The most interesting article I read last week about the NFL Draft was about fashion. Specifically, the custom suits most players wear (selected with the help of stylists hired for the occasion) while shaking hands and posing onstage after they’ve officially gone pro. I learned a few things about draft style trends — fitted tailoring is in as players are no longer trying to hide their sizeable frames; individuality is all about the tie and pocket square — but the article was mostly interested in the fashion show.

Communicators should be interested in where the NFL found a catwalk.

In 1980, one-year-old ESPN broadcasted the NFL Draft live for the first time. In 2010, the draft became a three-day event, including a prime time first round that drew a record number of viewers. Now, the New York Times coverage extends to trend pieces on draft fashion.

So what can the draft tell us about communications? To stay on the sports theme, I think it’s “if you build it, (they) will come.” By creating an event that fans could follow closely and get excited about, the draft went from something that just happened to a can’t-miss event for football fans. As fans’ appetite for coverage grew, so did the spectacle. The proliferation of online and mobile channels has only intensified interest and put fans more firmly in the driver’s seat.

Assuming we can’t turn every press release or quarterly earnings call into a mega media event, what can Comms do to facilitate similarly valuable stakeholder engagement? We have to focus on how to drive an emotional connection with stakeholders. But simply writing more personal blog posts or tweeting a link to the latest memo isn’t enough. Read More »

Consultative skills — really important for the modern communicator, really difficult to practice. From critical thinking and business acumen to interpersonal influence and active listening, it can feel like we’re expected to learn through osmosis or come with innate abilities.

After hearing a lot of members struggle to identify competencies and develop resources in this area, we’ve identified and defined nine skills that lead to better business partnerships. Our newest resource will help you master active listening techniques to get a better understanding of business partners, gain their trust, and foster open, communicative relationships.

Active listening is characterized by listening with empathy and seeking to understand the intent and assumptions behind colleagues’ and business partners’ communications. To take that from conceptual to concrete, we’ve broken it down into three tactics you can learn and practice to become a master of active listening: Read More »

You get word that a new product has been approved for commercialization. The launch date is set. The Comms team starts strategizing and meets with business partners to gather information. You create compelling messages to drive customer and industry interest, and train sales staff members on the new products most important features. In the run up to launch day, all doesn’t go according to plan but the team gets it done.

We’ve heard a lot of stories like this in conversations with members about B2B product launch communications. The rush to get deliverables ready for launch day and the stresses of changing deadlines are almost universal. On the hunt for best practices, we’ve focused on the essential role Comms plays in collecting and distributing information about new products internally and externally.

Here are a few examples of smart approaches we’ve heard to product launch communications:

Read More »

When was the last time you were excited about a new product? Maybe you heard about it on Twitter and then read some reviews online. You compared prices and made the purchase.

It feels almost quaint to think product launch communications used to be all about press releases and media contacts. We’ve grown used to being empowered consumers and we aren’t looking back.

With new channels giving companies more ways to reach stakeholders, increased access to information and the ability to compare products, and social media getting stakeholders heard in large numbers, companies are feeling a loss of power to stakeholders that has big implications for product launch communications.

As we’ve been talking to members and thinking about communicators’ role in product launch, we’ve identified three primary stages. To help us think about what guidance CEC can provide to best support our members, we’ve broken down the resource level, activities, and challenges at each phase.

Stages of Product Launch Communication

1. Concept

• Proportion of Comms Involvement: 10%
• Key Activities: At this stage, Communications role is mostly to soak it all in to get a good picture of what you’re going to be working with down the road. Your goal is to build understanding of product positioning, challenges, risks, and tangential stories that will influence the way you talk about the product later.
• Challenge: Knowing what to pay attention to and question in planning meetings, and understanding how it will influence communication about the product later on.
• Question for You: What’s hard about getting business partners to involve you at this stage?

2. Pre-Launch

• Proportion of Comms Involvement: 65%
• Key Activities: This is when the bulk of Comms’ work happens. You review market trends, media lists, influencers, and stakeholder groups to prepare launch communications (i.e. press releases, social media campaigns, blog posts, internal announcements). Depending on the specific product, you may also start to build buzz about the launch toward the end of this stage.
• Challenge: Figuring out how to differentiate the product, getting the right timing of market seeding, and coping with uncertainty about launch timing.
• Question for You: How do you embed uncertainty about timing into your launch plans?

3. Launch

• Proportion of Comms Involvement: 25%
• Key Activities: At this stage, you’re hitting the proverbial or literal ‘send’ button on everything you prepared during pre-launch. You reach out directly to top media sources and hold launch events. You track feedback from key stakeholder groups on an ongoing basis and respond as appropriate.
• Challenge: Knowing which stakeholder feedback to pay attention to and engage with after the launch.
• Question for You: How do you feed insights from stakeholder feedback to business partners?

