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

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.

2. Compensation, and the opportunity for increases in future compensation, matter most:
The average Chinese employee rates compensation as the number 1 attribute in the EVP—nearly double any other attribute. Development opportunities and future career opportunities are critical retention drivers for Chinese employees.

3. Top-Down Is Not Dead:
In general, hierarchical business relationships are expected and accepted. Employees look to senior leaders for direction and are accustomed to certain levels of formality.

Implications for Communications:

• Emphasize your companies’ stability and long-term commitment to expanding in China
• Promote local development opportunities and career paths (limit requirements to be relocated abroad to advance)
• Deploy senior staff members to make general announcements to employees in China, but emphasize team dialogue and the ability to speak up to drive employee ownership of strategy

CEC Members: Check out A Communicator’s Guide to China for additional recommendations on how to manage your employee communications, as well as PR, CSR, and consumer communications in China.

CEC Related Resources:

• Building a Global Mindset: A Communicator’s Guide to China
• 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:

• 3 PR Trends in China
• Lost In Translation: How Cultural Values Shape Your Communications
• Managing a Truly GLOBAL Communications Function
• Posts from the Road: China

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

But, as a communications professional, I will attempt to fulfill the mission as assigned by the stern taskmistress who runs the show here at the Insider…starting with:

#3: The Governor of Texas Can’t Count to 3
Gaffe: During a November GOP debate in Washington, DC, Rick Perry (the ever-so-momentarily leading contender to challenge President Obama) stated in no uncertain terms that when HE becomes president, his first order of business will be to eradicate three federal agencies: Commerce, Education, and…uhhhhhhh…the, uhhhh….

Lesson: (eesh, where to start?) If you’re gonna be specific, you’d better be…well…specific. If you’re gonna make inflammatory, controversial statements, you’d better be able to back them up. If you’re gonna prove that you’re smart enough to be the next President of the United States, you’d better be able to count past two.

#2: Companies Using Serious News Events as a “Hook” For Selling Stuff
Gaffe 2A: Shortly after British singer Amy Winehouse passed away, the Microsoft UK PR account suggested that purchasing her music through their Zune service would be a good way to remember the fallen star.

Gaffe 2B: In the midst of the Arab Spring uprisings and the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek, some marketing/PR genius at Kenneth Cole tweeted the following: “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online.”

Lesson: That brand of snappy, snarky wise-assery that sounds oh-so-edgy at your agency’s late-night brainstorming session just comes across as crass, commercial and crude to the rest of us.

And…this year’s winner…

#1: If Your Name Is Anthony WEINER, For Goodness Sake…
Gaffe:  What was worse — taking a picture of…(let’s just go with) yourself…and using Twitter to send it to a young female admirer – or…lying about it with the now-classic “Somebody musta hacked my account!”?

Lesson A: In the history of mankind, no one’s dog ever actually ate their homework. And, therefore, no one’s ever gonna believe that YOU didn’t send that tweet. So, don’t even think about steering toward that exit ramp, in an attempt to leave the freeway of your own stupidity.

Lesson B: If any part of your name sounds like a word that vaguely describes any part of the human anatomy, you’ve just gotta know you’re playing with fire. (That’s why so many grade school science teachers are so deliberate in pronouncing the name of the seventh planet from the Sun as “YUR-a-niss.”)

Lesson C: Don’t ever send anything to anyone that you wouldn’t want…your grandmother…a priest…your CEO…CNN…to see.

FINAL CONCLUSION: Hey, we’re all communicators here. Every day we all write and say stuff that others will hear, analyze and criticize. Sometimes the things that come out of our mouths (or keyboards) (or smartphones) aren’t as well thought-out as they oughta be. So…as 2012 dawns, and the whiteboard of the past year is erased clean…then, between us, we should all remind ourselves…let’s be careful out there.

HOW ABOUT YOU?  What memorable communication gaffes would you add to the list?

