEC Social Media Strategy Builder on the CEB Website.  We offer dozens of other tools and templates but if you are looking for a  single roadmap for yourself or a social media working group to organize your discussions around, this would be the place to start.

Phase 1: Company Strategic Priorities and Business Goals: The key to unlocking all our hopes and dreams for social media is to ground our plan in our ongoing corporate objectives.  This keeps us from getting distracted by the newness of the space and makes it easier to sell the plan internally to non-communicators.

Examples from the Membership:

• We seek to increase sales efficiency through growing share of wallet and attracting new customers
• We want to deepen customer relationships through new services and vertical acquisitions
• We want to improve global health outcomes with breakthrough innovation and world-class sales and marketing strategies.

Phase 2:  Communication Goal and Social Media Approach: Once you have a clear business priority, the next input to your plan is to dissect that priority into communications goals and subsequently, into how social media can help you achieve that goal.  Many members use the framework here of “what do we want stakeholders to KNOW, THINK, REMEMBER, and/or TELL OTHERS”.

It’s important to then connect those to the social media tactic that best supports that objective.  Page 4 of the plan template outlines the five ways social media can support your communication goals:

• LISTENING – capture insights and feedback from our target stakeholders or identify sources of emotional connection
• TALKING – inform stakeholders with current content
• CONNECTING – build relationships with and among our target stakeholders
• COLLABORATING – help our stakeholders solve problems and share ideas with us
• ENERGIZING – spark advocacy or viral messaging

Examples from the Membership

• Communications Goal:  Educate customers about new product offerings
  Social Media Capability:  TALK
• Communications Goal:  Generate sales leads
  Social Media Capability: CONNECT

Phase 3: Tactic Development: Whereas phase 2 (Listening, Talking, etc.) will guide you to the right goal and approach, phase 3  will guide you to the right social media tactics.  For example, Linked-in and Facebook tend to be strong channels for “connecting” where as twitter and blogs are often used for Talking.  Page 8 of the workbook outlines the type of social media activities that best align to each capability.

Examples from the Membership

• Communication Goal:  Sales Leads
  Social Media Capability:  CONNECT
  Tactic: Send desirable white papers via Facebook to identifiable users that friend us
• Communications Goal:  Customer Education
  Social Media Capability:  TALK
  Tactic:  Create a blog for our lead engineer to talk about new products and the development process

Phase 4: Metrics: Now that most members have at least started some social media activity, the most frequent question we get is what are the best metrics to use?  The truth is that there are no “right” set of metrics, but there is a right approach.

Most organizations try to begin with “volumetrics” (clicks, likes, followers, etc) and then slowly make these tenuous connections toward attitudes and ultimately some sort of sales impact.  Such an approach, however, strains credibility and can wind up costing support for social media.  More effective organizations are:

1. Beginning first with the business objectives upfront
2. Determining the stakeholder behaviors required to achieve those objectives
3. Identifying the attitudes that need to be true to drive those behaviors
4. And, lastly, tracking the volumetric elements that drive those attitudes.

The idea here is that while it’s very hard in most circumstances to connect social media to sales, we can show impact on behaviors the company agrees are important to sales and therefore grow support for our efforts.
Examples from the Membership:

• Business Outcome: Client Cross-Sales
• Behavioral Objective: Web site activity
• Attitude:  View Company X and it’s Web site as a source of expertise
• Volumetrics:  Readership of our thought leadership blog, click-throughs

CEC Related Resources:

• Social Media Strategy Builder
• Social Media Topic Center
• Build a Strategic Social Media Plan
  

CEC Related Blogs:

• Social Media Baby Steps
• Social Media Trends that Are Transforming Financial Services
• Social Media: A Scary Proposition for B2Bs

After spending the summer refining the 16 attributes of the Modern Communicator’s Skill Set, we have now posted a series of development resources against each element.  These resources combine the best of CEC case studies, practical templates, and interactive workshops to arm communications professionals with the skills required to meet the growing demands of the role.  After the jump, I’ll explore a few of the best opportunities to ignite your professional development.

Purposeful Writing:
I select my writing style based on the desire stakeholder reaction. I construct memorable messages that create an emotional connection with my target audience.

