There has been a rapid growth in available communications channels in the last couple years.  This channel explosion places an unprecedented pressure on the communications function to design a strong channel strategy to use these efficiently and effectively.  All of these new channels present an opportunity for communicators to reach out to large audiences and spread information and messages with rapid speed. But it also takes lots of more of communicator’s time to navigate these channels and measure and evaluate how effective they are in their usage.

While many communications teams have a dedicated channel and/or social media person on the team, every communications professional (regardless of your specialization) needs to have a good grasp of channel management. As part of my new project focused on designing a channel audit diagnostic, I have spoke to several of our members to figure out what types of channel related metrics (data) would help communicators use channels in more efficient and effective way.  Here are some of the challenges faced by our members that we are hoping to help them solve with the new channel audit diagnostic:

1. Tracking Usage

Most communicators I spoke to have a good idea about the overall channels usage in their company. They can tell what percentage of their mailing list typically opens their newsletter; how many people listen on to their webinars; or how many people showed up for their CEO/Employee roundtable. However, while lots of communicators know their absolute numbers, they can rarely benchmark themselves to other comms functions in other companies to see how well they are really doing in these metrics.

2. Measuring Comms Effectiveness

While usage numbers are important, high usage is not the same as high impact and effectiveness.  At the end of the day, what really matters not how many people read your blog, but how many of them actually went and took action or modified their behavior because something you said really resonated with them. Many of the communicators I spoke to express a desire to be able to determine better which channels are more/less effective in helping them drive real behavioral change-related outcomes among different groups of stakeholders.

3. Impact of Channels on Employees’ Productivity

A big part of modern communicator’s job is not just to use channels effectively, but also to ensure an organization-wide efficiency in channel usage across the company.  Not all channels are created equal when it comes to boosting employees’ productivity, and some can even be detrimental to it (30 Facebook updates a day, 20 corporate-wide emails in over-worked employee’s inbox). Consequently, communicators need to worry not only about their own channel effectiveness, but also focus on guiding the employees and other functions on how to use channels to their advantage in productive manner.

I would love to hear your thoughts on some of the new challenges you face due to the channel explosion, and what measures/metrics you have in place to track one (or all three) of the above.  As well as how are you making all these new channels work for you!

And make sure to check out some of our great channel-related resources:

Channel Selection Tool

Social Media Latest Outlook

Mobile Technology Latest Outlook

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

As more companies are growing both their operations and their sales in India, supporting that growth and building a strong company brand become priorities for the global PR team.  But maintaining truly global perspective and awareness of the nuances in each of the countries where the company operates is a daunting challenge.

India may be a welcome bright spot in this landscape, as the PR in India is very much in keeping with – and in some ways ahead of – trends in the United States and Europe.  Trends Western PR professionals will find familiar:

• Empowered consumers who do their own research online and are more influenced by peers than by company messages.  Social media use in India is by some metrics higher than in the United States and United Kingdom, although its character is quite different – smart phones rather than computers.
• Breakdown of audience silos, reducing the influence of specific media outlets and making it impossible to compartmentalize messages
• Professionalization of PR, including the presence of major global PR firms in the Indian market. Read More »

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

Crafting and executing communication strategies when entering a new market is hard. This is especially true if the cultural DNA of the country in question differs widely from home markets.  So, it’s not surprising that we get a lot of questions from our US and UK members about communicating effectively in Brazil –  an intensely multi-cultural society that is also one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

If you are tasked with steering your company’s communication efforts in Brazil, one of the first thing you will need to do is understand communication technology trends. Appreciating ground realities will help you leverage technology effectively across key activities such as PR, CSR, and employee and consumer communication.

Here are three key trends that you should know about technology in Brazil.

