CEC Insider

Public Affairs, You Confuse Me.

Calling all communicators in the business of Public Affairs—what makes you stand out from the rest of your peers in Communications?

• Do you have key legislators and lobbyists on your BBM contacts?
• Are you the sole owner of CSR and community relations initiatives?
• Are you the policy guru, spotting nefarious legislation and getting your company ahead the messaging curve?
• Do you spend countless hours grooming your CEO and other executives for government testimony?

Read no further if you have an answer and wouldn’t mind sharing it with me. Continue on if you think I’m a confused Millennial. Read More »

Customer loyalty is a burning issue for a lot of companies. Marketers know that if you become a “customer for life,” you are worth your weight in gold (and if you’re a lifelong customer at The Cheesecake Factory, just imagine your potential worth!).

So, what makes you loyal to a company?  What makes you want to continue to do business with some companies over and over again, but to “drop others like 3rd period French” and never return?

As it turns out, there’s a single answer to that question when it comes to your service interactions.  Our sister program, CCC (the Customer Contact Council—just like CEC, except for heads of Customer Service) has released the definitive study on the drivers of loyalty in the service environment. The secrets are featured in this month’s Harvard Business Review—you can download the article for free—but I’ll give you a sneak peek a the answer. It’s easy.

No, seriously.  Easy.

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Before the namesake of ObamaCare was in the U.S. Senate, I completed an undergraduate certificate program in Health Policy, primarily to stay on the family payroll for an extra semester.  Last week, those extra credits foolishly prompted me to volunteer this entry on what communicators should know and do about the reform bill.  Fortunately, our sister program serving benefits executives has produced a tidy 6-page summary of key provisions, but it may be more fortunate that they have us, as their recent online survey revealed communications about the bill as their most immediate concern.

Here are the most important things for corporate communicators to know right now about the health care reform bill:

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A big thank you to the 100+ Heads of Communications and staff who responded to our 2010 quick-poll, sharing their current strategies for external stakeholder engagement.  Were the responses interesting? Yes.  Did they make me feel warm and fuzzy about the state of Communications? Not especially.

Let me explain why. On the one side, it’s great that communicators are focused on proactively engaging stakeholders in the current climate—not just attempting to manage negativity. It’s more of their approach that worries me.  Here are some of the poll highlights:

I’ll add some quick thoughts on a few of the data points that stood out for me:

• Communicators are on the offensive—49% of communicators say that differentiating their company is their primary objective for 2010, and 39% are focused on directly supporting sales and marketing efforts.  This strikes me as Communications taking positive steps to help their companies get ahead in the ever-aggressive battle for stakeholder support and market share.  We’ve heard a lot of our members facing real pressure to get closer to the bottom line as budget and scrutiny tightens, which seems to be playing out here. Read More »

What’s your dream title?

If you envision your career as an ever-ascending climb, begun at sea level on the day you were first called “Intern” and continuing to rise ever-loftier toward some dare-to-dream pinnacle, then it would have to be true that your arc will peak on the day you finally get to take your rightful place as [fill in dream title here].

In the Comms world, I’ve been seeing interesting titles lately that might fit nicely into your parenthetic bracket.

Here’s a title I’d never heard of before—a new CEC member has recently joined the network as our first-ever VP, Communications and Change Management. That critical linkage between Comms and change is a theme we’ve been studying for the past year, and we’re really excited to see it reflected so blatantly in one company’s org chart.  Some other intriguing titles I’ve seen recently: Read More »

By Lisa Schievelbein

In my six years of serving the CEC membership, I’ve learned one truly fail-safe technique to provoke conversation among communicators (which admittedly is not that hard to begin with). To wit: if I’m ever hosting a lunch-table of members at an executive retreat where, after a while, the conversation is getting a little dry…some BlackBerry action is happening under the table…all I have to do is ask a single question: “Do you think it’s still important to be a great writer in the profession today?” [Insert passionate declarations, high-fives, generous exchange of business cards, etc.]

So, the fact that communicators tend to be passionate about writing is something of an understatement. Whether you’re on the cutting-edge of the profession or just trying to keep the lights on in a 1-woman shop, everyone seems to agree that writing skills are the most important characteristic of a top-notch communicator.

That said, the mark of a great writer in Communications today is about as stable as the ground moving fast beneath our feet. With apologies to other Strunk & White acolytes, it has to be said: effective writing today is about SO much more than the mechanics of language—at the end of the day, it’s about getting your message heard. And in today’s networked environment, that often depends on people wanting to share your message with others.

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Where exactly does the smartest, most progressive thinking in Corporate Communications come from?  The ivory tower of some big F500 headquarters? Some ivy-covered hall of academia?

Turns out some of the most progressive Comms ideas I’ve heard in the last year were first developed…in the underground rock & roll scene. Wendy Harman got her start in “communications” promoting local bands in Washington, DC—before she was hired by the American Red Cross as their first-ever Social Media Manager. (You may have seen Evelyn’s post last week about the Red Cross’ extraordinary response to the crisis in Haiti.) And among these progressive communications ideas is…how to create strategic results using social media outlets like Twitter.

So…to the question at hand.  Twitter. Channel, or not? Read More »

One of the best lines I’ve heard from a CEC member lately was a quote about brand guidelines from their CEO:

“I don’t care what they call us, as long as they call us.” 

It’s not a bad sentiment from executives focused on quarterly profits, but it’s questionable for communicators trying build the long-term value of the brand.

Two issues immediately arise: 1) what’s the point of brand guidelines as long as they “call us”? and 2) if we agree that the brand guidelines have value, then what can Communications do to enforce them—particularly in relatively decentralized organizations?

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Over the last year or so, we at CEC have seen social media participation become far more common among member companies.  That said, we’ve also noticed a tendency of communicators to jump on social media opportunities without applying much strategic discipline—that is, they weren’t matching up social media’s unique capabilities with their business needs, audience behaviors, and industry dynamics.  In response, CEC developed a social media diagnostic that helps members pinpoint their best opportunities for social media use.

As part of this diagnostic, we ask a few benchmarking questions of participants: for example, how many people work on social media at your company?  What channels are you using?  How confident are you in the value of your efforts?   We’re pleased to share the top-line data from our 60+ participants thus far:

I was surprised by a few things in this data set: Read More »

Among the few things I remember from Philosophy 201 is the quote from the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne: “It is good to rub and polish one’s brain against those of others.”

But for most of us grown-ups (personally, despite my advanced age I still feel compelled to add italics when thinking of myself that way), our days are spent in a mode of relentless multi-tasking—constantly putting out three fires at once, but hardly ever thinking.  How sad is it to be absent-mindedly checking your Blackberry while another person is standing there in the room trying to talk to you?  But we’ve all done it.

OK, constant distraction probably won’t kill you (smashing into a tree “texting while driving” being one notable exception), but to lead a truly satisfying life, it’s important for all of us to occasionally slow down and make the time to THINK.  To have a “spa day” to polish your brain.

That’s why this is one of our favorite times of the year at CEC—because we’ve just now opened up registration for our 2010 executive meeting series, Influencing Stakeholders in a Networked Environment. Read More »