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

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.

The increase in staff has been largely at the expense of non-staff budget as communicators shifted formerly outsourced activities back “in-house”.  Forty five percent of communicators reported cutting their non-staff expenses this year and the average percentage share of staff budget in total budget rose to 51 percent compared to last year’s 45 percent.  With an increased in-house focus, the importance of having a highly skilled and competent communications team becomes even bigger priority.

In the 2011 Budget Trends Summary, we look at the activities that communications professionals were focusing on a couple years ago versus the ones that they are focusing on now. It turns out that there has been significant reshuffling since 2007, which puts further emphasis on the importance of communications staff development.

To help you identify what staff development areas to focus on, CEC has identified the 16 key communications skills that every communicator needs and compiled them into the Communications Competency Framework. The Framework is accompanied by the CEC Online Skills Assessment which can help you pin point the competency gaps among your team.

We hope that you will find both the Executive Summary and the Communications Competency Framework useful in helping us optimize your 2012 budget allocation planning.  And as always let me know what you think about our findings.

Relevant Resources

2011 Budget Trend Summary

Communications Planning

Communications Competency Framework

CEC Online Skills Assessment

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?

Some recent work done by a sister program the Customer Contact Council that has attracted a lot of external press, including the cover of HBR, presented the idea of the Customer Effort Score (CES™). This concept caught my attention and got me thinking about how we could create such a simple mechanism to test the effectiveness of the intranet. CES™ is brilliant in its simplicity – customers are asked “How much effort did you personally put forth to handle your request?” This single question has been found to be best predictor of customer loyalty, intent to repurchase and actual word of mouth. Not bad going for 12 words!

We have recently talked about companies making significant headway in both the mobile access and usability of their intranets. I could imagine using a variation on the CES™ question to help understand whether these investments are paying off and actually making it easier for employees to get the information they need to be effective.

CEC has many resources dedicated to building a user-centric intranet along with examples of intranet effectiveness surveys. In the second half of the year we will be putting this idea into practice and seeing if we can find the simplest and most potent way to measure their effectiveness. If you have had success with your measures or a point of view on whether the effort question might work, let us know below.

CEC Related Resources:

• Create a User-Centric Intranet Resource Center
• Focus Your Intranet Strategy Resource Center
• Intranet Strategy Tool
• Sharpen the Strategic Focus of Your Intranet Webinar Replay

CEC Related Blog Posts

• Next Step Tech—The Mobile Intranet
• How to Break 3 Bad Intranet Habits
• Intranet Governance: 3 Tips for Success
• User Profiles: The Cure for an Unloved Intranet

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.

The goal of the process below is to articulate a defensible determination of the expected number of negative mentions without Communications staff and add it to the positive ones we already take credit for:

Step 1: Count the number of specific interventions you made that stopped a story from appearing. Ensure credibility by documenting “situation action result” just as you would for any proactively positive effort you track.

Step 2: Determine the ratio of total negative media mentions to the number of specific events that generated them. So for example, 100 negative mentions stemming from ten separate events or stories would yield a ratio of 10:1.

Step 3: Apply that ratio to your number of interventions that prevented coverage to determine the expected number of mentions prevented. So, in the example above, if you stopped 3 stories, you likely prevented 30 mentions by applying the 10:1 ratio.

Step 4: Add those mentions to the number of mentions you reported as positive and (assuming that the value of a positive story is the exact inverse of a negative one) you have a more accurate description of your value.

Step 5: If you further articulate the value of media mentions (for instance, by paid media equivalent or as a boost to a reputation metric), then determine the contribution of one positive mention and multiply that by the total number of negative mentions. So, if the same company above determined that they had 500 positive mentions worth a paid equivalent $1000, then the additional 30 mentions prevented would be worth an additional $60.

Now, obviously I haven’t achieved the impossible any more than the Cubs will win it all this year. Numerous assumptions erode the accuracy of this process – perhaps most significantly the assumed equivalency between the value of negative and positive stories. But as the Cubs keep trying (for at least another month), so should we chase the impossible dream for communicators. What do you do to ensure your team gets credit for all the stories that you prevent?

Related CEC Research

• Measurement and Reporting Topic Center
• Effective PR Metrics Programs
• Capital One’s Reputation Risk Report

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.