Why it matters: The volume of information we confront is so high that even the most experienced writers struggle to break through.  The most skilled among us know that our best bet is to develop such a strong connection through our language that we motivate others to share it on our behalf.

Featured Resource:  Dialogue Provoking Message Tool—Understand why “good” writing that is clear and comprehensive actually limits the dialogue we need to prompt stakeholder action.  Learn easy tricks to edit your messages for your flow over delivery.

Communications Measurement:

I set up quantitative and qualitative metrics at the onset of an initiative. I continuously improve efforts by monitoring behaviors and outcomes that matter to the business.

Why it Matters: Of course the economic environment requires all functions to demonstrate their value with greater discipline – a challenge exacerbated in “cost centers” like Communications.  But more fundamentally, as we seek to incorporate progressive communication practices that involve partnership with the business, a consistent approach to measurement gives us the permission to play an enhanced strategic role.

Featured Resource:  Metric Selection Scorecard—Install a consistent process to evaluate the effectiveness of your project’s measurement approach upfront via a scorecard that assesses the meaningfulness, objectivity, and feasibility of your proposed metrics.

Critical Thinking

I pause to surface the root causes and key obstacles behind clients’ needs, enabling me to offer high-value communication solutions.

Why it Matters: We all know we want to play a “consultative” role in conversations with our business partners but if our ability to consult is limited to optimizing communication solutions, we will find ourselves addressing the wrong challenges.  This skill allows us to truly think like a consultant and engage and advise first on a business issue and its root causes to ensure our communication solutions solve for the right obstacles to strategy execution.

Featured Resource:  Consultative Skills Curriculum—Learn a repeatable process for thinking critically through a business partner’s communication requests beginning first with the isolation of current and ideal states and the identification of the gap’s root cause that communications can specifically solve.  This resource is based on a six-sigma model pioneered by the Communications team at Toyota.

Check out, the CEC’s resources on the other 13 must-have skills:

• Foresight
• Strategic Agility/Judgment
• Business Acumen
• Outcomes Focus
• Interpersonal Influence
• Negotiation
• Global Perspective/Cultural Awareness
• Communications Coaching and Teaching
• Dialogue-Enablement
• Channel Management
• Oral Presentation/Professional Posture
• Audience Understanding
• Project Management

7:59AM:  I have made it to the AON Conference Room here at CEB Chicago to live blog this year’s Annual Executive Retreat in Washington D.C.  The biggest impediment to this experiment – the variable functionality of our video conferencing equipment – seems to be taken care of, my laptop is fired up, and Rick Delisi, our headliner extraordinaire, is already at the podium.  In the words of the immortal Bart Scott: “Can’t Wait”.

8:28: THE STAKES FOR TODAY:  More than 60% of employees today are experiencing high to severe “change fatigue” and the resulting stress is negatively impacting workforce performance to the tune of US$30million for every $1Billion in revenue.  Now, having been to a few executive retreats in my day, I have a sneaking suspicion that our efforts to mitigate the pain of change may be misplaced…

9:05: Okay, so all is not lost.  The efforts we are making to increase transparency and credibility are not wrong, it’s just that they mainly get us buy-in and only when change is a discreet event.  The problem, as I listen to comments from around the room, is that the volume and pace of change are accelerating and these efforts are therefore having diminishing returns.

9:45:  BIG QUESTION #1:  WHAT DRIVES PERFORMANCE IN A HIGH-CHANGE ENVIRONMENT?  We tested factors associated with 1) effort, 2) responsiveness, and 3) agility and the answer is… AGILITY!  (which we’re describing as proactively adapting, seeking feedback, and supporting peers).  This is great: next time I am asked to work longer or follow direction more closely, I will explain that instead I will just be more agile… I hope my manager gets to see this content at some point.

9:46: Whoa!  We’re playing music at the coffee breaks this year?  This ain’t your grandpa’s CEB meeting.

10:41: BIG QUESTION #2:  WHAT CAN COMMUNICATIONS DO TO DRIVE AGILITY?  I’ve been told that the blog format is an awkward one to convey detailed quantitative findings but in aggregate it seems our best bet is to: a) arm employees with the information they need to solve problems, and b) enable employees to build stronger networks of support to share and learn.

