Reputation, Research, Relationships and Messages

Great Article from McKinsey on Value and Corporate Responsibility

2011-12-12T11:42:00.000-08:00

http://tinyurl.com/bn4a7xp

Alternatives to AVEs

2011-07-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

I have the great good fortune of teaching an online class in Applied Public Relations and Public Affairs Research at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management in Washington, D.C. Because I teach online, I am able to do so from my office east of Oakland. And because my students take the course online, they are spread across the country and around the world. It's very cool!

One of the tasks of teaching online is to hold a "chat" with students at a specific time each week. Because this was my first experience with online teaching, I dreaded my first chat. But when it happened, it was great. Getting provocative questions from bright people is exhilarating!

I'm sure many of you have seen recent media and online discussions regarding the value of advertising value equvalencies (AVE)s and how those of us in the communications research community think them a poor form of measurement. Recently, one of my students asked what the alternatives to AVEs are.

The alternatives to AVEs are virtually everything else.

MEDIA ANALYSIS
The most frequently used evaluation technique in our field is media analysis. The critical point with making this useful is going beyond the number of articles that mention your organization and getting some kind of assessment of the quality of coverage. For example, how much of the coverage includes your message? How much of the coverage is positive for your organization? How much is negative?

You can make this more meaningful in a campaign sense and across time if you get the same kinds of numbers for the members of your competitive set. Then you can compare your organization's coverage to that of your competitors. You can talk about share of voice, share of positive voice, share of negative voice, etc. You can also combine these last two into some kind of ratio or index.

You can take media analysis even further if you begin to examine share of voice on specific topics that are important to your organization. Are there specific product or service areas through which your organization is trying to differentiate itself against the competition? If so, you could look at competitive coverage on that specific topic to see if you are getting more positive coverage on that topic than your competitors are.

SURVEYS
Beyond media analysis, you can do pre-program and post-program surveys of target audiences to determine changes in awareness, attitudes or intent to act (vote, purchase a product, service or stock, etc.)

LINK COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTLY TO BEHAVIOR
Finally, you may be able to link your communications efforts directly to sales. If your organization does no communication activities other than PR, then you may be able to take some credit for changes in sales or other stakeholder behaviors. However, usually, organizations use additional forms of communication, such as media advertising, couponing, etc. So it is almost never as simple as taking credit for good news.

COMPUTER MODELING
However, with the power of computers and statistical analysis, some marketers have begun to build models that help to understand the relative and combined contributions of different marketing communications tools. Following is the link to a paper about such a tool on the IPR website.

http://www.instituteforpr.org/topics/media-based-pr-on-sales/http://www.instituteforpr.org/topics/media-based-pr-on-sales/

IT'S MORE THAN COMMUNICATIONS
In the last paragraph, I noted a number of communications activities that can contribute to a change in behavioral activity. It actually is more complex than that. In addition to changes in communication, an organization might have a new sales force, new forms of distribution, new product or packaging design and so on. While these are all consumer-packaged-goods terms, they also might refer to changes in a candidate's position leading to an increase (or decrease) in votes or a corporate strategy leading to an increase or decrease in share price.

So, to summarize, there are numerous alternatives to AVEs that are far more meaningful and useful to PR.

Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award Submission Deadline 8.1.2011

2011-07-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

The Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award honors excellence in PR research, measurement and evaluation. The award's primary objective is to identify great examples of research used to support PR practice and to publish these case studies on the Institute for Public Relations website.

If your organization has used research to plan, execute or evaluate a communications program and you are proud of what you did. Please submit it to this awards competition.

You can find more information about it here: http://www.instituteforpr.org/research/awards/golden-ruler/

Great Blog from McKinsey on "Bad Strategy"

2011-06-27T12:52:00.001-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/3ontqvp

How To Streamline Your Research

2011-06-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

I saw a comment in a Linkedin discussion about what in PR wastes time. Jennel McDonald noted "Though researching is very important, I think we can go overboard in reading and gathering."

As many of you know, I am a communications research and strategy consultant. So, in large part, research is my business. But I agree with Jennel. We do frequently go overboard.

THE KEY TO FOCUSING YOUR RESEARCH

I would argue the biggest research time waster is doing research without a specific purpose. That is, before you begin any PR research ask yourself what it is you need to know to create a successful communications program. Turn what you need to know into questions and then ignore information that does not answer the questions.

The questions I use to guide research begin with "what action do we want the target audience to take as a result of our communication and other activities?" The answer to this generally comes from management and might be "buy a product or service," "continue to work for our company," "join our company," "contribute funds to our charity," "purchase our stock," "support us as we build a factory in the community," etc.

The questions to guide your research might be:

Who is the target audience? What are they interested in? What do they think of my organization? What is likely to provoke them to the action my organization seeks?
What media reach this target audience, and which are most appropriate for this message?
What external issues are important to our target audience and the best media for reaching them?
How can my organization take advantage of those issues to communicate with the target?
How will we know whether we have succeeded?
What method can we use to demonstrate we have succeeded?

My mentor, Roger Sennott, who was my boss when I worked in the research group at Burson-Marsteller, called this querying the data. He called the approach that takes way too much time "swimming in the data," by which he meant diving in with no specific information goal in mind.