1. Mobile phones are ubiquitous: Although only the well-to-do can afford “luxuries” like landlines, mobile phones are commonplace – Brazil has 116 mobile phones per 100 inhabitants. While text messaging is extremely popular in Brazil, mobile internet usage is also increasing with 29% of Brazil’s internet users browsing through their mobile phones. In fact Brazil’s middle-class, spends most of their 3-4 hour long commutes consuming digital content.
2. Internet penetration is low, but rising fast: Unlike mobile phones which are extremely popular, Internet is not widely available to the masses. While currently 22% of the population have access to the Internet, this number is expected to up sharply by 2015. Mobile phones are expected to break the digital divide and drive the growth of internet penetration in the coming years. Another thing to keep in mind is that Portuguese is the most popular online language, not English.
3.  Sociable Brazil leads social media usage: Brazilian culture is equally social online as it is in real life with 91% of Brazil’s online population using social media. In fact, Brazilians carefully craft their online persona – activities such as posting messages or joining communities help Brazilians reflect their desired image. Moreover, while social media is synonymous with Facebook in many countries, it’s Google’s Orkut which has traditionally been the most popular in Brazil. Facebook though has seen a whirlwind growth in 2011 with its user base tripling in a year.

CEC Members: Check out our full Communicator’s Guide to Brazil for recommendations on how to leverage these technology trends as well as to navigate PR, CSR, and employee and consumer communications in Brazil.

What challenges have you experienced steering your communication activities in Brazil? How are you dealing with these challenges?

CEC Related Resources:

• Building a Global Mindset: A Communicator’s Guide to Brazil
• Building a Global Mindset: An Overview of Cultural Values That Shape Interpersonal Communications
• Global Perspective/Cultural Awareness Resource Center
• Managing Communications Across Global and/or Virtual Teams

CEC Related Blogs

• Employee Communications in China
• Lost In Translation: How Cultural Values Shape Your Communications

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

As the world’s most populous country, fastest growing economy, and stereotypically hard working culture, it’s no wonder that so many companies are focused on expanding their footprint within China. That said, it can be a great challenge for multinational companies to effectively recruit top Chinese talent and build engagement with their current employees.  This is due to paradoxes in the Chinese culture including values of traditionalist versus advanced practices, material success versus relationship-driven business exchanges, and socialism versus capitalism.

This environment leads communicators to ask questions like “will our internal social media investments be effective with our Chinese employees?” “How should we prepare leaders and managers to drive dialogue in an environment where employees may naturally be inclined to let their boss do the talking?” “What values matter most to potential employees in this market?”

We would love to hear your experience with employee communications in China and thoughts on these questions (comment below.)

In the meantime, based on conversations with numerous MNCs and working closely with our peers in the HR space, we’re tracking some of the key trends in employee communication specific to working in China, including:

3 Trends about Employee Communications in China:

1. Chinese Employees Increasingly Choose Chinese Firms over MNCs:
While a higher number of Chinese work for multi-national corporations, in the past 4 years there has been a 19% increase in employees’ preferences to work for Chinese firms. For many, this stems from a fear that recession-hit Western companies lack growth opportunities and have a glass ceiling. Read More »

Do you enjoy building relationships and view conflict a positive means of arriving at a solution? Are you comforable addressing potentially contentious issues, but find that data and tools make you anxious? Do you recognize the power and relevance of communication measurement methods, but struggle to contextualize data into recommendations or actions? If you answered “yes” to any of the above, chances are that you’re an “Influencer.”

CEC research identified 18 competencies that are critical for any modern communicator to succeed. Based on how communicators’ key strengths around these competencies group together, communicators can be categorized into four distinct skill profiles:

• The Presenter—Knows What to Say and How to Say It
• The Influencer—Builds Relationships Across the Organization
• The Consultant—Solves Business Problems
• The Coach—Helps Others to Communicate

In our last post, we introduced the Presenter; today, we’re back with the second profile—the Influencer. Read on to learn how to use your core Influencer skills while making a plan to address development opportunities for continuous growth.

The Influencer
The Influencer is skilled at building relationships with stakeholders across and beyond the organization. She is capable of handling conflicts and disagreements constructively by understanding business partners’ views and finding “win-win” solutions. This quality makes the Influencer a sought-after person for senior leaders and business partners who seek to understand the communication implications of their decisions. Further, she is a skilled communicator and presenter, capable of delivering compelling verbal communication—even on contentious issues—with confidence and sensitivity. Read More »

Communicators often need to use numbers to narrate a story. However, for people who love playing with words, it can be a “scary” prospect to conduct quantitative surveys. The challenge lies in asking the right set of questions, gathering information that meets the desired objectives, and analyzing the data to build your story. The question then becomes, “What is the best way to gather the information required to fulfill my desired objectives?”

