CEC members often talk about the challenges with communications strategies in China – anything ranging from understanding the culture, to working with local agencies to identifying the influential media players, to building the company brand in the market. This interest in China is hardly a surprise as many companies either operate there already and are learning from their mistakes, or are considering entering emerging markets for new sources of growth (and especially China, which is the fastest growing among them, and one of the most important global economies at the moment).

China remains a challenging environment to do business in for many western companies, as Chinese culture and the socio-political nuances of the country are very different from home markets. Arguably, the Chinese PR landscape is one of the trickiest aspects for a communicator. As part of CEC’s A Communicator’s Guide to China, we looked at some of the key trends in the PR industry there, including:

3 Trends about PR in China

1. Government-Controlled Media: Media in China is still heavily controlled by the government and the press has very high restrictions on what it can publish (China ranked 171^st out of 178 countries in the worldwide index of freedom). This means that a pre-requisite to media relations is “playing nice” with the government.
2. Complex Stakeholder Environment: Many of the stakeholders you will need to engage with are also heavily influenced by the government (e.g., state-owned enterprises or NGOs controlled by the government), so you will need to shift your stakeholder engagement tactics.
3. Questionable PR Practices: Tactics like paying for positive coverage or paying PR firms to remove negative stories happen quite often, so you need to be prepared to screen your agencies to prevent such practices.

CEC Members: Check out our full Communicator’s Guide to China for recommendations on how to navigate these PR trends, as well as further resources on China.

What challenges have you experienced in handling PR in China, and how have you dealt (are dealing) with them? Please share your thoughts/tips in the comments box!

CEC Related Resources:

Building a Global Mindset: A Communicator’s Guide to China

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:

Lost In Translation: How Cultural Values Shape Your Communications

Managing a Truly GLOBAL Communications Function

Who Will Translate Your Company’s Messages

Posts from the Road: China

Currently, most stakeholder engagement is focused around reputation risk management and justifying or positively reinforcing existing reputation activities. Some of the ways in which communicators manage reputation with stakeholders include:

• Stakeholder mapping and monitoring: this involves keeping a pulse on what stakeholders are saying about you, so that you may identify and preempt potential risks. Think of this one as good “housekeeping” to prevent issues or crises from rising. For example, Monsanto utilizes stakeholder-centric monitoring to prioritize issues for specific stakeholder groups. Other companies identify and prioritize reputation risks by mapping “degree of sensitivity to issue” against “strength of company position.”
• Stakeholder conversations and thought leadership: more proactively, communicators identify influencers and discuss issues of concern with them to establish the company as a thought leader in the industry. This is in addition to other thought leadership and executive communications programs. Chevron for example, holds thought leadership stakeholder discussions on important issues to the company.

These tactics are great if you, the Communications team, were the only ones engaging with stakeholders! But more and more it is your business partners and employees who have more frequent interactions with stakeholders.  Adding additional pressure is the fact that the external environment is becoming increasingly complex as stakeholders become more resourceful about how they access information and form perceptions about you.

The problem is that business partners and employees don’t necessarily know all the risks to reputation as they are having conversations with stakeholders, and won’t think through those interactions as strategically as communicators do. One idea is to have CRM systems for stakeholder engagement – something similar to a Salesforce.com but for the entire stakeholder universe. This would impose some rigor around capturing all stakeholder interactions and sharing them with the business partners as they prepare to engage with stakeholder groups. This will allow a more 360 degree view of the stakeholder and help the organization prepare strategically for how and when to engage with specific stakeholders around specific business initiatives.

This leads to the second important point: taking a learning posture during stakeholder engagement and using these occasions as a diagnostic tool to understand how stakeholders make decisions. How much listening vs talking would you say you do when you meet stakeholders? Most members we have spoken with say that while they should be doing more listening, in reality, most of these conversations are around telling stakeholders all the things the company is doing to build a good reputation.

While Communications has a LOT of knowledge about stakeholders, it hasn’t been so good at sharing that information back inside the business at key decision points, to help business partners inform their strategy. Communicators are trying to take on a more consultative role with the business when it comes to managing reputation, but currently business partners don’t rely on insight from Comms in making decisions.  One company that has made some progress in terms of bringing “social intelligence” to inform business strategies is BBVA with its integrated stakeholder listening process.