So, don't gather or read material that does not answer your questions, and once you've got the questions answered to your satisfaction, stop. Where this satisfaction level should be will depend on the importance of the program, because the more you can corroborate your information, the surer you can be it is correct. More information means less risk.

SOMETIMES THE INFORMATION ISN'T OUT THERE

There is another research situation that can be very frustrating. Sometimes you know what you need to know, but you just can't find it. You keep looking and burning up hours not finding it. Those of us who have worked in secondary research have all been through this. And when you've gone through it enough times, you begin to get a gut feel for the kinds of projects that might take an inordinate amount of time and yield few, if any, results.

The need for very specific competitive information frequently is one example. If the information you or your client want is the perfect description of your target audience or your competitor's customers, you can bet that if anyone has it, it is your competitor, that he or she got it through primary research and that he or she will not be sharing it with you. Sometimes you can find good industry reports for a price. And even when these prices run into the thousands of dollars, purchasing the report may be a good value, when you consider the time you or your staff will have to spend to gather the secondary information, if it is available, or the cost of commissioning primary research, if it is not.

THE VALUE OF THE INFORMATION

This leads us to the value of the information. And that depends on the value of the decisions you need to make. If you are looking at decisions that can make or break a company, then the value of the information might be as high as the value of the company. However, usually this is not the case.

There are ways to calculate the value of information, but these can be rather complex, so I won't go into them here. But if you are ever in a situation where you think knowing the value of the information would be useful to determine whether to do research or not, give me a call.

Six Tips for Strengthening Stakeholder Relationships

2011-05-18T17:52:00.000-07:00

First, by way of disclosure, assessing the strength of relationships and helping organizations improve them is one of the things I do for a living. That said ...

THE FUNCTION OF PR
PR practitioners have argued for as long as I can remember about what the actual function of PR is. Some say it is to generate publicity. Some, to generate awareness. Others cite behavioral goals, such as increasing sales, reducing employee turnover, or increasing stock price. There also is a camp that argues the real purpose of public relations is to help organizations build and manage effective relationships.

A WAY TO MEASURE THE STRENGTH OF RELATIONSHIPS
In 1999, Dr. James Grunig and Dr. Linda Hon published through IPR "Guidelines for Measuring Relationships in Public Relations." Grunig and Hon drew on literature exploring personal and business-based relationships as well as insights regarding how organizations and stakeholders can affect each other. They developed a list of six factors that collectively assess the state of a relationship between an organization and a stakeholder group. These are (definitions from Grunig and Hon):

Control mutuality (think "mutual control") -- the degree to which parties agree on who has the rightful power to influence one another.
Trust -- one party's level of confidence in and willingness to open one's self to the other party.
Commitment -- The extent to which each party believes and feels that the relationship is worth spending energy to maintain and promote.
Satisfaction -- The extent to which each party feels favorably toward the other because positive expectations about the relationship are reinforced.
Exchange relationships -- In an exchange relationship, one party gives benefits to the other only because the other has provided benefits in the past or is expected to do so in the future.
Communal relationships -- In a communal relationship, both parties provide benefits to the other because they are concerned for the welfare of the other -- even if they get nothing in return.

Grunig and Hon included in the paper a set of tested perceptual questions addressing each of the six factors above. Grunig and others have validated these questions. So, by measuring the strength of stakeholder perceptions of the organization on these six relationship factors, we can gauge the strength of a relationship between the organization and the stakeholder group.

Following are my tips on strengthening stakeholder relationships.

TIP 1: ASSESS THE STRENGTH OF THE RELATIONSHIP
Tip number one is to survey your stakeholder group using some variant of the questionnaire Grunig developed, so you know how weak or strong your relationship is and where it is weak or strong. For example, in one project I did, we learned the organization had excellent scores with all stakeholder groups on all but one of these six factors. So improving stakeholder relationships in that case was a matter of focusing on that one factor.

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND COMMUNICATIONS
The remaining five tips have more to do with how organizations behave than strictly with communications. However, if PR has played the border spanning role of identifying key stakeholder groups and where they stand on the issues that matter to them and has shared this information with management, PR will have made a great start toward helping the organization truly manage its stakeholder relationships and, ultimately, its reputation. PR can further enhance the organization's reputation by educating management on this model of relationship assessment, why it is important and how to measure progress.

Finally, one reason some organizations under perform on these factors is that the organization does not communicate to stakeholders what it is doing in relation to the factors. Most stakeholder groups are too large to deal with one on one, so organizations get input from representative members of these groups. But organizations should communicate to the entire stakeholder group its responses to the input. In addition, it usually makes sense to describe the process of inclusion the organization used to get the input, so stakeholders who were not personally involved know people like them were. This, clearly, is the responsibility of PR or Communications.

TIP 2: BUILD STAKEHOLDERS TRUST IN THE ORGANIZATION

Consistently treat stakeholders fairly.
Whenever your organization makes important decisions take stakeholder opinions into account and otherwise demonstrate concern for stakeholders.
Keep organizational promises.
Demonstrate competence by doing what you say you will do.

TIP 3: PAY ATTENTION AND RESPOND TO WHAT STAKEHOLDERS SAY AND DO

Demonstrate you believe stakeholder opinions are legitimate by responding to them.
Give stakeholders a say in the organization's decision-making process, especially in those areas that affect the stakeholder group.

