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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Raise your hand if…you would say that instead of “putting the customer first,” your company actually puts the customer second or even third (behind such goals as chasing profits, serving internal interests and responding to the capricious whims of your executives.)

(SFX:  The sound of zero hands being raised)

Of course, every company in the known universe says “…oh, yes, we are definitely and proudly customer-centric.  Always have been!”  And I’m sure every company sincerely believes they are.

But let’s challenge the truth behind that belief.

Take the following three-question quiz and see if you have to honestly answer YES to any of the questions:

1) Are there a lot of rules and regulations in your customer contracts (fine print, legalese, clearly-spelled-out exceptions for things like “force majure“)?
Whose interests are being served by this tortured language?  Your legal department?  Finance?

Does your company have any clauses to ensure the customer always gets the best end of the bargain, even if it means the company has to take a hit?  (If so, I’m gonna stop blogging immediately, and run over there to sign up!)

2) Does your company measure “net promoter score” (NPS)?
NPS is based on a customer’s willingness to recommend your company, and many companies use this system to measure the overall loyalty of their customers.  Every company wants loyal customers, right?

But has any customer ever said, “I hope that after my transaction with this company, I’ll be willing to recommend them!”?  Companies want loyalty and recommendations.  Customers just want what they want, an interaction that benefits them in some way. Read More »

Linda Locke (Principal at Reputare Consulting, formely SVP at MasterCard)

By Rebecca Canan

As I’ve talked about in a previous blog post, it seems there is no limit to the amount of information that people are willing to share on social networking sites.  We are swimming drowning in a sea of data — people are talking candidly about almost everything; their words are being documented publicly on the Web for anyone to see.  How can we leverage all that audience insight in a scalable and smart way to help our reputations?   How can we take an “outside-in” approach to incorporate what stakeholders are saying (and reading) into our own internal reputation management?

We’ll be exploring that BIG question at an upcoming August 12th webinar with Linda Locke from Reputare Consulting – formerly SVP at MasterCard.  We’ll also be joined by Scott Stevener from Monsanto and Karin Kane from Evolve24.  During the session, we’ll show CEC members how they can take advantage of the tools and technologies now available – not only for traditional media monitoring, but also for social media monitoring – and apply them in a way that proactively manages their company’s reputation.  Sound lofty?  Maybe.  Sound impossible?  It’s definitely not. Read More »

At CEB, mid-year performance review time is here.  Seven busy and slightly hectic months of 2010 have flown by (how is it already August?!).  I have lots of stories to share.  A few things I’m proud of.  A few goals to achieve in the next half of the year.  But how do I put the right story together to truly demonstrate my impact to my manager, let along my manager’s manager???  I doubt newsletter metrics or download numbers for my research pieces will do the trick.

Communicators, have you recently tried to demonstrate your team’s effectiveness?  One of the top cries for help we hear from CEC members is: “Metrics!  We need help with metrics… how to define them, how to present them, and how to link them to the business goals that senior leaders actually care about.”

In a recent poll about Communications dashboards, only 31% of communicators said they have a dashboard they present to senior leaders to demonstrate Communications’ effectiveness.  Of those, only 50% said they are satisfied with their current dashboard. However, this “satisfaction” is questionable if you look more specifically at these respondents’ satisfaction with their dashboard’s ability to do the following: Read More »

Q: Why do we communicators crave true benchmarking data?

A. Lots of reasons!

• To understand how we compare to our peers
• To get a sense of trends facing our function
• To see where peers outsource activities to a vendor
• To understand what new activities we should be taking on
• To make a confident case to company leadership for more resources or different allocation (as Mike recently said—it can help us make the case for a little more R-E-S-P-E-C-T!”)
• To plan for 2011 (yikes—it’s coming way too fast!)

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By Mike Wellman

How great would it be to have the title of Chief Communications Officer and a 200+ team of able communicators to help you create an impact at your organization?  How about a fleet of Ferraris while we’re at it?  It sounds nice, but sadly many of the Communications professionals we work with continue to feel under-resourced and underappreciated.  That doesn’t mean that we need to always sing Rodney Dangerfield’s tune, though!  (Am I the only one who loves this video?)

The good news is that the communication demands of today are accelerating positive changes in the structure and skill set of many Communications teams, and job titles are evolving to reflect the nature of the important work we do. Smart communicators are asking CEC for help in making the case for more resources now, in a time of great change, when they know their organizations are more likely to listen.  Here are three useful tips on making an effective case for more people, money, or, access: Read More »