How do you listen and observe when and how stakeholders make decisions around specific outcomes? Do you capture that knowledge anywhere – do you use CRM systems? Do you have examples of specific business outcomes that were shaped by information about stakeholder decisions that you provided as communicators?

We’d love to hear what you are doing in this space (through the comments box or by contacting the CEC team directly) and how you’re bringing stakeholder intelligence to business decisions!

CEC Related Resources:

• Building an Outcome-Focused Reputation Management
• Stakeholder Engagement

CEC Related Blogs:

• 3 Steps to Build an Outcome-Focused Reputation
• Is It Good to Have a “Good” Reputation?
• Reputation Management: 3 Tips to Cope with New Threats

1. Traditional media (journalists/reporters) are busier than ever before. Their teams are smaller, their jobs are broader, and they have less time to recraft corporate stories.
2. The visibility of news means that journalists are no longer the sole audience for our releases.

Although I highly doubt that these facts will be news to many people, based on my conversations, it seems that very few media relations folks have substantially changed how they write news releases, or adapted them to reflect these changes.

Doesn’t this seem strange to you?

Stakeholder-Centricity

A couple of weeks ago, I pointed out how HSBC and some companies have put stakeholders at the front and center of their news releases. This serves two purposes (among others); it saves time-pressed journalists from recrafting and repositioning company-centric releases for our intended stakeholder-audience, and it also makes our news instantly more relevant for the new stakeholder audience, who access our news online. Loads of the press releases we looked at open with ‘today, our company would like to announce x, y and z…’. By contrast, the first line of practically every HSBC release I read was about its intended audience.

However, the first line alone doesn’t make it stakeholder-centric. CEC members, check out our latest work on how to write news releases, and more on four simple changes you can make to ensure that your releases are optimized for the people they’re supposed to influence:

• Subject matter: before even sitting down to write, ensure that the news is actually relevant to your intended audience. What’s the desired outcome of your news release? If you can’t name one, you probably shouldn’t be writing it!
• Style: think about how you position your news. You can you make your stakeholder the star of your release, and not simply its object. Check this great example from State Farm, in which they used the emotional appeal of candlelit Valentine’s meals to get their stakeholders thinking about the safe use of candles!
• Format: more information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the last 500 million. To cope with information overload, human beings in any walk of life simply scan text instead of reading every word. As communicators, we intuitively know this – so why do we insist in writing block text in long paragraphs? CEC was amazed by how few PRs keep their releases short, snappy, and call out key information in bullets and sub-headings!
• Media content: print journalists no longer write solely in print. They blog; they use videos; they use audio content (see figure 6 of this journalist survey) . We know that our stakeholders are the same. So why do news releases typically only contain text? Make sure your release contains content that is malleable, that can be broken up, where a stakeholder can forward a video that they think their friends would like, or easily tweet a short section of text.

More on this topic

Make Stakeholders The Stars Of Your News Release

Wake Me Up When Your Press Release Is Over

Given the need to address this important topic, the CEC recently launched its next major research initiative —Building an Outcomes-Focused Reputation.  As part of the study we’ve already spoken with communications executives at several dozen leading organizations to better understand the challenges that they are facing in managing stakeholder perceptions as well as the tactics they use to measure, monitor, and improve and their corporate reputations. (Take our 2 minute Quick Poll and tell us what you’re doing to manage your reputation!)

Current Approach:

Faced with increased stakeholder scrutiny and fickle audiences, most companies are focusing on building their company’s reputation by turning up the volume on positive messages related to their organization.  This typically involves ensuring that more messages are sent to stakeholders, across more channels, and in a more consistent way to reinforce key company themes.  Whether it’s highlighting CSR efforts, taking thought leadership positions, or finding opportunities for leaders to speak at industry conferences companies are emphasizing core messages that illustrate who they are as an organization.