TIP 4: DEMONSTRATE COMMITMENT TO STAKEHOLDERS

Show stakeholders that your organization wants to maintain a long-term relationship with them.
Engage stakeholders to build loyalty to your organization.

TIP 5: SATISFY STAKEHOLDERS

Identify and enhance the ways stakeholders benefit from their association with the organization.
Make interacting with the organization a "delightful" experience.
Make stakeholders feel they are important to the organization.

TIP 6: MOVE BEYOND AN EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIP TO A COMMUNAL RELATIONSHIP
As noted above, exchange relationships are those in which two parties in a relationship expect a benefit in return for a benefit -- tit for tat. These relationships are the basis of most for-profit businesses. That is, a customer expects a certain quality product in exchange for the money she spends, and the organization expects the money in return for the product. Employees expect pay, benefits and a sense of fulfillment and organizations expect work and engagement.

A communal relationship goes beyond that. One party in the relationship believes the other will give benefits with no expectation of a return. An example of this is corporate social responsibility programs, such as when a bank goes beyond the basic business exchange to "give back" to the community by supporting programs that benefit neighborhoods. Some argue that this corporate giving is not really selfless in that the organization expects good will in return for the benefit it bestows on the community. And this may be. Nevertheless, when a stakeholder believes an organization helps people without expecting anything in return, the relationship is at a different level than if the stakeholder believes the organization only trades benefit for benefit.

PARTING THOUGHT
In closing, I'd like to re-emphasize the importance of assessing the strength of the relationship at the outset. That there are six factors to manage when building relationships is a great insight. But to manage we must be able to measure. This tells us not only where to focus our efforts but also whether we have succeeded.

Reputation Institute Finds Media Have No Influence on Reputation

2011-04-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

Reputation Institute finds media have no influence on reputation. See Elliot Schreiber's Blog: http://tinyurl.com/3d4j89z

Measurable Objective Is Most Important for Creating a Successful Communications Program

2011-04-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

In a comment on the interview I did on Jose Mallabo's Blog (http://tinyurl.com/3oycde7), Jo Ann Sweeney noted she had "found it can take lots of effort to convince clients to spend time ... agreeing [on] objectives in advance; often clients want to dive in and measure before we are all clear what we are measuring and why."

I couldn't agree more. And, I believe this, frankly, is why many PR efforts fail -- they don't have objectives to guide the strategies and tactics!

As a strategist in PR, I often develop the objectives for clients and then ask them to react to them. This frequently is easier and takes less time than asking the clients to articulate the objectives themselves. This is an important service we, as consultants, can and should perform. As they say, it's not rocket science; it's simply a matter of identifying business objectives and determining what communications objectives will support achieving them.

Sometimes clients or agencies will not like this approach because they already know what they want to do. If what they want to do does not support achieving the communications goal that supports the business goal, then they will not have a reason to do what they want. This is perhaps understandable, but poor practice.

I frequently go through what we might call the "increasingly dangerous questions." For example:

When a client says they want to do a media event, I ask "Why?"
When they answer "To generate press coverage," I ask "Why?"
When they respond "To help sell their company's product," I ask:
"How will the coverage do that?"
"Do we know who our likely purchasers are?"
"Do we know that they read or view the media that we are trying to attract to our media event?"
"Do we know that the message we will put out at the media event will appeal to this target audience?"

All too frequently, clients are unable to answer these basic questions. And the reason the questions are dangerous is clients don't like finding out they haven't thought to ask them.

Actually, I usually go through these in my head. Then I start recommending to my clients that we do the research to answer some of the questions above and then develop a measurable communications objective. This might be: "Increase awareness of product Y and its benefits from 10% to 20% among married women 26 to 45 years old with children in the household and household incomes of $75,000 to $150,000 annually in the Northeastern United States within the next three months." Our assumption here is that the increase in awareness among this clearly defined target audience will lead to an increase in sales.

If you're interested in more on writing measurable public relations objectives, Linda Hadley, who was at Porter Novelli, and I wrote a paper on this topic with help from the Institute for PR's Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation. Here is the link: PR Objectives White Paper.

Most important thing to consider when measuring the impact of communications programs: Blog link

2011-04-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

My friend and colleague Jose Mallabo interviewed me for his blog at: http://tinyurl.com/3oycde7. Jose is the director, corporate marketing, for GSI Commerce.

Topics he asked about included:

The single most important thing people need to remember when looking to measure the impact of communications programs
The most common mistake I see companies making in buying measurement and research
Why PR people haven’t done a better job making communications research core to their programs and the industry
How to convince CEOs to invest in PR
Whether social media is helping or hurting research and measurement in communications
Whether the agenda setting theory still is valid

Please check it out. That link again is: http://tinyurl.com/3oycde7.

Reputation Management as Change Management

2011-03-21T10:23:00.000-07:00

You may remember my post "Reputation is Built on Behavior" in which I argued that communications has very little to do with reputation, but the way an organization behaves does.

I just read an article on the MIT Sloan Management Review website in which Michael S. Hopkins interviews Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil Co. The interview is to me very exciting, because it appears to be an excellent explanation of how an organization needs to manage itself to manage relationships with stakeholders (and I would say its reputation).