When researching on best ways to conduct quantitative surveys, we discovered that launching a quant survey is much more than pressing a launch button that sends out a questionnaire. Communicators need to focus their efforts on building a solid hypothesis to test and developing clear objectives for the survey.

The four steps below will help you get the most out of your survey efforts:

1. Build a Plan – Communicators should think about why they are doing a survey and how they plan to use the results. This involves creating a hypothesis of what you want to show with the study, understanding the central problem, and identifying the variables that influence it. Learn how to integrate the problem and its causes into a description of reality.
2. Spend Time Designing – Once you have the built a survey model, you need to do much more than make a list of questions. Designing the survey involves developing and testing hypotheses as well as thinking about whether you will want to track results over time or not. Read more on survey design to understand how to select your target audience, data collection tools, and the survey parameters.
3. Maximize Participation – Getting a high number of responses on surveys can be a frustrating process. You need to convince a large number of people to take 15-30 minutes out of their schedule to respond. Find out how you can maximize survey participation by creating a launch and promotion plan before even making the survey.
4. Conduct In-Depth Analysis – Sorting through vast amounts of survey data can be daunting.  Start cleaning your data by looking for outliers (high or low responses), which can really skew the validity of your results. Look at how you can analyze surveys and build correlations to tell a story with the data.

CEC Members: Download the complete tool for How to Conduct Quantitative Surveys. This is one of the accompanying tools to Step 4 in Building an Outcome-Focused Communication Plan.

Related Blogs:

• 3 Steps to Be a Better Listener
• CEC’s Top 4 Internal Communications Tools
• Integrate Your Listening Efforts

Related Resources:

• How to Conduct Focus Groups
• Building an Outcome-Focused Communication Plan
• Anatomy of a Business Value-Focused Communication Function

As we close the book on 2011, most of us are probably drafting our plans for how we intend to achieve our 2012 objectives.  If you’re like many of the communicators who I have spoken with recently, you are eager to structure your communication plans so as to demonstrate the value that Communications can create for rest of the business.  Perhaps you’re even using the CEC’s recently published toolkit on building an outcome-focused communication planand starting off the planning process by gaining a deep understanding of your Comms objective and target stakeholder audience.  After all, how can you begin to think about creating an action plan if you don’t first fully appreciate the communications goal?

While this advice might seem intuitive, communicators often lose sight of or altogether fail to consider the specific Comms outcome that they are hoping to achieve through their efforts.  But even more important than asking ourselves “What is the Communications objective that we hoping to achieve?” is another intuitive, yet critically important question — “What is the business outcome that we’re hoping to achieve?”

Reverse Engineer Your Comms Plans  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 »

For many of our members (and for CEC as well), January is the month when the annual performance review process kicks off. The review process is a great way to evaluate what you did well in the last year, but also to focus on your key areas of development. For most of us, the review process ends at the individual level, but it is equally important for the Communications function as whole (and for the team members who together constitute “the function”) to take thorough stock of its achievements and future objectives.

Based on our research and partnership with hundreds of companies over many years, we have identified the 20 key attributes of business value-focused communications function and compiled them into a compact Anatomy Game board . The Anatomy showcases the best practice for each attribute to help our members achieve functional excellence in each of the functional responsibilities. We found that a truly business value-focused communications functions focus their efforts in 4 key areas:

1. Sense Opportunities for Creating Value

Truly valued communicators don’t just fulfill clients’ requests, but proactively identify opportunities to meet stakeholder needs, address areas of potential reputation exposure and surface internal business partners’ communications needs and priorities.

2. Optimize Resources to Highest-Value Work

Many communications’ teams reported stagnating budgets in 2011, with only slightly more optimistic forecast for 2012. Scarce resources place lots of pressure on allocating them in the most efficient and impactful manner. Most successful members create a strategic high-value activities focused plan, and optimize their most important resource – their staff.

3. Extend “Reach” by Enabling Others to Communicate on Your Behalf

Most of our members have 1 to 5 communicators per 1,000 employees. This ratio makes it virtually impossible for the communications team to really connect and touch every employee and stakeholder out there. Top communications teams successfully leverage their stakeholders by getting managers, leaders, employees and external stakeholders to advocate on their behalf.