Being “Good” Is Not Enough:

While this approach might appear sound in theory, in practice it doesn’t move the needle towards actual business results.  Leading companies recognize that trying to reinforce positive perceptions about the company being generally “good” will not drive stakeholder behaviors. Instead, the best communicators focus on managing a few, targeted stakeholder perceptions and behaviors that are key to driving business outcomes, by providing information at key stakeholder decision points.

Outcomes-Focused Reputation:

The CEC has identified several elements that elements to effectively building an outcomes-focused reputation, including:

1. Identifying the key stakeholder decisions that can be scalably influenced through information
2. Providing “just in time” information accessible during key decisions
3. Aligning on measures that link communications activities to specific business outcomes

For an insider look into the very latest reputation management research, check out CEC’s Building an Outcomes-Focused Reputation work in progress page.  If you like what you see and would like to set up a conversation about how you are focusing your reputation-building efforts around specific outcomes send an e-mail to Jeff Schott.

Related CEC Resources:

• Building an Outcomes-Focused Reputation Work in Progress Page
• Reputation and Brand Topic Center
• Protect Your Reputation
• Managing Reputation in Online Conversations 

Related CEC Insider Posts:

• Is It Good to Have a “Good” Reputation
• The Real Connection between Corporate Brand and Company Success
• Reputation Management: 3 Tips to Cope with New Threats

Starting Strongly

What really struck me, though, was its opening line:

“Four revolutionary new products to accelerate the trend towards office and plant automation…”.

It’s true – with the benefit of hindsight, products like the typewriter were revolutionary. Interestingly, this is still a commonly used opener in press releases today – the only problem is, these days every company claims their latest product is revolutionary/spectacular/groundbreaking/earth-shattering… from a journalist/stakeholder perspective, I wonder how often they’ve heard those lines and simply zoned out?

Look at the difference between that opening line from 1956 “we’ve just created four revolutionary products”, and this present-day example from HSBC, in which they announce results from recent consumer surveys looking at “The Future of Retirement”. HSBC’s opening line is this:

“Half of Britain’s families are putting themselves at risk by failing to take steps to safeguard their financial future.”

There’s a world of difference between the two; where our typewriting friends once led with information about their products, and how great they were, HSBC actually barely mention themselves until much later in the release. Critically, one is company-centric; the other is stakeholder-centric.

Stakeholder-Centricity

As a stakeholder, this is so important. Take me as an example – I’m a member of a British family, and in this environment I’m certainly interested in our financial future! Their opening gambit is instantly provocative, and speaks right to me and my interests – consequently, it’s so much more engaging to me than opening up with “As a part of our ‘The Future of Retirement’ series, we conducted a survey, this was our methodology, and these were our findings… blah blah blah”, HSBC doesn’t lose anything by omitting themselves from the first paragraph – in fact, they allow me to read their information, but feel as if I’m doing so on my own terms.

How can I make my Press Releases More Stakeholder-Centric?

• clearly define your target audience, and your desired outcome in communicating with that audience – look at how to work with internal clients to ensure your communication is outcome-focused
• reference them in your very first line – let them know that this communication is aimed at them (check this great news release from State Farm – see graphic)
• think about how to make them the subject of the release (not the object) – check these writing guidelines from CEC

How do you think about making your press releases more stakeholder-centric? What other tactics have you used?

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.

Outcomes-Focused Reputation Management

Here’s the broader challenge with this approach to reputation management — organizations are trying to build the company image around broadly acceptable themes, viewing a generically “good” reputation as the end goal.  If the tone of their media mentions is positive and coverage is high, then the reputation game is won, right?  Not necessarily.  Sharing messages about being generally “good” does drive stakeholder behavior. 

Rather than approaching reputation as an asset to be generally maximized, a potentially better approach is to think of it as a tool to help the business execute its very specific strategy.  Strategies are set based on the unique outcomes that a company is trying to achieve, whether it’s to sell more product, recruit top talent, or influence legislation.  The stakeholder perceptions that need to be considered are unique and specific as well.

I’m not advocating that companies stop sharing stories of their latest corporate social responsibility efforts; but rather that they think more comprehensively about the specific business objectives that the organization is trying to achieve and which specific perceptions ought to be managed. 

