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

We have just released the Executive Summary of our 2011 Resource Allocation Benchmarking Survey findings highlighting the key communications budget trends for 2011/2012. The budget data collected from our members revealed some very interesting findings that every communicator should take into account when planning for 2012.

In 2011, many communicators saw their budget growth rates drop close to zero as their companies’ revenues stagnated. However, despite slower budget growth, communicators finally saw their budgets recover to the pre-2008 levels when looking at communications budget as a percentage of total revenue.  More interestingly, despite stagnating budgets, communicators across all company revenue bands continued increasing their staff levels at an even faster rate than last year. Read More »

Intranets – they spark joy and frustration in equal measure (often tipping in favour of frustration). Joy because we now have an easy and effective way of getting important information to our employees without bombarding them with emails. Frustration because no matter how hard we try, the feedback is still that when employees need something it’s hard to break through the maze.

It’s not like we aren’t trying. Communications teams (in partnership with IT and HR) are always looking for better and smarter ways to leverage this golden tool. What we’re all aiming for is employees who actually use the intranet, on a regular basis, to do their jobs better and faster. But how do we know that it’s really working? Most communicators keep close track of intranet metrics like clicks and views.

However, these volumetrics reveal nothing about what employees may have intended to do on the intranet, or wish they could do. Employee needs and goals are constantly changing, so how do we measure whether we are keeping pace? Read More »

It’s baseball season in Chicago and hope springs eternal on the North Side.  But as the Cubs chase the impossible dream of a World Series, communicators confront their own impossible dream – how do we measure the un-measureable: the value we create from all the stories that didn’t get written about us this year.

So it wasn’t until opening day that I realized the goal is similar to the efforts of advanced baseball statistics, which try to more completely capture a player’s value by comparing his contribution to a replacement. The only difference is that in baseball a replacement still generates some value whereas in communications the replacement actually reduces a company’s value by allowing negative coverage.  But while baseball statisticians can’t add up the hits of a replacement that doesn’t actually play any more that communicators can count the articles that were never written, they know they get pretty close by merely calculating the average or expected value of the replacement. So if communicators can focus on just an expected number of mentions, we can similarly develop a more accurate representation of our value.

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By Laura Newman

Communicators worldwide, do these comments sound familiar?

• “My CEO only cares about Rand [maybe you would say Dollars, Pounds, or Euros] and cents. If I can’t truly quantify the value of an activity or investment, he/she doesn’t bother to listen.”
• “I don’t want my team to be perceived as post-boxes, editing managers’ e-mails and updating distribution lists.” [Perhaps in your case it’s press releases, events, the intranet, or your internal publication.]
• “If I push back on requests and don’t simply do what I’m told, leadership will start asking about the purpose of our Communications team.”
• “My leadership is so ‘old school’ – they just want to count the number of articles in which they’re profiled, to build their political capital.”

This past week I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with the CEC’s South African-based members. Beyond the gorgeous Johannesburg sunshine, delicious Stellenbosch wine (the Hartenberg and Simonsig estates are my favorites), and tasty steak and venison, I led a number of conversations around business partnership, where the above quotes were surfaced.

I’ve been traveling to visit CEC members long enough now that you’d think I wouldn’t still be surprised, but on almost every trip I make, I am struck by the similarities in the challenges Communicators face worldwide.

My recent discussions have centered on defining and documenting the value of Communications, with the goal of being seen as a strategic player by business partners.

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By Kirsten Robinson

It’s one thing for communicators to listen to people—and quite another to be able to do something about what you’re listening to. A good listener will ask the right questions and use a mix of tools to harvest important information. But a smart listener knows that it’s not enough to just take note; they recognize the best way to really understanding stakeholders’ wants and needs is to integrate the resulting data.