Among his points:

The technical side of a proposal is only "half of the equation. The other half is about communities and stakeholders."
He calls this a shift from organizations saying "Trust me. I'm going to do it the right way" to stakeholders demanding "'Show me and involve me. Make me part of this. I’m going to be part of these decisions going forward.'”
He further notes that this "... changes everything. It changes the way we think as a company. It raises our performance. And it changes the timeline of these projects."
Not anticipating "nontechnical" risks and opportunities adds time and, consequently, money to projects. Thus, anticipating them is good for the bottom line.

He goes on to say:

"If we can get our people thinking sufficiently from that point of view, not just working with stakeholders and listening to what they say but actually anticipating their needs, anticipating these 'nontechnical' risks and opportunities — and if we can get more people skilled in that way — then the more successful we’ll be, the shorter these project timelines will be, the more trust in Shell there will be."

Mr. Odum is talking about changing how people in the organization think about issues and how to manage them. This is change management. One of the concerns I shared about British Petroleum (BP) in the wake of the Gulf disaster (in the blog I mentioned above) was that aside from hand wringing and replacing the CEO, there were no signs that BP was doing anything to change a culture that has led to an absolutely dismal environmental record.

Mr. Odum also believes this approach leads to better performance:

"As you get better companywide at exploring, understanding and addressing those nontechnical risks, it drives innovation. Because mitigating those risks often drives you right back into the technology loop — back into asking how can you solve novel problems in novel ways, and how can you do it at affordable costs?"

Another point in the article I find to be genuinely thrilling, is Mr. Odum says Shell does scenario planning:

"We’ll look a half a century into the future, and we ask ourselves, 'Where is the world going to go?' We’re not looking to define a definitive answer; we’re looking to define the spread of options that the world has, that governments have, how priorities will change and how things will be implemented. And then we’re looking to understand how we would perform in each of those possible worlds. Then we bring it all the way back to today to see now what we need to do to drive toward being successful in that spread of potential outcomes."

That's what I call a solid approach to environmental management and a firm foundation for reputation management.

And getting more directly at the role communications plays in reputation management, Mr. Odum says:

"... the first thing that comes to my mind in that respect is the word “transparency.” The only way to approach the situation that we’re in is for a company like Shell to be a complete open book in terms of what we do, how we do it. And we have to be able to stand up to the criticism as well as reap the benefits that we get from being that transparent."

One key role communications can play in all of this is monitoring issues and anticipating the nontechnical risks and opportunities Mr. Odum cites by having a thorough understanding of stakeholder wants, needs and expectations.

While I've drawn some fairly long quotes from the article, there is in it much more of great value. I highly recommend you read it. That address again is: http://tinyurl.com/4lskbyn.

Links to CEO Survey and Interview on Irrational Behavior

2011-03-10T14:03:00.000-08:00

My friend and colleague Liz Guthridge saw a couple of media pieces I thought you might find interesting:

One is a survey of CEOs by IBM and talks about how CEOs are dealing with change and complexity.
The other is an interview conducted by McKinsey with behavioral economist Dan Arieley, who cites examples of irrationality in the workplace and what leaders should do about this

McKinsey on Managing Government Relations

2011-02-28T10:40:00.000-08:00

McKinsey research on managing government relations for the future: http://tinyurl.com/47ntwj2

Note on potentially missing chart in earlier blog

2011-02-18T12:01:00.000-08:00

Earlier today I posted a blog, which may have had a chart that was invisible, except for its labels. If subscribe to my blog and received it this way, please go to this url to see the blog with the chart: http://tinyurl.com/4dbdt3f.

Sorry for the mixup.

A Tool for Analyzing Your Organization's Environment

2011-02-18T09:51:00.001-08:00

business environment,analytical tool,public relations,research,stakeholder management,complexity

In my last eZine, I wrote about "Helping Your Organization Succeed in a Complex Environment." My point was that the business environment is becoming increasingly complex. I also promised to send along an analytical tool in this eZine.

One of the sources of the complexity organizations must deal with is the multiplicity of stakeholder groups that are important to their success. Among the most common are:

Shareholders
Employees
Customers
Communities

Another source of complexity is the environment itself. You may recall I outlined the parts of the business environment my Kellogg professor, Dr. Stanley Hallett, outlined in his class on "Managment and Its Environment." These were:

The green, or ecological, environment
The technological environment
The social/cultural environment
The economic environment (which includes the organization's financial situation as well as the competitive and general economic environment)
The regulatory and legislative environment

In my work through the years I came up with the rather simple idea of creating a grid of environments against stakeholders. It looks like this:

Stakeholders/ Environments	Shareholders	Employees	Customers	Communities
Green (Ecological)
Technological
Socio/Cultural
Macro/ Micro Economic
Reg/Leg

When you consider the intersection of a stakeholder group and an environment, areas of concern tend to pop out. For example, any energy utility probably would have check marks all the way across the "Green (Ecological)" and "Reg/Leg" environment rows. Our local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) recently experience a pipeline explosion in San Bruno, California; some consumer lives and property were lost. Right now, PG&E would have check marks in the "Technological" environment row at least in the "Shareholder," "Customer" and "Community" columns. I would think they would have one in the employee column as well.

