people business

Corporate Communications – The Power Of The People

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Last Wednesday, Starbucks, the coffee company, released its first quarter results. They showed a four-fold increase over the same quarter last year against, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, a fairly appalling economic background. You can read the commentary in the New York Times for yourself.

As someone who doesn’t follow the company, I find this renaissance absolutely extraordinary. The two most recent things I recall about Starbucks is the company (falsely) being accused of not supporting American troops in the Gulf, and the furore over wasted water from ‘rinsing’ taps being left permanently ‘on’ in stores.

Obviously, and I’ve done a little light research, there has been stuff going on behind the scenes – and the return of Howard Schultz to the top job has obviously paid dividends – but I find the reasoning laid out in this post (on the Corporate Eye blog) particularly resonant.

In brief, top-line summary, it argues that the Starbucks turnaround has been driven by paying attention to employees. It cites an HR Guru, Kevin Wheeler and his Five Steps to Making Your Company Memorable:

  • Gain perspective and know yourself
  • Define the promise
  • Develop a strategy
  • Create a “buzz” to communicate your brand
  • Measure your progress

More than this – and this where I find myself violently agreeing – it’s about applying these same principles to your customer relations. What works for getting and keeping staff, works for getting and keeping punters.

And as, of course, this wouldn’t be my blog without a quick pop at social media – Starbucks appear to have achieved this dramatic success without too much Facebookishness of Twittery (they have 5.6m fans and 765k followers respectively). Have a look at their Facebook page, and gauge for yourself the quality of the conversation – visit their Twitter feed and (sorry Brad) well, it’s not exactly a marketer’s wet dream.

No – my feeling is that Starbucks has achieved this through good ol’ traditional communication, traditional face-to-face and lashings of loyalty-building.

I never though I’d see the day when Big Coffee would become a case history. An example of best practice ‘how to do it’ des nos jours.

Hats off, blog snorkellers.

Social media – Privacy No Longer The Norm

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Coming a bit late to this – although I have used it as a platform for my opinions on the validity of ‘the conversation’ (in summary, ‘the conversation’ is just another pair of Imperial undercrackers) – but, for clarity, this is Mark Zuckerberg’s much-vaunted assertion that: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

My personal take on this remains that simply because anyone with internet access (59% in the UK) has the opportunity to post to social media, this doesn’t mean that they’ve also been magically granted the capability to do so. There is – and I’m working on the laws of probability here – a vast swathe of users out there who simply do not understand what they are doing and have no concept of the implications of posting personal details on a free-to-access web portal.

Some people have ‘gotten comfortable’, others are neither comfortable with, or uncomfortable about, sharing information openly and with more people. Many, I’d wager, have yet to grasp that when you stick something on the net, anyone can see it and – possibly worse – there are all sorts of organisations, agencies and groups who are actively looking for it. So-called privacy controls on social media sites are, currently, no more than lip-service – not obvious, not understood, not used.

Anyway, that’s me – and here’s a post from a gentleman by the name of Ed Hartigan. The post sort of reiterates what I’m saying but, all credit to Mr Hartigan, he takes it a bit further. What is genuinely interesting, however, is his reference to VRM (Vendor Relationship Management for those few of my blog snorkellers who didn’t already know) which I’d not come across – as a specific discipline – before. Obviously, I’d given thought to some of the suite of VRM tools before, from a consumer’s point of view, but I’d not seen it as a specialism in its own right.

It’s interesting because it’s wholly the product of business’ inability to behave ethically and the consumer’s inability to deny themselves or consider the implications of their actions. VRM exists to combat CRM – which, after all and despite what its name implies, is a sales tool, wholly reliant on being able to prise a potential customer’s personal details out of them.

Strange, isn’t it, that in this age of social – which, let’s not forget, is all about openness and transparency and the conversation – where it’s all down to individual relationships and contracts – where brands have to humanise – that VRM mechanisms need to be put into place to protect consumers from rapacious brands that, given half the chance, will spam them out of existence.

But what really pisses me off is that because business cannot stop being business, and no matter what it says, will continue to try to use social media to turn a profit; and because Percival D Consumer cannot stop being a turkey and spilling his life history at the drop of a freebie, we, the sane minority, will have to start dealing with yet another new-consultant-on-the-block.

Social media gurus, meet the Vendor Relationship Managers. I hope you’ll be very happy together.

Social Media – Social Media Policies in Practice

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Internal Communications, Internal Communications and Engagement, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

Came across this on Mashable – it’s a story about this, which is social media policy devised and published by Australian company Telstra for the benefit of their 40,000 employees. To date, according to the company, 12,000 employees have been ‘trained’ or ‘educated’ in the ways of social media.