A disjointed approach to media monitoring causes many Communications teams to miss out on big opportunities to understand and then ultimately influence their stakeholders. But you can avoid this mistake by being a smart listener, too. Check out the examples set by these smart companies: Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

“Who wants to be working on things that are low-value added? Nobody.” – Marie Uhrich, SVP Communications at Thrivent Financial

With this thought in mind, Communications leaders should be asking themselves—Is our team working on tasks that are valuable resources to the business? Are we using our time efficiently? And how can our team demonstrate the value we are adding to our company?

Process improvement relies on information taken from workflow data, but the effectiveness and value of the Communications team isn’t measured by metrics like other company functions—making it more difficult to uncover inefficiencies, as well as show partners value being brought to the business.

Thrivent Financial’s communications team realized the importance of workflow data, but also saw some obstacles—such as collecting data from a staff resistant to time and activity tracking; organizing disparate sets of data; and understanding what type of analysis is most appropriate in a given situation. Read More »

With only 31% of communicators having a formal dashboard, many of you are reading this blog title and probably saying, “Woah, let’s start at Dashboards 1.0.  We’re just beginning to invest more in measurement.”  While we at the CEC are happy to help guide you through the building blocks of how to create (even a 1.0) dashboard…your senior leadership team likely isn’t going to hold your hand in the same way.

End of year reviews are quickly approaching for many of us, and your CEO will be asking, “Did your work this year matter to the business?” And you, communicator, are looking for the easiest way to say, “Yes! Let me show you why…”  Yet so often the communications metrics that we show to demonstrate the strategic impact of the function are things like: click/attendance rates, number of media hits, followers, etc.  While these can be impressive in their magnitude, they just don’t carry the weight we’d like them to.

Essentially, communicators often begin with transactional metrics and attempt (unconvincingly) to make a leap to translate those metrics into business outcomes.  See below:

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One of the most frequent questions that we hear from our members is around demonstrating the value of communications.  The reason behind this is that typically members’ communications focus on long-term perception changes and messaging “about” the business.   Both of which are notoriously hard to link to short term business results.

We’re not saying that longer term outcomes such as employee engagement and reputation are bad (far from it).  It’s just that in defining ourselves by traditional roles, we can restrict our thinking and miss opportunities to add value.  Many of these opportunities are right in front of us.  Look around you – communication breakdowns are likely happening all over your organization.  You can probably think of them within your own team!

An example of such an opportunity: CEB’s operations practice found that culture was the single biggest driver of risk reporting – companies with a culture of integrity outperformed their peers by 16% in shareholder returns!  Now that is a result I’d like to be attached to!

Some leading companies are jumping on these opportunities: one company who has done this to great effect is ITT Corporation.  Courtney Reynolds, Head of Internal Communications at ITT, partnered with Jim Shaffer and one of their regional plants to increase performance, showing a 40% reduce in scrap and 20% increase in on-time delivery, in just a matter of months. Read More »

By Rebecca Canan

Did you have a chance to attend our webinar last week on social media monitoring?  During the webinar, we invited CEC members to join a discussion with Scott Stevener from Monsanto, Linda Locke from Reputare Consulting (formerly SVP at MasterCard), and Karin Kane from evolve24.  You may have recently seen guest blog posts from Scott and Linda on the CEC Insider.  Below, get the quick scoop from our third panelist, Karin, who manages client engagements at evolve24, a reputation management and monitoring firm.  And CEC Members: if you missed the webinar, you can access the replay here!

Rebecca (CEC): In brief, can you describe how your media monitoring is different from what most communicators use/receive?

Karin: We recognize that communicators can provide tremendous value across an organization when they measure, and share, the insights they can uncover from media.  Because of that, we focus on providing those insights.  We offer the widest selection of social media content, and provide very advanced analytics that allow our clients to measure social media in very distinct ways.  Along with the standard share of voice and sentiment metrics, we measure influence, credibility, reputation, emotion, and risk. These measurements make media monitoring relevant for communications and marketing teams, customer experience and customer service teams, HR, sales, operations and risk management. Read More »