Now that I’ve provided some food for thought, I’d love to hear your perspective on the idea of reputational “goodwill.”  Post a comment below or send an e-mail to jschott@executiveboard.com.

Related CEC Resources:

• Reputation and Brand Topic Center
• Protect Your Reputation
• Managing Reputation in Online Conversations 

Related CEC Insider Posts:

• The Real Connection between Corporate Brand and Company Success
• Reputation Management: 3 Tips to Cope with New Threats
• 6 Steps to Facebook Reputation Management

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.

3. Most media is local. Most audiences are local, regional at best in the case of newspapers and TV news channels. Much of what affects your firm will not be perceived as important to a random audience unless the event is really big.

4. The media knows you can only plan so much:  If the event involving your firm really looks like it is big, the CEC has developed a framework to help structure your response. Leading companies tell us that there is only so much planning you can do to respond to a big event.  However, you can think strategically by assessing the situation, coordinating the response and managing the stakeholder debate that follows.

5. Press conferences can be double edged swords: The media prides itself on being naturally suspicious so think carefully about your level of response. Calling a press conference can unnecessarily raise the profile of the event affecting your firm. However, it can backfire if you do not call it and the media thinks that it sniffs a cover up. Then the press conference itself can go wrong and feed the story.

CEC Related Resources:

• Crisis Management: Our Latest Observations
• Avoiding Crises: How to Build a Preventative Safety Culture
• Building a Crisis Communication System
• Crisis Communication Tools
• Communicating through a Product Crisis

CEC Related Blogs:

• 4 Lessons on How to Manage a Crisis (and it’s not how NewsCorp did it)
• What’s Worse than a Crisis?
• Discussions Spotlight: Crisis Alert Systems
• 6 Steps to Facebook Reputation Management

French newspaper Le Monde quips, “James Murdoch, the son-and-heir, placed on the ejector seat.”  Spain’s El Pais comments, “Murdoch the emperor defrocked” (by the House of Commons’ culture committee).

Why the snowball effect and why the relative blind-siding of other stories? Can these guys just not resist the temptation to report scandals?  It is not that the audience never cared about the Murdoch scandal. Doubtless, many people were fascinated. But it does not affect their livelihoods – unless, perhaps, they work in the media. Other big issues have been relatively sidelined as a result – the Greek debt crisis, and the drought and emerging famine in the horn of Africa  are two relatively neglected issues which really do touch ordinary lives. Maybe the media is giving people what they want, but too much of it for too long. In the midst of a scandal, when does the media pause for a second and determine when it’s over and time to move on to other topics of audience interest?

The Communications Executive Council’s Modern Communicator’s Skill Set springs to mind and would really help some of the media editors bridge that gap of understanding. Specifically, audience understanding is one of the 16 skills that the CEC has identified as crucial for today’s communicators in this skill set. It is all about working out what your  stakeholder’s motivations and preferences really are.

With CEC guidance, you know you can get this skill if you can:

• Use in-depth knowledge of key audience values to achieve communication goals beyond mere understanding or agreement, such as engagement and active support.
• Advise staff on the appropriate listening tool and can set up the departmental listening “system” across stakeholder groups.

Then, if you get your head round that, see if you can do what the best companies do. We are a fan of Johnson & Johnson’s work on audience understanding and communication competencies generally.

CEC Related Resources:

• Online Skills Assessment
• The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set
• The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set (Webinar Replay)

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• 16 Critical Skills of a World Class Communicator

We live in a world that expects open communications. This means that as communicators, we constantly face the tough balancing act of: communicating the truth, communicating what is most relevant to stakeholders, AND knowing when to communicate at all.

For example: How often do the following words come into a consumer’s mind when they are shopping in a retail store? 

Floods. Labor markets. Paksitan. China. Supply chains.

Very rarely. These are not typical thoughts in a shopper’s mind when they are searching for a good deal on the latest trendy sweater, cute T, or pair of athletic socks. But for a large number of retailers, the 15-year high in the price of cotton due to abnormal floods and droughts in Asia is no longer a bearable dent in their supply chain costs. As prices for 2011 are set, many retailers are preparing for shoppers who will see a small to mid-sized price increase in clothing. In speaking with communicators facing this situation we are hearing valid questions like, “Is this something they need to know?” or “Would we be better off if we don’t draw attention to the situation?”

