The only way that I can cope with the New England Patriots Super Bowl XLVI defeat this morning is to focus solely on the ads. Overall quality and entertainment of ads was down this year, but three themes of significance for communicators and one clear winner for its targeted message and online experience stand out.

Three Trends and One Winner

1. Ubiquitous and Unique Hash Tags
Advertisers made sure that the entire experience—from pre-game “leaks” to the in-game 30 second spot to online chatter—united around one theme. The use of clever hash tags was no exception. Audi carried its Vampire theme over to its hashtag #solongvampires. GE tried to get people talking about #whatworks after showcasing how its people and factories create great, useful stuff, like the turbines that create beer.

While the hash tags were fun to comment on in real time, did they have an impact on the conversation around the brand? Somewhat. Cute or complicated hash tags may have just made it a bit too tricky for Tweeters to make use of it. For example,  mentions of Audi were 50% higher than that of its hash tag. So what have we learned here? Clever hash tags might be fun to brainstorm, but for the “Big Game” where buzz around the brand is key, it might make more sense to just stick with your brand or company name.

2. Employees as the Voice of the Company
Employees—and factories—took center stage in this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads. Eager to demonstrate a commitment to America’s people and products, companies like GE, Best Buy, Turbo Tax, and even NBC Sports let their people share why they love the work that they do and how it contributes to improving the American way of life. Here at CEC we say “Bravo!” Why not tap into the passion of your employees (that passion must exist, of course, before you can harness it) and share an authentic message?

3. Fellow Consumers and Cool Experiences Tap into our Emotion
An emotional connection with the company—be it in the form of shared values or some other feeling of ownership or investment—is the number one driver of a stakeholder actively supporting your company by sharing that positive sentiment with their friends (CEC Influencing Stakeholders, 2010).

Companies tapped into this emotional connection to drive conversation around their brand in two ways. First, Doritos, as it did last year, handed over the commercial-creation reigns to its consumers. The wildly funny Doritos “Slingshot Baby” by chip eater Kevin Wilson and the number-one ranked “Man’s Best Friend” by Jonathan Friedman showcased the fantasies of Doritos lovers. Second, other companies, notably Cadillac and Chevrolet showcased their car operating under “extreme circumstances.” Cadillac featured its ATS driving circles around competitors on Germany’s “Green Hell” while Chevy let boys be boys and take the Chevy Sonic bungee jumping, sky diving, and making a music video with OK Go.

Taken together, each of these trends bear witness to the maturation of Marketers and Advertisers continued navigation of   the labyrinth of online vs. TV, social vs. promotional, and entertaining vs. informational. Given the complexity and the cost, what do you think the future of Super Bowl advertising looks like?

And the winner is…

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

We all know that the effectiveness of what you write depends in large part on how well you speak the language and values of your audience.  This is doubly so in today’s socially networked environment, where your audience is also the messenger – if they choose to be (CEC members click here for more on that).

So it’s no wonder that the 850+ participants in the CEC Skills Maturity Assessment have indicated a real interest in improving their ability to create engaging content and – as a necessary precursor – to listen to audiences and learn what they care about.

There are many ways to learn about your target audience, all featured in a new CEC member resource center dedicated to developing this skill.  I want to call attention to a tool we’re adding to the mix, thanks to a partnership between CEC and Iconoculture, the leading syndicated provider of up-to-the-minute, segment-level insights into consumer values and trends: audience understanding in less than five minutes.  This series of one-page outlooks – grouped by industry, demographic segment, and geography – gets you quickly up to speed on key values, trends, and language.

I’ve mined these for three trends to watch in 2012, as they cut across many countries and demographic groups:

1)      Idealistic youth + social networking technologies = higher standards.Young adults expect institutions (both government and private) to do good, not just seek profit or power.  Most – especially in Asia – remain quite optimistic, despite macroeconomic challenges.  And all are quite ready to mobilize.  In many ways, this isn’t brand new – earlier generations of young people have felt the same way.  But modern social networking technology let them share information and ideas faster and wider than previous generations (think “Arab Spring”).  This means that unflattering information about your organization will be discovered in the blink of an eye and that “social responsibility” initiatives had better be more than lip service.   Read More »

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:

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 »

Building a Bank of Goodwill

Financial advisers often emphasize the importance of building a personal emergency fund.  What they’re referring to is a rainy day fund, consisting of a certain amount of money (e.g., 8 month’s salary) which can be drawn down during tough financial times.  Should you lose your job or get slapped with an unexpected major expense, you could rely on these savings to help you weather the financial storm.