4. Create Value by Crafting and Disseminating Messages

Almost every communications team out there is focused on creating and disseminating message. However, what distinguishes the truly best communications teams from all the rest is their ability to not only have their message heard, but to actually motivate their audience to take action and to actually change stakeholders’ behavior in way that has a concrete and measurable impact on company’s business objectives.

Why don’t you take a look at our newly updated Anatomy and let us know how your function stacks up?

Recommended Resources

The Anatomy of a Business Value-Focused Communications Function

Managing the Function Topic Center

Skills and Roles of Modern Communicator

Corporate Communications often finds itself at the mercy of the organization to sets its agenda for the year. While Communications’ efforts should certainly support company strategy, consider these 5 Communications-specific trends that will influence the function’s ability to have a real impact in 2012.

1. Stakeholders have (even more) power.

The age of individual control over what, when, and how to consume information continues in 2012.  New devices, like the Kindle Fire, new services, like Spotify, and new mobile apps, like Zite, that took off in 2011 will further enable people to act in ways natural to them. Chances are, reading/viewing/listening to dry corporate messages isn’t something most people like to do naturally! As a result, Communications’ approach to everything it creates must be stakeholder-centric, not company-centric.

Smart teams will kickoff the year by asking themselves, “Do we know where our key stakeholder groups go for information?” Determine how your stakeholders consume information with CEC’s audience listening guide, and then use that information to develop a stakeholder-centric communication plan.

2. Communicators look to build their business partnership skills.

In 2012, the Corporate Communications function grows up. Once just the PR-engine for the company, Communications is now expected to impact business results in a much different way by coaching leaders to communicate more effectively, developing internal communication systems for employees to connect with one another, and feeding stakeholder insight to business leaders, to name a few roles.

A new set of skills is required for communicators to live up to these new expectations. Clear writing and a solid understanding of channels won’t cut it, but a focus on business partnership skills such as critical thinking and negotiation will enable communicators to grow into the position of consultative business partner.

CEC members, we can help you: See how your skills stack up compared to peers; develop a plan for your skill development in 2012; and equip yourself with smart tools to build skills in the moment.

3. A global mindset pervades the function.

Communications execs are asking two things of their teams this year: 1.) partner with colleagues in remote locations and 2.) customize messages for local audiences in other countries. At the root of this global focus in the function is the simple fact that emerging markets are key for corporate growth. Communication teams that spend time in 2012 building an awareness of cultural differences of local audiences will discover new solutions to age-old collaboration challenges (e.g., Why does no one use our intranet portal to share information?) and deliver messages that are more resonant.

Visit our Global Management Topic Center to take the stress out of collaboration or download communicator’s guides to India and China to get up to speed on cultural trends that impact the function’s communication efforts.

4. Blanket trust-building to strengthen corporate reputation is called into question.

Tight budgets over the last few years have forced communicators to think hard about where they place their investments, and dollars spent tracking high-level reputation measures are being scrutinized more than ever before. One communicator sums it up nicely: “We have done reputation measurement for several years and I have not taken any radical, meaningful decisions as a result of any of the data we’ve got.”

In 2012, we expect to see leading communicators focus reputation efforts not on building an even bigger bank of goodwill through high-level reputation tracking, but instead on sharing information that influences a small set of targeted stakeholder decisions that drive business outcomes. Contribute to our 2012 research on Building an Outcome-Focused Reputation.

5. Agile workforces meet the challenges of uncertain environments through strong communication and a focus on learning.

Much remains uncertain and unsolved in 2012. And yet, the show must go on. Companies will attempt to grow. The smart ones know that employees who proactively adapt, seek to learn from peers, and feel a personal connection to the company are excited by and contribute to these fast-moving companies.

Communications, then, must support the development of an agile organization by helping leaders to share key market context that helps employees to make decisions in line with strategy, partnering with HR to connect employees to one another, and supporting a culture that empower employees.

CEC Related Resources

• 2012 Strategic Priorities for Communicators
• 2011 Communications Budget Benchmarks
• What’s in the Works from CEC in 2012

CEC Related Blog Posts

• 4 Comms Execs Priorities in 20123 Stakeholder Trends to Watch in 2012
• Top 3 Insights from Communication Gurus in 2011
• Top 5 CEC Blogs of 2011