CEC Related Resources:

• Twitter Strategy Builder
• Stakeholder Engagement Topic Center
• How to Communicate About Challenging Issues

CEC Related Blogs:

• How Not to Waste Your Time on Twitter
• The One Question You Need to Ask Your CEO
• Reputation Management: 3 Tips to Cope with New Threats

Deciding how to prioritize our efforts in a way that best supports our business partners has always been challenging. Expectations have evolved and it’s time to break perceptions of communications as merely a service provider. Through our research into the communications skills set needed by the ‘modern communicator’, it’s clear that you and your team must not only excel at the classic communication skills but also non-traditional competencies such as business acumen and building consultative partnerships.

Over the past few months, hundreds of communicators have been reevaluating the critical skills they consider essential to effective performance in this environment. And many teams have improved planning templates, invested in development workshops, and hopefully dug into the CEC resources to identify skills gaps and improve their effectiveness in these areas.

We know only too well how difficult it is for central communications teams to carve out time for their own personal development. So think how hard it must be for colleagues in local offices or dispersed business units, who are ‘out there on their own’ and are often forced to wear a number of different hats. With this in mind, better visibility into the skills of local communicators and improved collaboration between corporate and affiliate Communications has never been so important, and it really is in our best interest to invest in our local affiliates’ development.

When the CEC was putting together its work around Managing Communications in Global and Dispersed Organizations, a notable approach we came across in improving this central-local partnership comes from fellow CEC member Novo Nordisk, one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Novo Nordisk has implemented a simple yet highly effective 3 step process, leveraging what they refer to as a Communications Effectiveness Reviews (CER). They use this as a dialogue-provoking and development tool, which identifies skills gaps of local communicators so they can better align their activities with business needs.

To summarize these 3 steps:

1. Prepare for Affiliate Review:

Set groundwork for communication review session through a set of prep activities with local affiliates. Here central Comms identifies key people in the review process and gathers information on current local practices.

2. Conduct Affiliate Review:

A 3 day process where central Comms assess affiliate effectiveness through conversations with local communicators and employees, addressing gaps and agreeing on a forward action plan with local Comms lead and country GM.

3. Follow Up and Next Steps:

Findings, next steps and recommendations with local communicator and country managers are shared. Here local communicators give a formal commitment to central Comms and regular check-ins are scheduled to track progress on the action plan.

We hear that local communicators at Novo Nordisk are embracing the reviews – one local communicator even invited a peer from another country to observe and learn from their process! But what are some of the things you’re doing within your company to drive better central-local partnership? Have you tried anything similar to Novo Nordisk? If you’re a local communicator, what are the biggest frustrations you are facing when trying to partner with the central team? I would love to hear from you.

Related CEC Resources:

• Use CEC’s Competency Framework to identify skill gaps of your local communicators
• Consult the Skill Development Grid and support resources to help local communicators improve their communication competencies
• Take CEC’s Skill Maturity Assessment to assess skill gaps of your communicators and team
• Use Communications Effectiveness Assessment processes as a development tool to identify skills gaps of local communicators
• Leverage Novo Nordisk’s Communications Effectiveness Reviews Toolkit
• Assess whether you have the skills you need in each country through Standard Chartered’s In-Country Risk and Reputation Management process | Create your own risk exposure and capability scorecards by using our templates

Related CEC Insider Posts:

• Adding Value Where it Counts
• Lost in Translation: How Cultural Values Shape Your Communications
• 4 Ways to Improve Central vs. Local Communications
• What Makes Novo Nordisk’s Global Collaboration Effective
• 3 Skills to Ensure Your Job Security

When I think about what’s become of the news business, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or go out on the front lawn and start eating grass (isn’t that what animals do when they think they’re about to barf?).

But I gotta say — although you may already be getting a little queased-out from the relentless coverage of this Joe Paterno/Penn State story — for once, this ain’t hype.  This really is the biggest scandal in sports history. More than just another ringing bell for the Pavlov’s Dogs of Media to salivate over, this is a cautionary tale for EVERYONE in a position of authority at any big organization in the world.