I’ve said,  in previous posts, that a good social media policy might actually be seen, or used, as an employee benefit – Telstra’s policy is exactly that. This is something that has, quite clearly, taken time, resource and investment to put together, and has been formulated to educate employees and provide them with a skill, or skills, which are applicable in their day-to-day lives as well as their work lives. I particularly like it because it doesn’t shy away from threatening disciplinary action should anyone contravene the policy.

What it doesn’t do, however – and it’s telling – is explain how employees can help the company through their social media activity. It doesn’t explain the company’s social media strategy. It might be said that it begs more questions than it answers. It strikes me as a guide to social media – all well and good – but not a social media lever. It’s about stopping people making inadvertent (or deliberate) mistakes – rather than ’embracing the social media opportunity and bringing everyone in to the conversation’ (as I imagine the cyber-hippies would have it).

This is not a sign that social media has become mainstream and infiltrated Big Corporate – rather it’s a sign that Big Corporate has recognised the damage that can be caused by social media and is attempting to mitigate its effects.

This is pre-emptive issues management, nothing more or less.

Corporate Communications – Doing God’s Work 2

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Crisis Management, External Communications, Public Relations and tagged , , , , , , , , .

 Last time, on ‘Doing God’s Work’. A global investment bank – let’s call them Goldman Sachs – breaks the silence of decades and has some of their senior executives interviewed, for a feature piece, by a medium with global reach – let’s call it The Sunday Times (of London). In the course of the interview, we discover that one of the senior executives likes big boats, that all their employees are being paid obscene amounts of money (nothing wrong with that, mind) and that the ultimate boss – let’s call him Lloyd Blankfein – believes he’s ‘doing God’s work’.

The whole thing raised few issues for me. On the one hand, I was impressed that their Corporate Communications head – let’s call him Lucas van Praag – had managed to get the notoriously secretive bank to ‘go public’ (if you like). I think I understood what they were up to – the threat of governments poking their legislative noses into the affairs of the world’s money-machines needed (needs?) to be averted, so what better than to open yourself to the media and demonstrate that, behind the hype and the rumour, you’re simply a business, under the same pressures as other businesses, trying to turn an honest dollar.

On the other hand, I think they (the Corporate Communications advisors) dropped a clanger. Unfortunately – so I thought – this big financial institution didn’t come off terribly well. The big boss wasn’t terribly likeable (and who cares what he’s really like – if he’s going to do media, he needs to pretend that he’s, at the least, human), quotations from employees simply reinforced the preconceptions and, frankly, no-one needs to know that they like big boats. I think we probably assumed that, anyway.

And then the ‘doing God’s work’ quotation. Well, I assumed (and when we assume, we make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’) (now I feel ill) that this was a joke that fell flat. A throwaway comment, made by a man with not too many social skills. However, this piece, from London’s Evening Standard, tells me otherwise. (Here’s another article, again from the Standard, which showed how they tried to spin it. Oooops.)

And so to today’s lesson, dear blog snorkellers. If you are a corporate communicator, and you are parading your top bods in front of the media, make sure that they are a) trained b) on-message and c) understand that this is not the time for off-the-cuffs. If you cannot tick the boxes against these three points, then do not proceed.

As Goldman Sachs has proved – a bad result is worse than no result at all, and, in their case, may have the opposite effect to the one they were (probably) looking for. Their performance has simply given the world’s media an interest in, and an excuse for, forensically examining everything they do. And guess what? There’s lots to write about.

Twitter – I Can Do That, Gis A Job

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , .

Came across this, which is a look at the American political Twittersphere – I know, I know, sounds horribly complicated and not a little worthy (and it is) – but actually worth a quick look – if only to see who’s using it. Anyway, it’s not the point of this post, so don’t waste too much time.

While I was looking at it, I was drawn to @schwarzenegger (like a moth to a flame, or a fly to dog poo, or a small child to an unprotected electrical socket) and my morbid fascination, dear blog snorkellers, was amply rewarded. Do, please, have a quick look.

Quite clearly, The Governator is not going to tweet himself. No, he has a team of tweeters – and judging by their performance over the last few days, they have fallen foul of ‘Call Me Dave’s ‘too many tweets makes a twat’. I’m sorry – I don’t know Mr Schwarzenegger (although I am a great fan of his oeuvre) (serious) but there is no way on God’s green earth that he is going to post “in case you missed it, here is a clip from our water press conf. That’s what I call bipartisan.” He’s just not. Sorry.