In the case of PG&E, I'm confident that its stakeholders have concerns in these areas. But this may not be as clear for all organizations. I remember working with a hospital that had been surprised by an issue and wanted to be prepared in the future. For that organization, we needed to identify the issues before we could prioritize and manage them.

I think the grid is useful as a way to identify potential points of concern for any organization at these junctions of stakeholders and environments. You might not know for sure that issues exist at any given intersection, but if you think they might, you can do some research to determine if there are concerns and what they are.

To identify issues at the hospital I mentioned above, we went to the people inside the organization who were responsible for the stakeholder groups, and asked them for input to the grid. As you might expect, these people had the issues top of mind.

One way I've used the grid quite effectively is by putting it on a large white board and having cells big enough to write in the actual issues. If you have a number of issues and limited resources (as most of us do) you can prioritize the issues to determine which you should tackle first.

Returning to the hospital example, we created a working group comprised of those responsible for the stakeholder groups and met monthly to assess progress with the issues we'd identified, add new ones to the board and retire those that had become unimportant.

These exercises are, no doubt, simplistic to those of you who do public affairs as your sole focus, but for those of us who do not, I've found it to be a good way to get a handle on what is generally a very complex set of challenges.

McKinsey on Info Overload

2011-02-08T09:10:00.000-08:00

McKinsey Quarterly article on Recovering from information overload: http://tinyurl.com/4rpyb39

Helping Your Organization Succeed in a Complex Environment

2011-01-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

I recently had the good fortune to attend a short presentation by Sally Blount, the new Dean of the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. She spoke of the changing environment, new trends and issues that business schools and all organizations are going to face in the coming decades.

BIG-TIME CHANGE

She noted speaking to a number of the captains of the finance industry -- the men and women who can take business actions that move markets. They told her they used to be able to take these actions and pretty well predict the outcome a specific action would have on the market, but that this no longer is the case.

So what's changed? The actions are the same. But the markets, obviously, are not. Why?

EXTRAORDINARY COMPLEXITY

I would argue that the external environment has become far more complex than ever before. This complexity has been driven by huge technological changes in every walk of life. These changes have in turn affected nations, organizations and individuals around the world. Transformations such as these, combined with constantly increasing population, cannot help but reshape cultures as well. And whether you agree with global warming or not, I would argue it is one of many perceived ecological environmental changes that are influencing world economies and politics. All this complexity has added innumerable variables to what were once fairly straightforward economic equations. The world in which we all operate has become extremely complicated. Man-made and natural processes that once had a manageable number of inputs and outputs now have so many as to be practically unmanageable.

A MODEL FOR THINKING ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT

When I attended Kellogg, I took a course entitled "Management and Its Environment" taught by Dr. Stanley Hallett. It was not only one of the high points of my Kellogg career but the wellspring for much of my professional career. The class was about the way our society changes across time and the interplay between business, government, non-governmental organizations, the judicial system and so forth. Dr. Hallett's view was that for organizations to succeed, their managers needed to understand and respond to changes in the environment. He broke the environment into:

The green, or ecological, environment
The technological environment
The social/cultural environment
The economic environment (which includes the organization's financial situation as well as the competitive and general economic environment)
The regulatory and legislative environment

As I was trying to say above, all these environments have experienced exponential change in the past few decades.

THE IMPORTANCE TO ORGANIZATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS

My take away is that understanding the environment, while more difficult than ever, is more important than ever to the success of organizations. This is because the morphing external environment can alter how stakeholder groups feel and what they believe, and this can cause a misalignment between these stakeholders and any given organization with which they might previously have been aligned. And this means the organizations for which you work.

Today, many organizations are more complex than they were ten or twenty years ago, and different parts of the organization are responsible for understanding and responding to the five parts of the environment I list above. For example, IT or R&D might be responsible for understanding and responding to technological change, and most large organizations have a governmental affairs group that is supposed to understand and respond to regulatory and legislative change.

However, this increasing complexity also is an opportunity for public relations or communications, because all these changes affect an organization's stakeholders and how they will react to actions the organization takes. PR and communications departments should seize responsibility for understanding and managing this. If they don't management will place the responsibility elsewhere and communications departments will be increasingly marginalized.

This is an opportunity for communications professionals to add real senior-management-level value to their organizations by identifying and understanding emerging trends and issues and how they will affect interactions between their organizations and key stakeholders.

In a future post, I will discuss a method I've developed to conceptualize and manage these complex issues.

Please comment or call if you'd like to discuss this. I'd love to hear from you.

Link to Article on Making Org. Redesign Successful

2010-12-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

Excellent article on taking org redesign from plan to practice in McKenzie Quarterly: http://bit.ly/fk3aXl.

Social Media Debate: Setting Goals or Being Where our Stakeholders Are

2010-11-30T11:52:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in an earlier blog an IABC Networking Nine dinner I attended November 16th.

These dinners include about nine people who know something about a specific topic. The topic for the November 16th dinner was blogging. This quickly became social media in general.

It was interesting to me that while we all agreed on many things, there seemed to be two camps on what might motivate an organization to participate in social media.