10:42: “Wait, what is the role of senior leadership?” asks an audience member.  As it turns out, we should probably spend less time helping leaders communicate clearly, and more time getting them comfortable empowering employees.  I think those of us who vent about simply writing for the executive suite may be in for an entirely new type of challenge.

12:35:  Well, it doesn’t look like this concept of agility as more valuable than effort is going to lead to the extra vacation days that I was hoping for.  In the world of constant change, employees will no longer sit back for an explanation but rather be armed to solve problems themselves – this actually feels harder.   I think employees who are excited by that proposition are the ones most likely to succeed in this environment (note to CEB management: please ignore vacation comments from earlier).

1:47:  Case studies are coming fast and furious now and my word count limit is rapidly approaching.  My big takeaway from our first two case studies of ConAgra and Eli Lilly is the huge difference between what information we think employees need and that what they really need to create solutions on their own.

2:53:  I’m really struck by the implications for our utility and energy members.  While spending the last week in beautiful Alberta with some of the smartest companies in the industry, I heard about unpredictable changes in the regulatory environment and customer behavior that will clearly make agility the key to success, but just at a time these organizations are experiencing massive turnover in their workforce.  I think the challenge for energy communicators will be to resist the temptation to coddle these new employees and instead empower them and then trust them to develop effective solutions on their own.

Related CEC Research:

Building a Change-Ready Organization

Managing Change in Global and Dispersed Organizations

Communications ability to impact the flow of this information both internally and across earned media channels will be critical to success in these initiatives, so after the jump, let’s review some early findings from our systems program’s latest research and the implications for our function.

Marketing Insight: Compressing the Decision Journey (from Marketing Leadership Council, MLC)
Overview: Despite being bombarded with marketing messages from many new channels, MLC data reveals nearly 80% of consumers delay their brand choice until the point of sale.  Understanding the consumer decision journey—including how, where, and why consumers buy—is more important than ever.  Factors, from mobile search to SKU proliferation to just-in-time digital coupons, are widening consumers consideration sets across categories and threatening defection from your brand. And the negative effects live on post-purchase: the more consumers comparison shop and consult multiple sources of information, the more anxious and the less satisfied with their purchase they become.

Key Insight: In response, the best brands are increasing consumer’s perception of information clarity—the degree to which it is easy to gather, prioritize, understand, and trust information for purchases. And for good reason: consumers who report such clarity during the purchase process are far more likely to repurchase and recommend.

Implications for Communications: Communicators who typically see their impact at the earliest stages of the buying process must find ways to get influential information and stakeholders connected to customers just before and after its conclusion as well.  The scale required to achieve such last minute connections may well require the mobilization of employees to monitor and respond to last minute queries for information. We think Intuit has done this particularly well using Twitter.

Market Research Insight: Putting Customer Insight at the Heart of the Business (from Market Research Executive Board, MREB)
Overview: Research should play a big role in focusing the company on the customer. No one knows more about customers and consumers. But knowledge in the team is like a tree falling in the forest. What good is it if the rest of the business doesn’t have it?  To make its findings known, most functions prize the literal “seat at the table.” Face-to-face meetings and presentations, which are very labor-intensive, are thus typically reserved for relatively high-value decisions or business partners who make lots of decisions. But research indicates that key decisions are increasingly made with e-sources meaning putting a premium on the ability of research to provide information with speed and reliability.

Key Insight: Leading functions are re-thinking how to both market and delivery customer insights to more effectively align with an organization’s decision making.  These options include improved online sources such as portals and e-mail, a new generation of research communication tools, and a more narrow view when live presentations can increase an insight’s impact. Improve your intranet by visiting the Intranets and Internal Social Media Topic Center.

Implications for Communications: Communications must better understand how e-sources are commonly used across the company and ensure technologies such as new intranet platforms are optimized for speed, reliability, and confidence decision making.