So, I may have missed the point. 1) Maybe it is him, and I’ve been suckered by his monosyllabic silver screen routine. 2) Maybe he dictates it. 3) Maybe no-one cares what the words actually are – it’s the message that counts.

Actually, none of this. What we have here is failure to communicate. Governor Schwarzenegger, publicity-hungry, comms-oriented soul that he is (and I believe he is, and for most of the right reasons) has been advised to ‘do Twitter’. So he’s said yes. And he clearly can’t do it himself, so he’s got someone to do it for him.

Nothing wrong with that – I think most people would expect it – but it throws up a fundamental rule of corporate communications which perhaps the social media strategists have yet to learn. It’s a simple one. Ready?

If, in your communications, you take on the voice of someone else – the CEO, or the Governator – make sure that you approximate their usual delivery (either spoken or written).  Most people understand that this stuff is written by a ghost writer, but no-one wants their face rubbed in it.

Anyway, based on the Governator’s twitter feed – I could do better than that.

Dear Mr Schwarzenegger, can I be your twat?

Internal Comms/Social Media – Addenda to Social Media Policies

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Internal Communications, Internal Communications and Engagement, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

The whole social media space is a minefield littered with UXBs and especially so for a company’s employees. Social media are growing and changing and influencing behaviours far faster than most people can keep up – it’s got to the point where a corporate use of social media policy is not only a business necessity, it’s actually part of the corporate ‘duty of care’ to employees.

Here’s a thought – educating employees in the use of social media may be seen, in the future, as an employee benefit provided by the company. Possibly those more forward-thinking companies, without exposing themselves to the free-for-all that is open employee access, might actually be seen to be taking a lead on the issue, simply by ensuring their employees are social media savvy in a semi-formal fashion. Brown-bag training sessions, interactive intranets. Who knows.

Anyway – here’s an article from The Guardian that deals with the specific problems of colleagues following you on Twitter, or friending you on Facebook. Particularly senior colleagues. The implication – and it’s correct – is that social media are blurring the lines between work life and personal life. There is no such thing as a personal life anymore – what you’ve got is a work life and life when you’re not working. Use of social media – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, et al – means that anyone can find you at anytime. Nothing that you post to these sites is private. There is a record of all you have written and uploaded. If it sounds a bit Big Brother, that’s because it is.

There is, obviously, a solution to the dilemma. It’s taken a lot of thought. It’s not popular. It flies in the face of current thinking. It’s this. DON’T USE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK. OR ANY OTHER SOCIAL MEDIUM. If you want to organise a party, send out invitations via email (still trackable, but not available to everyone). If you fancy getting in touch with someone – meet them for a drink. Give them a call. Write a letter. Go on, give it a try.

But no. You want to be free, to get LinkedIn, to have a good time. And this why – as the boundaries between you personally and you professionally blur and dissolve – it’s more and more important that there are not only corporate social media policies, but corporate social media etiquette statements also.

It pains me, but we’re here (how? how?) and now we have to deal with it. So, in the spirit of understanding and sharing, here’s something that I stumbled across earlier. I should say now that these are the thoughts of one Bristol-based managing editor (mid-thirties, apparently) who makes it clear on his blog that monkeys like me are not to steal his thoughts without due attribution and permission. I haven’t got permission, but consider this attribution. These are not my thoughts – I am simply passing on the wisdom of another.

(NB The guidelines that Mr Bristol sets out here are, actually, quite corporately focused. But they work equally well for use of social media on a personal level. You could adapt them. But I’d ask Mr Bristol for his permission first. You never know.)

Social Media – A Bit of a Roundup

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

This is for those of you who think I’m at my best when dealing with social media as a topic area.

(Keen blog snorkellers may have noticed that I’m essaying a move away from just ranty nonsense about social media to more considered, but still ranty, horse-droppings about other elements of the communications mix. But it’s not to say that here isn’t still stuff to marvel at in the wacky world of social media, with all those fine gals, guys and horrible, abnormal cretins who are busy filling up the internet with mindless, unentertaining shyte. Oooop – did I say that out loud?)

So – thanks to the Evening Standard yesterday evening for their profile of Mark Zuckerberg (for those living in an hermetically-sealed coffin, buried at a depth of 75 metres beneath the Gobi Desert, he’s the 25-year-old wunderkind behind the terrifying Book of Face) and the idea that Facebook has a bigger advertising potential than Google. Which makes it pretty damn’ huge, ladies and gentlemen. As an aside, it also makes Marky richer than several squillion Croesuses, and good on him. Putting an interpretation on this, it means that otherwise sensible companies will be able to stop messing about with Facebook groups, sack their overpaid Heads of Social Media Strategy (bye-bye Scott Monty), and spend their money sensibly on the only thing that social media will ever offer to a commercial concern – advertising space. Yes, good old above-the-line.