A number of participants seemed to have jumped into social media simply because it is happening. Their argument is they need to be where their stakeholders are. Since a number of these folks work for large technology companies, this is a good argument. Their stakeholders are almost certainly online, and at least dabble in social media.

However, just being where stakeholders are doesn't strike me as enough. This brings us to the other main point of view, which is all corporate communications activities, including social media, should have a behavioral goal driving them. That is, in the long run, social media communications should be intended to increase the likelihood of some behavioral goal. Such goals might include increasing:

Employee engagement and reducing turnover
Customer satisfaction and loyalty
Shareholder likelihood to buy and hold stock
Regulator and legislator likelihood to include the organization's point of view in drafting legislation and regulations
Community willingness to have a company facility sited in their neighborhood

and so forth.

Organizations will always need to prioritize activities and resource allocation to thrive and even survive. The way they do this is by setting goals and screening activities and allocations by how much they contribute to achieving those goals.

So, I agree that it's a good idea to be where your stakeholders are. But I still want to know what you are doing there and why.

What do you think?

Numbers Count -- The Magic of Cross-Checking

2010-11-24T12:38:00.000-08:00

I saw a headline today in an online publication cautioning PR practitioners not to embarrass themselves by making mathematical statements that didn't make sense. I believe the article was focusing on talking about equations like ROI or ROE. I agree that one's credibility with management will suffer immediately if you misuse such expressions.

However, a more common way to sacrifice your credibility in communications is to do a mathematical analysis of some kind and make mistakes. I see this regularly because I do survey research, which has lots of numbers in it. Sometimes you might want to combine two different respondent sets -- for example those who have graduated college and those with advanced degrees, or those 18-24 and those 25-34 so you can describe those 18-34. These are not difficult calculations to make, especially if you know your way around a spreadsheet. But it pays to check and recheck, because if, during your presentation, someone questions your number in one instance and demonstrates you have miscalculated, it throws all of your data into question and everything else you or your team says.

I have been hired a number of times by agencies and communications departments of corporations, that have been called on relatively simple mistakes, to go through all their data and make sure it was air-tight before they presented it again.

One very useful trick I use is the idea of cross-checking. For example, let's take the case in which we combined those 18-24 with those 25-34. Let's assume the survey polled adults 18 and over. So if we take our new combined number of those 18-34 and subtract it from the total number or percentage of respondents, that should equal the sum of all the other age categories. If it doesn't, you need to find out why. It might be you made a mistake with your original calculation, it might be a rounding error, or something else. But you need to know why there is that difference so you can defend the numbers, should someone call you on them.

McKinsey Article on Global Forces Shaping Business

2010-11-22T15:42:00.000-08:00

Great article in McKinsey Quarterly on global forces shaping the future of business. They include: "The rise of emerging markets as centers of consumerism and innovation; the imperative to improve developed-market productivity; ever-expanding global networks; the tension between rapidly rising resource consumption and sustainability; and the increasingly larger role of the state as a business regulator and partner."

One thing I like about the article is the authors explicitly state the importance of understanding "deep external forces and the narrower trends that they can unleash" as key to an organization's success.

Here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/25hp5fu.

Reflections on Conversation

2010-11-18T17:12:00.000-08:00

I attended a marvelous IABC event in San Francisco last Tuesday called Networking Nine. Nine people come together to have dinner and discuss a common topic. It was wonderful to have a real conversation.

It is unfortunate that we seem to engage in true conversation so little any more. I remember when I was a boy, my father frequently would invite one of our ministers to Sunday dinner after church, and we would discuss the sermon at the table. It was very intellectually stimulating. Too, it seemed we had some of those kinds of conversation when I was in college living in dorms. Now most of these conversations occur when one of my kids is studying something at school, and they come to me (usually at 11:00 p.m. when I've decided to turn in) and want to discuss, for example, Emerson, Transcendentalism and Self Reliance.

Unfortunately, most of my interactions with others now seem to be in sound bites. I lay responsibility for most of this on the rise of television and online activities. And while we can interact online through blogs and comments, typing thoughts is not the same as talking with someone.

A Refreshing Approach to Community Involvement

2010-11-11T12:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended a workshop sponsored by a community bank and my local PRSA chapter. The free workshop was intended for and attended by local non-profit/charitable organizations. I believe most had been invited by the bank.

Before the event began, I ran into a VP from the community bank. I told him I thought it was great his bank was supporting these organizations like this. He responded by telling me about a number of ways the bank is involved in the community, and he emphasized support for getting food and housing to those who cannot afford it.

I asked him how they determine which charitable organizations to support. He said they decide in a number of ways, but that ensuring people in the local community had food and shelter was just "the right thing to do."

I began to go into my pitch about the way to determine causes a corporation should support is to identify the causes the corporation's stakeholders care about. Then the organization supports these causes and lets the stakeholders know of this support. I, of course, can help them identify the right organizations.

But I stopped myself.

While the bank's approach struck me as simple in this complex day and age, I was struck by how honest and straightforward it was. The bank was helping organizations that help people get food and shelter, and, through this workshop, it was supporting a number of small charitable organizations survive during these challenging economic times. And the bank seemed to be thinking of it in terms of acting on a value rather than achieving a return on investment.