Sales Insight: Guiding the Customer Purchase: Closing Complex Sales by Teaching Customers How to Buy (from Sales Executive Council, SEC)
Overview: Bigger, more complex solutions combined with greater customer risk aversion are causing more stakeholders to get involved in each purchase. One member said that the average number of stakeholders involved in each deal has increased by 3.5 people since 2006. To manage this dynamic, many companies are investing in sales methodologies built around mapping and categorizing stakeholders (e.g. economic buyer, technical buyer, coach). The seeming reality is that better understanding of how groups, not individuals, make decisions is required.

Key Insight: While significant work has been conducted around identifying specific buyer types (i.e., economic buyers, end users, advocates, technical buyers, etc.), understanding each buyer type is no longer sufficient. Group decision-making dynamics must be understood in order to best approach the customer. Sales must focus on making change easy to grasp and minimally disruptive for customers: In today’s selling environment, the best reps do more than present a value proposition: they surface risks and key stakeholders upfront, lay out clear implementation steps and timelines, and use their expertise to highlight and mitigate the risk of change throughout the buying process.

Implications for Communications: Communications should expand the focus of thought leadership and other commercially relevant messages to focus on the process of change in new product/service adoption not just the benefits of the company’s offer. Consider two options when building your thought leadership strategy.

Related CEC Research:

@TeamTurbo Tax Employee Communicators

Intranets and Internal Social Media Topic Center

Define the Horizons of Your Industry Through Thought Leadership

So it wasn’t until opening day that I realized the goal is similar to the efforts of advanced baseball statistics, which try to more completely capture a player’s value by comparing his contribution to a replacement. The only difference is that in baseball a replacement still generates some value whereas in communications the replacement actually reduces a company’s value by allowing negative coverage.  But while baseball statisticians can’t add up the hits of a replacement that doesn’t actually play any more that communicators can count the articles that were never written, they know they get pretty close by merely calculating the average or expected value of the replacement. So if communicators can focus on just an expected number of mentions, we can similarly develop a more accurate representation of our value.

The goal of the process below is to articulate a defensible determination of the expected number of negative mentions without Communications staff and add it to the positive ones we already take credit for:

Step 1: Count the number of specific interventions you made that stopped a story from appearing. Ensure credibility by documenting “situation action result” just as you would for any proactively positive effort you track.

Step 2: Determine the ratio of total negative media mentions to the number of specific events that generated them. So for example, 100 negative mentions stemming from ten separate events or stories would yield a ratio of 10:1.

Step 3: Apply that ratio to your number of interventions that prevented coverage to determine the expected number of mentions prevented. So, in the example above, if you stopped 3 stories, you likely prevented 30 mentions by applying the 10:1 ratio.

Step 4: Add those mentions to the number of mentions you reported as positive and (assuming that the value of a positive story is the exact inverse of a negative one) you have a more accurate description of your value.

Step 5: If you further articulate the value of media mentions (for instance, by paid media equivalent or as a boost to a reputation metric), then determine the contribution of one positive mention and multiply that by the total number of negative mentions. So, if the same company above determined that they had 500 positive mentions worth a paid equivalent $1000, then the additional 30 mentions prevented would be worth an additional $60.

Now, obviously I haven’t achieved the impossible any more than the Cubs will win it all this year. Numerous assumptions erode the accuracy of this process – perhaps most significantly the assumed equivalency between the value of negative and positive stories. But as the Cubs keep trying (for at least another month), so should we chase the impossible dream for communicators. What do you do to ensure your team gets credit for all the stories that you prevent?

Related CEC Research

• Measurement and Reporting Topic Center
• Effective PR Metrics Programs
• Capital One’s Reputation Risk Report

Strong communication is at the center of all this. While specific responses will vary by organization, it’s vital that we share ideas and best practices to serve societal (and business) interests. I’ve started to collect a few of these priorities and ideas – please help others by sharing what you’re doing.  And let us know what questions you have for your peers. 

1)    Get informed – In this time of crisis, there is rapidly evolving, occasionally conflicting information on a complicated set of issues.  Communications’ ability to provide a measured report on facts and probabilities will support operational decision-making and soothe a broader set of employees.

2)    Ensure continued communication with affected employees, customers, and suppliers – No matter the scope of your global operations, it’s important to establish multiple outlets/channels for affected stakeholders to give and receive information.  To whatever extent possible establish an on-the-ground network, in addition to mass digital channels in case infrastructure worsens.