What this means is, finally, we can all blow a big, fat raspberry in the face of the truly evil American idea of ‘The Conversation’. Ooooo – it’s all about The Conversation. The Conversation – it’s the future of business. We need to have ‘The Conversation’. I even came across – and I’m not going to link to it, it makes me all wobbly and cross – someone, with (I presume) a straight face, actually suggesting that a good measurement of social media strategy effectiveness would be a ‘share of conversation index’. Oh – please just f*ck off. You nasty little hippy.

And, therefore, the inevitable demise of The Conversation will mean a drop off in the slew of noisome Twitteration that’s being forced down our throats currently. Once and for all, Twitter is an ego trip and no-one cares what you are reading or eating or thinking/watching/excreting etc etc – except those people who also think that someone might be interested in what they are etc etc etc. This is why Twitter’s growth is slowing in the US. It’s a fad, always has been, and it will be for the rest of its (hopefully) short and dwindling existence.

Meanwhile, stuff surfaces proving once again a) the danger of social media to a company or brand and b) that every company, among its employees, has a greater or lesser number of fuckwits who I wouldn’t trust with a digestive biscuit, never mind access to a uncontrolled, unregulated, global communications portal.

Recently the employees of two UK electrical retailers – Currys and PC World – created a Facebook group, poking fun at their customers. Really, really stupid, did nothing for corporate reputation and, I sincerely hope, nothing for the career prospects of those who set the group up. Now, I read, again in The Standard (great paper – free, d’you see?), that they’ve done it again – and the clowns have set up a Facebook page as an open letter to their bosses, which – in summary – accuses them of being barriers to free speech. The sheer enormity of their delusion and stupidity is beyond comprehension.

And finally, as a little light relief, here’s something from msn.co.uk. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – in capitals, just in case you’re missing the point – DO NOT LET YOUR EMPLOYEES ANYWHERE NEAR SOCIAL MEDIA IN WORK TIME, ON WORK BUSINESS, OR ON BEHALF OF YOUR BRAND OR COMPANY. There’s a lot of stupid people out there. Beware.

Public Relations – Best Practice…..I Think

Posted on by in External Communications, Public Relations, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , .

I’m seriously anti-fluffy. I think there’s too much fluff in PR. Sadly, I think there are too many la-las as well. Thus, when I come across a trend-setting (or identifying) newsletter from an up-to-the-minute PR agency, my heart sinks and my stomach turns over. I know what it’s going to contain. Lots of laaaa, and Dysons full of fluff. “How great are we?” sort of stuff, with garish graphics and pictures of Charlotte, a junior account exec from their sTYleWerKs division, riding camels in an amusing manner. (Or is that just me?)

Anyway, much as it pains me, a shout out to Lexis PR for this. (Particularly for the Meatwater heads-up, which my regular readers – ho ho ho – will know sparked off a bit of a diatribe.)

Tentatively, because I’m not one to get all definite about anything, I think this might, actually, be quite good. No pictures of Charlotte riding camels, you see. I hope they can keep it going.

But – because nothing, here on Wordmonger Farm, is ever without its ‘but’.

“Dear Lexis,

Loving your website – but does it not take an absolute age to load? Is it, perhaps, slightly more clever than it needs to be? I hope this is seen as constructive criticism.

Also, in your lovely e-newsletter, just a small thing, you namecheck Bring Me The Horizon as being a beat combo who may achieve some popularity in the mainstream hit parade in 2010 and have a ‘new sound’. I’m seriously middle-aged and I know that Bring Me The Horizon have been around since 2004 and the sound, far from being new, is an evolution of that well-established and popular easy-listening genre, deathcore. Possibly not as cutting edge as you might be, here.

Good luck with it!

All the best

Jeremy”

Social Media – Social Media Crisis Management

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , .

I’m still fretting about Domino’s Pizza. As you’ll all know, the company came under some pressure earlier in the year as two employees posted a video on YouTube of themselves – ahem – ‘abusing’ the food they were preparing. Cue furore. Anyway, it’s in the past now, the company hasn’t gone bust and pizzas continue to be delivered to the free world as usual.

Thing is that there are two schools of thought on Domino’s response to the crisis (for such it was). One is that they handled it well, the other (clearly) is that they didn’t. (Just so you know where I stand, I read that it took them some time to address the issue and when they did, the response was limited.)

Anyway, as I was looking for reportage on the incident, I came across this on usatoday.com, which got me thinking more about the general principles of handling a ‘social networking attack’ (their words not mine). The article publishes the views of experts – I reproduce them here. As usual, the plain text is theirs, the italics are mine.