I’d say this is the $100 million question (second only to “what is the ROI of our activities?”) for many communicators today. As with many similar situations, it comes down to a balancing act. So, let’s look at some of the pros and cons of communicating this situation (I’m sure there are MANY others, so feel free to share your thoughts):

Pros:

• If your CSR strategy is profitable for both your business and society, it would be smart to also link it to your supply chain. For example, communication about the cotton crisis could provide an opportunity to highlight activities your organization is doing to better support the communities affected by the agricultural production of cotton.
• If you’re not communicating about the issue, employees may feel ill-equipped to discuss the price increases with other stakeholders. 
• And, obviously investors likely want to hear about shifts in pricing being made to maintain the same level of profits.

Cons:

• Consumers may not care about the reason; they just see the price increase.
• Consumers may not be especially price sensitive on a certain item — communicating about it may draw unnecessary attention.
• Not communicating about it may look like you are dishonest or have something to “hide” and could be damaging to your company’s reputation.

So, share with us: Would your team communicate about the reason behind the price increase? Would you try to target specific audiences with that message? And what criteria do you use in your own “balancing act” to determine when it has become necessary to respond?

It takes more than one person to develop a thought leadership program.

“People come and go, but thought leadership lives on.” –Matt Broder, VP of External Communications at Pitney Bowes 

Funny isn’t it?  For a company to be viewed as a thought leader, it needs to have smart, standout people within the company to share its ideas.  Yet, any company that is key-person dependent in its thought leadership risks sacrificing the company’s long-term recognition as a thought leader. 

Fortunately, that’s where you in Corporate Communications come in. 

Communications’ role is to build the foundation and create the environment for thought leadership to flourish within a company regardless of its current “face.”  It is Communications’ responsibility to develop processes to support the discovery, creation, and sharing of thought leadership.   

What does this responsibility and investment look like in real life?  Ignacio Gonzalez, Stakeholder Engagement Advisor at Shell Oil Company, spends 90% of his time building and sustaining the company’s thought leadership.  In fact, thought leadership is a core activity for the entire US Corporate Communications team; a dozen people touch the program.  One of Ignacio and team’s primary responsibilities is to amplify the voice of company thought leaders.  Below are his views on thought leadership and how it takes a team to get there:

Q: If a thought leader speaks words of wisdom in the forest and no one hears them, is he/she still a thought leader? 

A: Err, not really. It’s one thing to have a cool idea, it’s another thing to communicate that idea within the organization, and it’s an entirely different thing to broadcast that idea and create conversation with the world. 

Communications needs to help company thought leaders amplify their messages and connect them with the right external people to engage in discourse.  At Shell, Communications maps out key stakeholders to put its thought leaders in touch with.  They plan by asking themselves, “with whom does the company most want to engage?” or “who are other respected leaders in the space?”  In addition the function identifies key conferences and events where a thought leader could share her perspective and build relationships.  Without Communications support, thought leaders would likely not recognize themselves as thought leaders never mind have the time and energy to determine how best to share their knowledge. 

According to Ignacio, Communications is “a well-oiled machine seeking engagements of many different forms and integrating media, social media, follow-up, speech coaching, and other communications functions to maximize our efforts.” 

Now I ask you: How are you enabling your company’s thought leaders to share their opinions and engage in productive external conversations?  Not sure what your team should be doing?  Here are the three most common thought leadership responsibilities for Corporate Communications teams according to a recent CEC poll: 

1.     Developing communications process to support the creation and sharing of thought leadership  

2.     Elevating the status of the CEO as a thought leader 

3.     Building a culture of thought leadership internally 

Previous posts on thought leadership: 

• Un-think Thought Leadership
• 2 Ways to Develop a Thought Leadership Strategy

Related Resources: 

• Key Takeaways on Thought Leadership from Ignacio and Matt
• Emerging as an Industry Thought Leader (Webinar Replay)