3)    Inform and prepare to discuss your response – Our information and crisis expertise may inform decisions ranging from feasibility of local operations to optimal employee donation programs from distant regions.  All companies can expect media outlets to inquire about their response and our effectiveness at telling a clear and compelling narrative is critical to our reputation and signals the state of current threat levels and responses to a mass audience.

4)    Mobilize employee support – Provide an outlet for employees to donate.  Articulate your positoin on any matching gifts or corporate efforts.  Keep people informed of affected parts of the business and invite people to reach out to their colleagues if possible.  This is our opportunity to be human in all of this.

5)    Examine policy implications – Hearings are already being held in Congress about the future of nuclear investments, but this crisis will undoubtedly launch discussions on a variety of issues that may affect your business.  The timing and nature of participation may vary, but it’s probably not bad to begin talking (or at minimum, listening) now.

Hopefully, this post and subsequent discussion forums within the CEC can allow communicators to share what else they’re doing, what’s working, and how others are viewing the responsibility of employers in these situations. Is there a right level of transportation, housing, or financial support that we should provide employees and the broader population?  Is there anything commonly done that’s counterproductive?

No matter what the response, all of us have been distressed by the news.  By beginning this dialogue, we at the CEC hope we can surface productive solutions and ideas for communicators on the frontline.

Today, most pools are entered, scored, and paid for through sites like ESPN and PayPal, and the afternoon games are easily accessed through online video sites and even on your iPhone or iPad. But just as surely as the inevitable winner bases their picks on a preference for Blue Devils over Bulldogs are you confronted with an annual set of statistics estimating $1 – $4 billion in lost productivity during March Madness and dire warnings of federal gambling statutes. As communicators, often charged with promoting awareness of and compliance with corporate policies, we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of policing our communication tools to prevent  these legal or productivity risks. A compelling case could be made that those efforts would be misplaced – in fact, let’s go out and encourage participation in the office pool. No sporting event brings the country together quite like the NCAA tournament.  The Super Bowl only involves two cities; college bowls amount to a corrupt, elitist patronage system; golf, NASCAR, and hockey remain a bit niche; and baseball’s just boring. But everyone has a connection to at least one school in the NCAA tournament, and every school has a shot. Even better, the simplicity and unpredictability of the bracket format make the event accessible to non-sports fans, and the compelling narratives behind the teams keep everyone rooting for a Cinderella story.

For communicators, this is GOLD! We should be looking for just such opportunities for our employees to connect across functional and geographic boundaries. Just talking brackets today, I found out that one colleague went to school in my hometown (‘Nova!) and another shares my enthusiasm for statistical formulas to support picks (see Ken Pomeroy).  These connections actually make it much more likely that my fellow Nova fan will just approach me directly if she needs to know what the CEC is working on; or that I’ll know a true stats geek if I need support analyzing a member’s benchmarking data.

Indeed, it’s these personal connections that are the pre-req for the peer-to-peer support we know is so important to employee engagement and alignment with corporate priorities.  For example, when we studied the best-practice internal social media tool from Sabre, we found that 80% of the early dialogue on the site was personal in nature, but that over time it shifted to be primarily professional. We believe that the professional benefits of peer support cannot be realized without those more human interactions, and NCAA tournament pool is one of the easiest ways to generate those connections.

Technically, federal law prohibits sponsored gambling, but those statues aren’t enforced for office pools. Indeed, in many states, as long as no one profits from the pool (i.e., all money is paid out) and everyone has the same odds of winning, you won’t run afoul of any laws. On the flip side, consider this:  If the NCAA tournament could generate just 1% more in personal connections and peer support across enterprises, we would see a 0.1% in productivity benefit according to CEC research, which for a $1billion company nets you about $6.5 million/year. Using an annual U.S. GDP of $14.7 trillion, that ratio equates to about a $95 billion economic benefit from our office pools.  You really wouldn’t be doing your patriotic duty if you didn’t encourage them!

So, now that we’re all free to share, who do you have?  As always, I’m picking Duke!