So, what do you think? Does this sound like the right distributions of activities? How are you dealing with these (or other) challenges? We’d love to get your perspective! Leave a comment or e-mail me at jwohlmuth@executiveboard.com.

CEC Related Resources

• Product Launch Specialist Profile
• Corporate Brand Management
• Differentiate Your Corporate Brand

CEC Related Blogs

• Make Stakeholders the Stars of Your News Release
• Why is Cross-Function Collaboration SO Hard???
• Super Bowl XLVI: 3 Trends, 1 Winner

Introducing CEC Quick Polls: This is the first blog in an ongoing series featuring the results of short surveys. Contact jwohlmuth@executiveboard.com if there is a question or topic you’d like us to poll the CEC membership of 14,000+ communicators worldwide.

Who doesn’t like a good statistic? In the CEC Newsletter a few weeks ago, we kicked off our new quick poll initiative with three questions on communications activities around reputation management.

When the results came back, we got a picture of how communications priorities have changed in the last 5 years. With the proliferation of social media, it’s no surprise that messaging through new channels came out as the activity most communicators are doing more of. Perhaps less predictably, corporate advertising and branding efforts have seen the biggest drop off.

Click the image to enlarge

Top 3 activities communicators are doing more of:

1. Messaging through new channels
2. Preempting negative coverage
3. Increasing transparency

Read More »

CEOs are gearing up to share their 2012 strategy with employees through live and virtual town halls, blog posts, and Q&A sessions. While no one underestimates the importance of company leaders’ plan for the year ahead, employees often leave strategy sessions unsure of what, exactly, they should do with the insight and how they will be expected to contribute.

One of the best tools to think about engaging employees in strategy conversations is your employment value proposition (EVP). Your EVP is the set of attributes that employees value about working at a company. Attributes like compensation, future career and development opportunities, and work-life balance are usually at the top of the list. Understanding what employees value and feeding these insights into leadership communications and business unit discussions about the implications of company strategy.

EVP, or employment brand, is usually the purview of Human Resources because of its importance in recruiting and retaining employees. But Communications can play an important role by supporting HR in crafting and communicating about the EVP, and taking the lead on driving employee engagement through organizational alignment with the EVP.

Learn how you can support HR in creating a successful EVP and engage employees through your EVP. By breaking the EVP realignment process into two stages, it’s easy to see just how big a role Communications can play: Read More »

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 internal communications peers have been using these guides to do their jobs faster and more effectively.

You can also check out our top external tools.

CEC’s Top Four Internal Communications Tools

1. How to Conduct Focus Groups

• What it is: This three step process will show you how to effectively run focus groups to test planned campaigns and gauge audience perceptions on communication strategies.
• Why it’s cool: Focus groups can be a highly effective listening tool to understand audiences, but are usually the domain of market researchers or vendors who charge a lot for something you can do yourself. Read More »

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. Read More »

“How should my company use Twitter?” is an intimidating question and it’s only the tip of the iceberg. What should and shouldn’t we tweet about? Are people retweeting our posts? Do we have enough followers? And at the end of the day, what do the hours monitoring Hootsuite and TweetDeck really get us?

We set out to determine how and why companies should use Twitter and found that it becomes much easier to answer these questions with clear business outcomes in mind. Here are some of our key insights:

Why bother with Twitter?

• Twitter is a powerful information sharing network. When your supporters actively spread your messages with their networks on Twitter, they reach a broader audience. And whether it’s in the form of a retweet, mention or hashtag, the message gains credibility since it isn’t coming directly from the company. We’ve taken our analysis even further than the last time we discussed the value of Twitter.

What should we do on Twitter? Read More »

Whether it’s the sites we check when we first get to work in the morning or what time we run out for coffee, routines can be hard to break. But choices like these aren’t usually worth doing a critical analysis each time we make them.

The real problems arise when we start to rely on similar tactics for making more important decisions, like internal communication channel selection. Rather than ask yourself, “What is the best way for employees to be informed about this leadership change?” it’s easier to jump to, “I’ll just write a quick post on the intranet.”

Falling into bad habits like this prevent you from strategically selecting channels to make your communication more effective. Luckily, we have a cheat sheet to help you stay out of a channel selection rut.

This channel selection guide will help you choose the optimal channel based on what you want to achieve with your target audience. By considering what information is most effectively communicated through different channels and weighing the pros and cons of each, you’ll be able to quickly choose the best channel for your objective. Read More »