These conversations have driven me to review some of the CEC’s work on “Creating a Must-Have Value Proposition” and “Boosting Communications’’ Value to Business Partners.” In that process, I’ve been reminded of a few key lessons that a number of Communications teams have yet to apply:

1)      You may have great intentions when you attempt to build a relationship with your business partners by asking the question, “What are your priorities and how can Communications best help you achieve these?” However, this question relies on a fundamental assumption – that your business partners understand your role and the types of activities and consequently the value, you can provide. It is natural for them to request the type of support you have provided them in the past. If you are seeking to reposition your function, then asking for a business partner’s assessment of what you could provide isn’t going to do the trick.

• CEC members, you might want to try the Business Partner Alignment Survey to first identify what areas of strategy execution are most important to business partners (e.g., building understanding, sustaining commitment, minimizing obstacles to execution), and then obtain their assessment of the Communications function’s impact in those areas.

2)      When you’re defining your Communications strategy, don’t overlook the importance of linking your priorities to the company’s strategy. In a concise, visually-compelling way, lay out your corporate strategy, your mission in Communications, and the specific objectives and initiatives you will manage across the year in support of the business. I bet you’ll be impressed by how much it will help guide your thinking, motivate your team, and educate the business on your role.

• CEC members, check out the way the Royal Bank of Canada conducts their business strategy-centric planning and how they’ve laid out the business and Communications strategy on one page (ok, fine, it’s double-sided!)

3)      As a critical thinking exercise and an educational lesson for your business partners, try to map a clear link between your company’s business targets and your Communications activities. How specifically will your team’s day-to-day work impact your business’ goal of growing revenue, for example? If you are able to clearly link these top and bottom-line business goals to what you spend your time doing, imagine how powerful it would be. Even if you don’t change your portfolio of activities, your partners may begin to see the influence and impact of effective Communications.

• CEC members, check out the way American Express has “deconstructed” their business objectives by asking “how will our company achieve this goal,” until they reach something that Communications can impact.

4)      As critical as it is to formally define a strategic plan of support for your business partners, don’t neglect the importance of incorporating and documenting what you won’t support.

• CEC members, check out the way ING has partnered with the business to define service-level tiers, explicitly outlining the level of support Communications will provide for projects that meet strategic and organizational need, and where the business will be expected to own their own communications, with the right safeguards and support structure in place.

What lessons have you learned in building an effective and strategic relationship with your business partners?

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:

• Integrated technologies. Instead of using media monitoring as an “after” indicator of their success, Monsanto uses a stakeholder-centric system across all media to identify the top issues stakeholders care about “before” they roll out messages. This enables the company to then tailor communications to resonate with specific audiences.

Learn more about Monsanto’s approach and read key takeaways from a related webinar.

• Integrated teams. We all know that dialogue is an important source of information. Best Buy doesn’t just limit monitoring to one or two separate individuals in Communications—they have a dialogue team within the department to provide integrated listening support to communicators (and the business).

Check out the examples set by Best Buy and USAA communicators in a related webinar.

• Integrated projects. Best Buy’s dialogue team integrates data from a variety of listening tools to clarify the root causes of specific communications issues. For example, the company’s Survey, Observe, and Drill Down tools build off of each other for a more collective view of employee concerns.

Read the full-length study on Best Buy’s employee listening system.

Visit CEC’s Stakeholder Engagement Topic Center to view additional ways to deepen your stakeholder understanding.

Be sure to check out these related blog posts—To Communicate, First Question: 4 Tips for Asking Good Questions; Best Buy’s Employee Listening System; and Media Monitoring: A New Approach.

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.

In response, the company developed a strategy to organize and analyze data with the help of workflow management tools such as time tracking. Here’s a breakdown of Thrivent’s workflow analysis strategy:

Get the team on board. Convincing everyone to get on the same page can be half the battle. When staff showed resistance to capturing data via time tracking, the communications team created a win-win scenario by developing a set of interventions addressing these areas.

Addressing the issues and offering direct solutions encouraged employees to have a positive outlook about the system.

Hear Marie Uhrich discuss their win-win approach.

Simplify tracking. Thrivent uses an online tool to simplify the collection and management of data. To ensure that the process is less of a hassle, staff are only required to enter “must-have” data. This includes only tracking two levels deep (project and activity), and only tracking duration on a “go-forward” basis—not historical retrospective. Thrivent’s tracking tool acts as a diary, enabling executives to see and get a sense for where projects took longer, and highlighting areas to be fixed for future projects.

View a Thrivent Financial communicator talk about the benefits of their online tracking tool.

Explain smarter choices. Resource transparency helps business partners make smarter requests. The communications team can review previously tracked data and then go back to partners and let them know how long projects should take, based on duration of past tasks. A time recording system is also a powerful tool to educate internal business partners—it helps teams explain all of what Communications can do, what they do, and how much time is invested in accomplishing their goals.

