As we close the book on 2011, most of us are probably drafting our plans for how we intend to achieve our 2012 objectives.  If you’re like many of the communicators who I have spoken with recently, you are eager to structure your communication plans so as to demonstrate the value that Communications can create for rest of the business.  Perhaps you’re even using the CEC’s recently published toolkit on building an outcome-focused communication planand starting off the planning process by gaining a deep understanding of your Comms objective and target stakeholder audience.  After all, how can you begin to think about creating an action plan if you don’t first fully appreciate the communications goal?

While this advice might seem intuitive, communicators often lose sight of or altogether fail to consider the specific Comms outcome that they are hoping to achieve through their efforts.  But even more important than asking ourselves “What is the Communications objective that we hoping to achieve?” is another intuitive, yet critically important question — “What is the business outcome that we’re hoping to achieve?”

Reverse Engineer Your Comms Plans  Read More »

Anyone ever tried one of those seven day cleansing diets?  They usually start when you get back from a decedent vacation, stuff yourself over the holidays, or realize you’ve subsisted for a month on Chicago polishes and deep dish.   You’re allowed only concoctions of stuff like lemon juice, vinegar, salt water, and mashed beets and ginger; and the expectation is that after a week, you’re miraculously cleansed, fit, and trim.  Of course, any benefits don’t last, and by day eight you’re back in line with the rest of us at Big Al’s Italian Beef.

Bear with me a second, but that whole process kind of reminds me of a desperate Corporate Communications team retreat.  We know we’ve gotten fat on low-value requests, we haven’t had time to work out our skills, and the direction of our function is starting to feel a bit aimless.  So, the thinking goes, if we just lock ourselves in a conference room for three days to plan, train, and strategize, we’ll be good to go for another twelve months.

But we all know the benefits of many retreats don’t last longer than those cleansing diets, and our needy business partners can throw us off track like a Bears Mug Beer Sunday Beer Special (a Chicago football tradition).  So as a solution, let me introduce CEC’s 100 day plan for lasting improvement to your communications function.   It’s not an instant cure, but we think the benefits are far greater and more lasting. 

Day 1-25: Setting Strategic Priorities
The first step in the diet is figuring out what we actually should be working on.  Now, a cleansing diet will have you a brainstorm a big list, narrow it down, refine some language and send you packing with nothing tied to business value to keep you on track.  The CEC plan requires a bit more upfront research with business partners, but if you complete our Anatomy of a Business Value Focused Communications Function, you will come away with a data-driven set of priorities that maximize value to the business based on urgency and current state.  You can even use the data push back on business partners and revisit your work to ensure ongoing alignment.    Read More »

For the past couple months, I have been working on compiling 16 different “role profiles” of some of the traditional and not-so-traditional roles that you can find on current communications teams.  For each profile, I have interviewed several communicators holding this position to pick their brains on the key responsibilities and skills that their role demands. The resulting role profiles reflect not only their current responsibilities but also some of the more aspirational activities that they would love to add to the list in the near future to increase their impact and effectiveness.

However, not all communications teams have a large number of communicators which can be strategically allocated among all of these 16 (or more) different roles.  A quick look at our membership shows that a quarter of the communications teams have 10 or less people and about half of them fall in the 20 and under full time staff members category.  So what do you do when you have a small team that requires everyone to wear “multiple hats” to get the job done? Read More »

We have just released our annual 2011 Aggregate Benchmarking Report highlighting the key communications budget trends for 2011/2012. In my previous blog, I highlighted the growing importance of staff in communications budgets; but there is another interesting trend that we found from our data: Companies are decoupling their communications and marketing departments’ budgets.

While in 2007, 33 percent of communicators reported that their communications department’s budget was part of the marketing budget, this percentage fell to 21 in 2011. In addition, the share of marketing related expenses in communicators’ non-staff budgets also fell by 10 percent between 2007 and 2011. Read More »

How to best structure the communication function is a question that arises quite a bit here at the CEC. “Where does Internal Communications sit?” “What are common reporting lines?” “How do global companies structure their communications teams?”….the list goes on.

Recently, there has been a lot of chatter in our Employee Communications Forum around organizational structure, and in particular, the structure and reporting lines of internal communications. Take a look at the original question here. You’ll see that despite a few common answers, there are a wide range of responses. So with so many different possibilities, which structure is the best?

One member expressed that their internal communications team sits within the Finance group. They also added the caveat that their structure is “admittedly unusual, but it works very well for us given the culture of the organization.” AHA! That’s it!

No, I’m not suggesting that everyone house their internal communications team within Finance or restructure their communications function to mimic this particular member. It’s the second part of the answer that should be noted. Different structures work for different companies. Often, companies see a problem and quickly jump to reorganize. But when the dust settles, they realize that a lot of the same problems that drove them to reorganize persist. Why? Because more often than not, issues are embedded in process, not structure. So, before you jump the gun on reorganizing, here are a couple of questions and resources to consider first: Read More »

Public Affairs, You Confuse Me.

Calling all communicators in the business of Public Affairs—what makes you stand out from the rest of your peers in Communications?

• Do you have key legislators and lobbyists on your BBM contacts?
• Are you the sole owner of CSR and community relations initiatives?
• Are you the policy guru, spotting nefarious legislation and getting your company ahead the messaging curve?
• Do you spend countless hours grooming your CEO and other executives for government testimony?

Read no further if you have an answer and wouldn’t mind sharing it with me. Continue on if you think I’m a confused Millennial. Read More »

I’ve learned a lot about learning over the years.  Some people learn best by reading.  Others by listening.  Some people need to have a sensory experience in order for a new idea to lock into their brain. No one style is better than another, it’s just that we’re all different.

Many communicators, for instance (being the verbal maestros so many of us are!) learn best by talking.  Sometimes words just blurt out of our mouths (ideally not in the midst of eating a Sloppy Joe) and as we hear ourselves speaking out loud, a new thought begins to take shape.

Such a blurt occurred recently for me during our first-ever Preview of our new CEC Annual Executive Retreat series, “Influencing Stakeholders in a Networked Environment.”  In discussing the new reality of influence–the idea that people today are much more likely to listen to and believe ideas from “unofficial sources” (real people) as opposed to anything we say in our “corporate” communications–I blurted out the not-quite-fully-formed thought, “There is no such thing as social media.” Read More »

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 »

By Lisa Schievelbein

Here at CEC, the irony is not lost on us when we fail to practice what we preach to communicators.  For example, our team has produced some pretty cool insights about intranet management, yet few of us visit our parent company’s own “digital landfill” for anything but the cafeteria menu. (Like many CEC members, we wistfully covet information-sharing platforms like SabreTown and The WaterCooler.) But in the last few months, as Kayleigh and I shifted our primary focus from intranets to org structures, I’ve been encouraged by the potential for “human” solutions to make a real impact on information sharing.

Read More »

What’s your dream title?

If you envision your career as an ever-ascending climb, begun at sea level on the day you were first called “Intern” and continuing to rise ever-loftier toward some dare-to-dream pinnacle, then it would have to be true that your arc will peak on the day you finally get to take your rightful place as [fill in dream title here].

In the Comms world, I’ve been seeing interesting titles lately that might fit nicely into your parenthetic bracket.

Here’s a title I’d never heard of before—a new CEC member has recently joined the network as our first-ever VP, Communications and Change Management. That critical linkage between Comms and change is a theme we’ve been studying for the past year, and we’re really excited to see it reflected so blatantly in one company’s org chart.  Some other intriguing titles I’ve seen recently: Read More »