In the communications world, a similar concept exists with regard to an organization’s reputation — this is the concept of the “bank of goodwill”.  Much like your rainy day fund, the idea behind the bank of goodwill is that companies can stockpile their reputation assets when times are good and lean on them as a buffer from negative stakeholder perceptions when times turn bad.

On its surface, the concept seems plausible.  After all, in the financial savings example, few would argue that having extra money in the piggybank wouldn’t give you some degree of financial breathing room.  But whereas money can be universally spent on a wide range of goods and services, perceptions are complex, specific to each stakeholder group, and increasingly fickle.  Additionally, academic researchers struggle to quantitatively prove the theory of the bank of goodwill.  Nevertheless, one need only look to the news for examples of big, well respected companies who have been recently blindsided by massive financial and reputation hits due to crisis or scandal.  I’ve spoken with some of these companies and they’ve all said that, if there is bank of goodwill, it gets exhausted quickly. Read More »

The media are always after a good story. That is of course unless they already have one that is too big for them to handle.  And sometimes, you may think that an unfortunate piece of bad press can do great damage to your company’s reputation only to have it never gain traction in the press.

Certainly when I worked for a major TV news broadcast organization, the aim was never to damage a company’s reputation, but if that happened as the story unfolded, that in itself could make the story more compelling.  So if you think you need to get the media involved, consider the following:

1. Context is everything: If the media is already covering something big, chances are that it may actually pay no attention at all to the event that involves your firm.

2. The media’s attention is relatively short: Just as your company’s unfortunate piece of bad press pushed something off the headlines, in most cases the next big thing will push the event affecting your firm down the pecking order. Read More »

I think we can all agree that our overarching goal in communications is to influence others. We want to get people do what we would like them to do. What we’ve seen through years of researching how to influence stakeholders is that over time, the game has changed. The old approach of sending perfectly crafted messages to targeted audiences through the specific channels we control doesn’t pack the same punch as it once did. As a result, not only do we need a new approach to influencing stakeholders, we also need to take a fresh look at how we approach communications planning.

Well, it just so happens that the CEC recently hosted a webinar on “Taking your Communications Planning to the Next Level.” I highly recommend watching the replay. Also, look out for our step-by-step, strategic planning toolkit. But for now, here are a couple of key insights from our session to help make your communications plan more robust.

Where we fall short:

More often than not, the biggest reason we fall short in communications is because we simply do not take a fresh approach. Instead, we tweak plans we’ve used in the past. These tweaks tend to focus on communications goals rather than actual business objectives. If we don’t take a fresh look at our organizations priorities as a whole and we only focus on what our comms team is trying to accomplish, our value to our business partners falls by the wayside.

Another reason is that we focus on output instead of outcomes. We assume we know our audience well and therefore we jump to tactics and channels we assume will get our message heard. Instead, we should be looking at which channels will help produce a certain outcome. We need a more stakeholder centric approach. Consider what our audience is trying to achieve and THEN the channels and tactics that best support that outcome.

How We Can Succeed:

1. Engineer Goals from Corporate Strategy

Don’t just focus on your goals from a communications perspective. Start with what your organization is trying to achieve, and then determine how communications can support. If your plan is rooted in outcomes the business is trying to achieve, it will be much easier to demonstrate value. Read More »

Generally speaking, when I have conversations about social media with CEC members, they usually start one of two ways:

1. “We know how important social media is, but we can’t convince senior leadership.”

OR

1. “Our senior leaders told us to we need to ‘do’ social media…What now??”

For the first question – It almost goes without saying, but social media is not a fad. Since it ain’t going anywhere, you might as well start using it for the good of your company. If others don’t feel the same way, use our resources to educate them:  Make the Case

But what if you are asking the second question? What if your team has the green light to start using social media, but aren’t sure how to use it effectively? Here are a couple of baby steps you can take to get started. Read More »