See a video about how tracking helps Communications describe their impact.

View the full case study on how Thrivent Financial implemented this practice.

Tell us about data tracking practices that your company uses. What has been the most effective strategy?

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:

No matter how good our storytelling skills are, in most companies, building credibility with senior leaders requires a much more transparent link between the activities of the Communications team and their impact on the firm.

We’ve been working with our peers in Marketing (who often face the same challenge) and have adapted their Return-on-Objectives framework, which links attitudinal and behavioral metrics more closely to your communications’ objectives, and serves as the bridge between volumetrics and business outcomes.  (See the framework here.)  An understanding of the right level of metrics to track and report serves as the first key principle to designing a leading functional dashboard—one designed to simplify the task of demonstrating the true value of your work.  Below, we outline that principle and the five others that can get you on the right track:

6 Principles of Leading Communications Functional Dashboards

1. Design with the objective in mind: Design the dashboard to emphasize the clear link between the metric, the communications objective it relates to, and the subsequent business objective.
2. Limit the amount of information: Use a principled selection process to include only highly relevant metrics, protecting users from information overload and from the challenge of extracting insight from a mountain of data.
3. Provide a frame of reference: Each metric, chart, or graph should answer the question: “compared to what?” Successful dashboards compare specific measures to a benchmark and assess relative performance to help users identify trends over time.
4. Use an intuitive and visual scoring system: Include a simple scoring system—such as the widely employed “stop light” approach of red, yellow, and green—to clearly indicate whether or not goals have been met.
5. Make it visually compelling: Aesthetic considerations, such as colors, simple and straightforward frameworks, graphs, or charts significantly ease the interpretation of complex data and help catch users’ attention.
6. Make additional detail available: Include additional information on the meaning or calculation of each metric, as well as segment breakdowns in an appendix or subsequent pages of the dashboard.

In early December the CEC will be posting its latest resource on Communications Measurement and Reporting, including guidance on metrics selection and example dashboard for you to model.  Metrics… it’s our way of saying happy holidays to you!

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.

They used some of the techniques from six sigma and applied them to the softer side of change management; things like leadership, communication, culture and recognition.  Even though these principles of change management are familiar ground to most communicators, we rarely use them in such a targeted way to drive demonstrable changes to business outcomes.  Here’s how the team at ITT did it:

• Embed in the business – they spent disproportionate time listening and gathering data to really uncover the root causes of communication/cultural breakdowns
• Work together – they collaborated with both business leaders and employees to develop solutions that suited employees’ preferences and ways of working
• Set clear expectations – they developed a clear daily communication process so everyone knew what to expect and how they fit in
• Don’t communicate and run – they provided support and coaching to business leaders and line managers (and had them support and coach each other) to build their confidence in a more interactive communication style

We believe that this targeted application of communications’ skills and resources to remove roadblocks to performance (e.g., wrong information, slow-moving information, mixed messages) is a sign of the future of corporate communications.  These opportunities are there for the taking in most organizations – we just have to find them.

Have you tried partnering with the business to drive a particular business result?  How has it changed perceptions of the Communications function in your organization?

Resources for CEC Members:

Case Profile: Performance-Focused Cultural Re-alignment (ITT Corporation)

Webinar: Communications Improvement That Drives the Bottom Line

Workshop: Consultative Skills Development Curriculum

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.

Rebecca: We hear from CEC members that they use media monitoring for  either (1) reactive purposes – to alert them to immediate  reputation risks OR (2) retrospective purposes – to track tonality and key message penetration.  What are some new or different applications of this data that you’ve seen companies use?

Karin: Our clients are using social media in a number of very innovative ways:

• Product development teams have found that social media can be a valuable, and less costly, alternative to traditional market research. It provides an open, unbiased environment for people to share their wants and needs, and provides great insights for product features and when it’s measured properly.
• Strategic planners are finding that social media can help uncover “unknown unknowns”, or risks and opportunities that they might not otherwise be aware of.  They’re gaining early warning of these opportunities, getting real time insight in the market environment, and using that for business planning.
• We are also seeing Customer Satisfaction teams using social media in new ways.  They’re looking at how consumers interact with a product, reaching out to customers directly, and getting a much better picture of what customers are looking for.

Rebecca: Can you tell us one fun fact about yourself and/or background?

Karin: I’ve recently become addicted to Foursquare, the social media location tracking program! I was the mayor of Chicago O’Hare Airport’s Terminal Three for one brief, glorious week.