Here’s a strong recommendation from your friends and colleagues at CEC: Use this moment as an opportunity to have an important discussion with your CEO.  Particularly if he (90+% chance it’s a he) is a football fan (gut guess on my part = there’s a 75+% chance he at least likes football).

All you have to do is ask him, “So, uhhhh, whadda ya think about the whole Paterno mess?”, then sit back and let him spew. Whatever he says next will enlighten both of you about his understanding of “the way things work” in today’s media environment.

Chances are you’ll get one of three responses:

• What’s happening to Joe Paterno is so unfair.
  This might be an indication that your CEO isn’t fully aware of how easy it is to get caught up in a scandal — even when you didn’t think you were personally doing anything wrong. Hey, right and wrong don’t seem to matter to the media anymore — proximity-to-something-bad may be enough to bring you down. And it IS unfair. So, let’s talk about how your Comms team can help you prevent getting caught up in some unfair future situation.
• Paterno is an idiot. How could anyone be so irresponsible?
  This might be an indication that your CEO doesn’t realize how easy it is to lose one’s perspective within the insular inner-circle of big organizational power. Joe Paterno may be an 84-year old geezer, but he’s no idiot. So why did he think that merely reporting the first incident of child sex-abuse to his boss would absolve everyone of responsibility? Because sometimes that’s the way people in power think. So, let’s talk about how your Comms team can help you see the way the world looks at big companies — let’s make sure you have some true outside perspective.
• This whole mess is gonna be a field day for the lawyers.
  This might be an indication that your CEO believes that in the event of a scandal or reputational crisis, as long as your General Counsel and Legal department are able to win lawsuits, mitigate financial damage and keep the company from going out of business, everything will be OK. So, let’s talk about how Comms can help you avoid crises in the first place — cause what we can do will be much easier on your stomach lining, and SO much cheaper.

My Dad used to say, “Son, there are two ways to learn the big lessons in life — the hard way and the easy way.” In his mind, the hard way is learning from your own mistakes. The easy way is learning from things that happen to other people.

The Joe Paterno situation is an opportunity for your CEO to learn a hard lesson the easy way.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?  What do you (and more importantly) your CEO think about this scandal?

We at the CEC are no different, and in our never-ending quest to stay at the cutting edge of the Communications space, it’s vital to us that our agenda be set by our members most pressing needs. With this in mind, we recently polled our clients to identify where we should be focusing our energies with our upcoming work.

Check out 4 trends that we’ve observed from the data:

Observation #1: Engaging employees with corporate goals and supporting change remain the top priorities for communicators

CEC research indicates that the average employee experiences 3.5 major changes every two years, ensuring that the need to navigate these turbulent times, and maintain employee engagement at the same time, remains high on every communicator’s agenda.

• Thoughts from CEC: check our studies, Mobilizing the Workforce for work on engaging employees around organizational objectives, and Building a Change-Ready Organization for work on supporting organizational change management.

Observation #2: Communicators are placing increased emphasis on reputation management and on supporting growth in emerging markets

2012 is the first time in a few years that proactive reputation management has figured in communicators’ top 5 priorities.  Interestingly, communicators have simultaneously placed an increased onus on supporting growth in emerging markets.

• Thoughts from CEC: It seems possible that the increased focus on reputation management might be to aid and abet emerging market growth. Check CEC’s work on Reputation Management, and on communicating in a global organization.

Observation #3: Communicators are rethinking their approach to external communications. We asked our members in which areas their 2012 strategy would differ most significantly from previous years. The response was interesting – the top three areas in which Communicators expect to change their approach were in branding, CSR, and reputation management.