This touched me. So, instead of pitching him with my MBA-business driven approach, I complimented him on how refreshing their approach was and wished the bank success.

I'm also considering changing my account to that bank.

Corporate-Stakeholder Alignment; CEOs Create Win Win Scenarios

2010-11-09T09:47:00.000-08:00

I've done a number of projects for CEOs who go to their heads of communications and say "We're tripping over our messages." In doing these projects, I've discovered most organizations are tripping over their policies as well.

The Challenge of Division of Labor

This happens because as organizations grow, no one person can do all the work required to maintain good working relationships with all the different stakeholder groups that become critical to the success of the organization.

These groups include:

Shareholders
Customers
Employees
Communities
Regulatory and legislative organizations
Vendors
Others

So, organizations have people in charge of:

Finance and investor relations
Marketing and customers
HR and employees
Community affairs
Regulatory and legislative affairs
Purchasing departments
Others

This makes great sense, because then these executives can devote their full attention to understanding and satisfying the needs of the group for which they are responsible.

Conflict Between Stakeholder Goals

But this is where the problem arises. In some ways, the needs and desires of each group conflict with those of the others. For example, shareholders want a solid return on their investment and employees want good pay and benefits. So revenue the organization generates must be allocated in a way that makes investors feel they are getting a good return and employees are getting their due for their work and engagement.

Example 1

I worked with a publicly held organization that did environmentally sensitive work. They asked us to develop an environmental positioning statement the company could use to communicate with all its stakeholder groups. When we did internal management interviews, the operating managers were unanimous in wanting to be as environmentally positive as possible. But the finance and accounting staff said "but it's not [the operating managers’] money." Their point was that investors might see being “environmentally friendly” as capital intensive and thus taking away from either their earnings per share or capital that could be reinvested to increase the value of their equity.

Responsive Communications Become Policy

The natural inclination of many executives would be to try to get the best return or benefit for the stakeholder group that executive represents. Each of these senior executives probably is responsible for communicating with his or her stakeholder group and may well embellish the communication to respond to what that group wants to hear. Before long, the communications going to one stakeholder group can openly conflict with those going to another. And once communications go out, staff, quite fairly, see them as representing what the organization believes, and what is in the communications becomes de facto policy.

Employees may well be shareholders. So they will get communications intended for employees and those intended for shareholders. In addition, investors and investment analysts make it a practice to read communications to as many stakeholder groups as they can in an effort to better understand the viability of the organization as an investment. Customers might be investors as well. And with the Internet and social media, it is getting easier and easier to examine what an organization communicates through different channels.

The CEO’s Role

In this context, the CEO's job is to balance the needs of all these stakeholders against each other and create a winning proposition for all. This is why it generally is the CEO who gets concerned when she or he sees conflicting communications to different stakeholder groups. This also is why it is critical to the success of many organizations to have a central communications platform and consistent policies.

Return to Example 1

In the example I related above, the CEO told me that he wanted the organization to be as environmentally positive as possible, but that he also wanted to be able to demonstrate to investors that this path was best for their investment.

Alignment

It also is important that these policies and communications be in line with the expectations of stakeholders. The CEO and management team need to know what stakeholders do expect (through interaction or research), and this should be one of the stars against which the CEO and management team steer the organization.

The other star should be the vision for the organization. In the best of all worlds, management’s vision of what the organization does matches what stakeholders want.

If this is the case, alignment usually is a matter of defining management’s vision by stakeholder group, determining how the stakeholder group thinks about its expectations of the organization and developing a set of consistent messages that state management’s intentions in language that is persuasive and accessible to the stakeholders. This also is the time to make sure the messages to each stakeholder group are consistent with each other.

This sounds simple, but in practice it may not be. Executives frequently interpret the organization's vision in a way that favors the stakeholder group for which they are responsible. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, because these executives become advocates for their stakeholder group within the organization.) However, coming to a set of messages and policies that are consistent across stakeholder groups often requires facilitation.

Lack of Alignment

If management vision and stakeholder expectations are not aligned, the organization needs to rethink its vision or find stakeholders that do align with their vision.

Example 2

An example of this situation might be an organization, for which I did an audit, that wanted to communicate to its customers that it was very customer-oriented. The research they themselves had done with their customers indicated customers did not believe this to be the case, and research we did with the organization’s employees indicated employees did not believe this to be the case. We suggested the organization change the communication to being aspirational. They could say they knew they had a problem with customer responsiveness and were working to improve it. They could even do reports on their progress. But to say they were customer-oriented, when their customers and employees knew otherwise, most likely would have damaged what credibility this organization had with these two stakeholder groups.

MBA vs. Master's -- Which Is the Better Option for a PR Pro?

2010-10-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

Emily Geesaman asked the title question on Linkedin a couple of days ago.

Two folks, Susan Maxwell Stevens and Karen Derby, APR, both observed that the answer depends on the kind of background the PR pro has. If a business undergraduate degree, then perhaps a Master's in communications would make the most sense. If a journalism major, then perhaps an MBA. Certainly, I agree with their counsel.