“Here are key things experts say marketers can do to quickly catch and respond effectively to similar social-networking attacks:

• Monitor social media. Big companies must actively watch Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social sites to track conversations that involve them. That will help uncover potential crises-in-the-making, says Brian Solis, a new-media specialist and blogger at PR2.0.

Couldn’t agree more with this, and it’s not difficult to do – however, although it’s easy to believe that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the only social media, there are (of course) myriad others that may not appear on the radar and which could be the source of your issue. Nothing beats pre-planning – what are the issues that could impact your business and how would you handle them (and how would you respond) if they came up? Your crisis management plan needs a social media section.

• Respond quickly. Domino’s responded within hours. “They responded as soon as they heard about it, not after the media asked, ‘What are you going to do?’ ” says Lynne Doll, president of The Rogers Group, a crisis-management specialist.

This isn’t what I heard, but responding practically immediately is exactly what’s required.

• Respond at the flashpoint. Domino’s first responded on consumer affairs blog The Consumerist, whose activist readers helped track down the store and employees who made the video. Then it responded on the Twitter site where talk was mounting. “Domino’s did the right thing by reinstituting the trust where it was lost,” Solis says.

Yes, by all means – but how are you going to deal with the wider fall-out? Trust may initially have been lost on Twitter, but you can be certain it was also lost amongst the readers of mainstream, traditional media, who don’t go online, and don’t use social networks. They won’t have seen the response.

• Educate workers. It’s important that all employees have some media and social-media training, says Ross Mayfield, co-founder of Socialtext, which advises companies on new media.

No it isn’t. It’s important that all employees understand what your social media policy is, and the consequences of breaching it.

• Foster a positive culture. Workers who are content and customers who like your product are far less likely to tear down a company online, PR guru Katie Delahaye Paine says. “This would be a lot less likely to happen at places like Whole Foods.”

These are, unfortunately, Utopian motherhood statements. Workers are not content and not everyone likes your product. Social media or not, there is always a risk – even at Whole Foods – that someone will have a go. By all means invest in company culture and corporate reputation – but don’t forget your contingency planning.

• Set clear guidelines. Companies must have clear policies about what is allowed during working hours — and what isn’t, Doll says. “It won’t prevent everyone from breaking the rules, but at least they’ll know what the rules are.”

Yes – but make it a policy, not a set of guidelines. Guidelines are open to misinterpretation and flex – policies say what is and isn’t allowed and specify the penalties for infringement. Call them rules, if necessary.”

Social Media Policies – Pros and Cons

Posted on by in Communications Strategy, Social Media and tagged , , , , , , , , , .

You may well have seen this, but I hadn’t and I thought it’s worth commenting on. This is from February this year, when an Irish blogger – Jason Roe – thought he had discovered a glitch in Ryanair’s website. He blogged about it. His post attracted commentary from Ryanair Staff – later confirmed as being, yep, a member of Ryanair’s staff.

Read – and gasp in wonder – here.

Quite clearly, at the time, Ryanair had no social media policy, governing who could post to what, when and how they should approach it. When the official response came out – here’s an article containing it (and a picture of Mr Roe) – it was made quite clear that they had no intention of getting a social media policy anytime soon.

You can take one of two things from this – up to you.

  • This is a salutary lesson in the importance of having a social media policy and ensuring that all your employees understand and abide by it
  • This demonstrates that it really doesn’t matter whether you have a policy or not, and whether your employees post to social media sites/blogs/messageboards or not – if your company has a sound business proposition, corporate reputation is not important, you’ll continue to make money

Personally, I think it’s all about what sort of company it is and – most importantly – what sort of leadership it has, based on the eternal truth that, like it or not, all business organisations will reflect the character of their leaders (CEO, President, Chairman – whatever).

In the case of Ryanair, it’s all about price. It’s cheap and it at the moment it has a strong customer base because it’s cheap. As long as it’s cheaper (or as cheap) as its competitors, it will have a share of the current market, a market which is (must be?) growing as people (generally) have less money. Therefore, the warmth of corporate reputation and customer admiration is something it doesn’t need.

And its leader is Michael O’Leary, a seemingly unpleasant, short individual with – it would be easy to infer from interviews given and commentary made – the emotional intelligence of a scorpion and the subtlety of an angry rhino. (Just in case anyone’s missed him – here’s some O’Learyisms.)

On balance, a company such as Ryanair has no need of a social media policy currently. It remains to be seen how long they can continue like this, mind.

(Oh – and I’d fly Aer Lingus or Aer Arann if I were you.)