• Thoughts from CEC: the external environment continues to evolve apace, so this isn’t necessarily a shock, but we were still interested to observe that the most externally-orientated activities took up all three of the top picks by communicators. Check CEC resources in this space:

-          Differentiate Your Corporate Brand

-          Protect Your Reputation

-          CSR Management

Observation #4: Consultative partnership will be key to Communications’ success

We asked respondents to identify the key to the achievement of their goals in 2012 and beyond. In line with trends that we’ve observed in recent conversations, the #1 answer was the need to play a more consultative role with business partners.

• Thoughts from CEC: global data from CEC’s high-value Competency Diagnostic indicates that consultative competencies such as critical thinking, business acumen, and an ability to focus on outcomes aren’t quite as well honed as traditional comms competencies (writing skills, oral presentation, channel management). CEC is building out materials to help close competency gaps – access this work here.

Help to direct our work – Based on analysis of this data, and on in-person member feedback, one of our major focuses for 2012 is likely to be around how Communications can enable proactive reputation management; we’d love to hear from you on what’s happening in the environment that is making this a priority for you. What are you doing differently? Get in touch with the Arlinda Mezini to help direct our work in this area!

Coaching the leaders of the organization to be better communicators with their respective stakeholders is a critical skill of today’s communicators—and one that our skills maturity assessment highlights as a common development area for today’s communicators. Our goal here at the CEC is to help you be a better coach, and thus enable better communication across your organization.

Recently, the oh-so-talented team of executive advisors at the Corporate Executive Board gathered for a few days of training (yep–we’re trying to make our presentations more engaging and effective for our members as well!). Below are 10 of the top tips from CEB’s masters of effective presentations. Share them with your leaders in your next coaching session!

1. Start with Confidence, Purpose & Content. The audience should know you’re in charge right away, and that they will learn something very quickly.
2. Half as Long, Twice as Good. Commit to every point you make. Never half-say anything: say it confidently or don’t say it at all. If you can’t decide whether to say something, don’t—everything is premeditated and focused.
3. You’re Happy to be Here. Don’t just smile. Be excited to be here and let it show.
4. Silence is Power. Be comfortable with silence. Use it to own the room throughout the presentation.
5. Believe it. Show us that you truly believe your message.
6. Prioritize. You are here to tell the audience what is most important. Which information matters most? Where should they focus their attention? Tell then what to do, what matters, and why.
7. Don’t Talk What. Talk Why. Why are we talking about this? Why should we care? Why is this hard? Why do we believe we should change? Why are we showing you this information? Always be answering why—that makes for a much more fascinating presentation.
8. Don’t Address Slides. Address the Audience, Using the Slides. You are here to teach and engage people in the room. Use the slides to do that, but make sure you address the people, not the slides.
9. Transition with Purpose. Never say “page 9” as your transition. Tell me why we’re leaving page 8. All transitions are about why.
10. Manage the Clock—Openly. Managing time from the very beginning. Once you have a time problem, it’s too late to solve it.

CEC Related Resources:

• The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set/ Skills Maturity Assessment
• Communication Coaching and Teaching Skill Development
• Enabling Leader-Employee Communications

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Why Your Leadership Communications Support Misses the Mark
• Strongest and Weakest Skills for the Communications Profession

• They could all have been prevented
• They did significant damage each company’s reputation, and to their financial performance

With the stakes higher than ever before, CEC is updating its existing work on crisis management. And, with the above in mind, we’re looking at two different angles.

1. Building a Preventative Culture

In spite of the best efforts of companies to apply processes, rules, and expectations, this isn’t always enough to drive behavior change – we’ve all seen rules bent or broken to “get the job done”. And yet, we are reliant upon employees maintaining standards to maintain product quality, information security, legal and ethical compliance, and personal or public safety – if they fail to do so, the consequences for the organization can be disastrous.