That said, the more I watch communications and business evolve, the more convinced I am that the MBA is, in general, the better choice. We talk in communications about managing reputations and relationships. But the truth of the matter is this is not done through communications so much as through the actions of the organization. And those actions are driven by management policies. Organizations may be able to communicate their way out of bad behavior once or even twice, but they cannot do this consistently. The new drive towards transparency requires that organizations act in ways that are consistent with the norms of their stakeholders and the society in which they operate. This is managed at a policy level, not a communications level.

So, if you want to make a difference in the organizations for which you work, or if you even want to be able to execute communications programs that are effective (because they say things that are to stakeholders reasonable and true), you will have the greatest likelihood of doing so if you are a part of the management team of your organization. Understanding what MBAs understand will help you be a part of that team more than understanding what communicators understand.

Of course, understanding both is best.

If you're interested in reading more of my thoughts on reputation and the MBA's potential role in communications, I've recently written two blog entries that address these topics: http://tinyurl.com/24prdvj and http://tinyurl.com/22ofeyn.

Reputation Is Built on Behavior

2010-09-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

We've seen a number of reputation crises in the past few years.

COMMUNICATIONS

Much of the discussion around these crises in the communications community focuses on how well the organization communicated in response to the crisis. Were they forthright and forthcoming. Did they get the best information they had to the media quickly?

Sometimes, we see discussions of whether PR had a "seat at the table." Was the senior communications executive involved in the initial decisions that led to the crisis? Did he or she see the potential for damage to the organization's reputation and counsel against certain actions to help preserve the reputation. How did management respond?

This is all well and good. It's the kind of thing communications people think about and discuss. It's what we think we do. But communication is really only the very tip of the reputation iceberg.

THE REAL BASIS FOR REPUTATION

Reputation is based far more on actions -- the way an organization behaves. In this area, PR matters if it has a seat at the table, insight into the expectations stakeholders have for the organization's behavior and the ability to influence others around the table.

However, there are occasionally cases in which organizations simply behave badly. There frequently are potentially ameliorating circumstances for bad behavior. Did the whole organization behave badly, or just one or two individuals? Was this behavior condoned by management? Was the behavior intentional or a mistake? If the bad behavior was an aberration, then good behavior and communications probably can right the organization's reputation in time.

I believe that most organizations are run by honest people who want to treat their stakeholders and the community in which they operate fairly. I would put almost every CEO I've worked with in this category.

What troubles me are the organizations like Enron, that apparently are genuinely corrupt at the top and intentionally try to game the system. Or those in which corporate greed is really that, and outweighs sensible precautions to protect the community that gives it license to operate and the environment in which that community lives.

AL GOLIN'S "TRUST BANK"

Al Golin coined the phrase "Trust Bank" years ago when trying to explain the following concept to McDonald's. The idea is that if you build trust by making deposits in the "Trust Bank" (doing good) your stakeholders will let you make withdrawals in times of need, that is, they will give you the benefit of a doubt when things go against you.

I think Toyota has benefited from a "Trust Bank" effect. It has seen a rough patch or two lately, but through the years it has acted like a responsible corporate citizen, produced high-quality cars and built a loyal customer base.

THE BP CASE

BP, on the other hand, seems to have dug itself into a hole. According to a well referenced and corroborated entry in Wikipedia:

In September 1999, one of BP’s US subsidiaries, BP Exploration Alaska (BPXA), agreed to resolve charges related to the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes on the Alaska North Slope, for $22 million.
In August 2006, BP shut down oil operations in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, due to corrosion in pipelines leading up to the Alaska Pipeline. .... BP had spilled over one million litres of oil in Alaska's North Slope.
On 16 October 2007 Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation officials reported a toxic spill of methanol (methyl alcohol) at the Prudhoe Bay oil field managed by BP PLC. Nearly 2,000 gallons of mostly methanol, mixed with some crude oil and water, spilled onto a frozen tundra pond as well as a gravel pad from a pipeline.
Two weeks prior to the Deepwater Horizon explosion BP admitted that malfunctioning equipment lead to the release of over 530,000 lbs of chemicals into the air of Texas City and surrounding areas from April 6 to May 16 [2010]. The leak included 17,000 pounds of benzene (a known carcinogen), 37,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides (which contribute to respiratory problems), and 186,000 pounds of carbon monoxide.

These citations relate to BPs environmental record before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and we all know about that disaster. The Wikipedia article also includes references to numerous safety, political and price manipulation offenses by BP.

MANAGEMENT->POLICIES->CULTURE->BEHAVIOR

According to an article in The Seattle Times, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, told BP executives in a September, 2006, hearing: "BP's policies are as rusty as its pipelines. I'm even more concerned about BP's corporate culture of seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues."

I believe Representative Barton's concern is well founded. A consistent history, such as BPs, suggests a consistent culture from which that history has sprung.

REBUILDING REPUTATION

BP has a new CEO, who seems to be making changes. But will he be able to change a culture that has led to the consistent problems we've seen?

Despite BP's green advertising and green investments, I think we all would agree it does not have a green reputation today. Moreover, because it has communicated that it is green, while demonstrating that it is not, it has not presented itself as authentic; it says one thing and does another. This is not the way to build trust.

I would argue BP's reputation is a shambles not because of poor communication but because of poor behavior.

And no matter how good BP's PR team is, it cannot repair this reputation on the outside. This reputation must be repaired from within.