Communications Challenges

CEC is looking at some of the reasons that employees don’t always act in accordance with the standards required by their organization, its regulators, and other crucial stakeholder groups. Our conversations indicate that many communicators spend a disproportionate amount of time building employee awareness without addressing the personal and systemic barriers to desired behavior. Indeed, research shows that only 6% of employee-observed misconduct is escalated to business leadership, preventing the business from responding to rectify the problem. We’ve thought about what prevents employees from acting in a way that prevents crises. Here’s our first shot, below:

Questions for you:
We’d love to hear your reaction to this brainstorm.  

• Which of these challenges do you struggle with most?
• How do you raise employee awareness of expected standards?
• How do you bring employee voice to leaders, to avoid potential crises?

 

Join us for a webinar on 29 September to learn how to avoid crises by creating a preventative safety culture.

2. Responding to Crises

Of course, some organizations will experience occasions where attempts at prevention fail. In these instances, as communicators seek to mitigate the damage done to their reputation, the increasingly networked online environment has decreased the amount of control communicators possess of their message.

3 Phases of Response

Conversations with members indicate that there’s only so much that you can plan for in a crisis situation. Under duress, 100-page crisis manuals, however ‘perfect’, will likely be ignored. Leading companies have told us that rather than fight fires, it’s vital to plan your response strategically. In the past, we’ve explored how the best companies build crisis communication systems that are able to respond quickly. In response to a crisis we think that there are three distinct phases:

1. Assess the Situation to determine the scope of the issue; get up to speed quickly
2. Coordinate Response to contain the damage caused by the event
3. Manage the Ongoing Debate to protect your company’s reputation

In each phase communicators face distinct challenges. Visit our latest observations on the website to learn more about how we plan to uncover effective ways to overcoming these crisis response challenges.

Our initial conversations indicate that the most successful navigators of crises are those who go beyond simply seeking to “get our point of view across” and to have their message heard. Successful crisis managers seek to involve themselves in conversations and to enable favorable stakeholders, such as employees, to speak on behalf of the company.

Questions for You:

• Have you experienced a crisis at your organization?
• How did you gather information internally, and use this to formulate a response strategy?
• How have you planned to manage future crises?

Interested in Sharing Your Perspective?

CEC would love to learn from your experiences and involve your perspective in our research. Please email Dan O’Keeffe-O’Donovan,  to discuss crisis communication.

CEC Related Resources:

• Crisis Management: Our Latest Observations
• Avoiding Crises: How to Build a Preventative Safety Culture
• Building a Crisis Communication System
• Crisis Communication Tools
• Communicating through a Product Crisis
  

CEC Related Blogs:

• 4 Lessons on How to Manage a Crisis (and it’s not how NewsCorp did it)
• What’s Worse than a Crisis?
• Discussions Spotlight: Crisis Alert Systems
• 6 Steps to Facebook Reputation Management

However, in the last couple years the communications landscape changed substantially, as did many of the positions and responsibilities under the communications umbrella.  Communicators across our membership are moving away from being task takers and content creators to being communications enablers and valuable business partners. In order to make the transition, many communicators are adding new, non-traditional roles to their team’s repertoire and evolving some of the more traditional roles in order to adjust to the new environment.

CEC is currently creating “role profiles” of some of these new and evolved positions in order to give our members a peak into how these roles and responsibilities are changing among their peers.  Currently, we are focusing on covering these 5 main aspects of each role:

• Purpose: what is the key objective of the role in the overall communications strategy
• Reporting lines: where in the orgnaization does the position report and what are the advantages/disadvantages of different reporting lines
• Main responsibilities: what does the person with this job title ultimately do on every day basis and how do they allocate their time among these activities
• Key skills: what are the key skills that a person needs to be successful in this role
• Business partnerships: what communications and business parters do the communicatior in this role need to work with to be successful

I would love to hear your ideas on why (or why not) you would find these role profiles useful and/or what other aspects of the role description you would like to see us include in order to make these as valuable to YOU as possible. Shoot me an email at mkrausova@executiveboard.com or leave a comment and let me know!

Relevant CEC Resources

Modern Communicator’s Skill Set

Skills Set Webinar