I am running a workshop on brand 21 June in London

I am running a workshop on brand 21 June in London

Should be an interesting and valuable session!

It’s not complicated, it’s just hard.

I was about to write a blog expressing … a bit of frustration with some work I am doing.  I sat down with my trademark white sheet of A3 paper and Sharpie and it struck me that what we were trying to do wasn’t actually that complicated at all.  It was really quite simple.  The problem was – it was asking a lot of people to do something different.  That’s what makes it hard.

So I was going to write a blog about it.

Cue serendipity – the planner who helped with some breakthrough thinking is a chap I have long admired named Russell Davies.  I haven’t followed his blog for a while – bad move.  I was trawling yesterday and, yes, as expected, he got there a long time ago.

Awesome – and it includes a video from Jerry Seinfeld, which is always good value.  Enjoy. http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2013/01/its-not-complicated-its-just-hard.html 

CommScrum 4 live … event tonight + slideshare

1 CommsScrum 4 now live.  We debate the dissolving internal-external communication divide - here

2 Speaking tonight at the Institute of Directors as part of the Ashridge Business School programme.  Slideshare available here.

Internal communication vs engagement vs change management

Gearing up for a couple presentations (one at the Marketing Week Employee Engagement conference and one for the upcoming SAS Culture Shock event) some thinking…

It seems like the internal communication/engagement world splits into several camps (see attached).

• Internal communication as information management. In the old days, “the newsletter brigade,” but now arguably more sophisticated. They might now use wikis and podcasts, but at the end of the day the key objective is moving the right information around the organisation at the right time, from and to the right people. Feedback may be present, but it’s still pretty much a one-way ticket.
• Internal communication as projects for the business. This is where the business needs something done or changed, and ropes in internal communications to make it happen. At its worst this can be pretty diabolical, but my recent experience shows that sometimes, given the complexity of today’s global organisations, the speed of change, and the difficulty of managing “the big picture” in spite of theoretical exhortations to “join things up”, this actually doesn’t work too badly for some companies. So long as the execution is good, this can actually work pretty well.
• Employee engagement by numbers. Run a big, monstrously expensive and complex survey every year. Track the numbers by department. Do action plans to move the problem numbers in the right direction. Repeat as necessary until people are engaged.
• Employee engagement as an HR exercise. Often tied to the above, but usually run by the HR function (ideally with, but all too often without, consultation with those irksome internal comms and marketing/brand people) – all about workplace issues, connection to the firm and colleagues, development and performance planning, etc.

Two observations.

First, and no big surprise, all of these things are about managing change. But it isn’t “change management” in the “here comes Accenture to fire everyone” sense of the word. Having previously worked for 5 years in a top agency dedicated purely to engaging employees in large-scale, complex, global change, I would say that, though, wouldn’t I?

Second, you guessed it, in an ideal world it’s all of these things. It sounds hard (or impossible) to achieve, but it doesn’t have to be. As I’ve said before, the main problem is that the way organisations structure their communication function (as such) is for the most part woefully inadequate to deal with the advances in practices, technologies and changes in audience behaviours. Some of it has to do with handing the keys over to those lower down in the organisation structure, and some of it has to do with realising that functions don’t “own” audiences.

Which brings it all back to audiences. Or stakeholders or whatever you call the people you’re trying to talk with. They aren’t who you say they are. Even if your segmentation model is 100% accurate, which it never will be. I’ve argued with some success that audiences don’t exist — the communicator creates them, for better or worse, and the better you do at creating your audience in context, the more connected those individuals will feel to you and your ideas.

888 words from Eurocomm 2008

WARNING – LONG POST

BARCELONA — After a lovely walk around the marina and Barceloneta area, some Sauvignon Blanc accompanying a remarkable black lobster paella, I drifted back to the Catalonia Suites Hotel for a hot bath to reflect on the past two days.

A 1960s Dean Martin movie, one of the Matt Helm series I adored as a child, plays on the tv of the Catalonia Suites Hotel. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s been somehow strangely improved as an overall experience with the Spanish overdubbing. On screen, a group of waiters standing in the parking lot salute Dino/Helm, who has acquired the Hotel’s bell captain’s uniform, as he rides by on his newly acquired motorcycle.

The waiters’ trousers are around their ankles as Dean slaloms through them with a twinkle in his eye and that trademark smirk. I’m not sure what led to this, but for some reason it’s the only possible image for this particular moment of my life.

A good conference. My personal highlights were Suzanne Salvo’s (Salvo Photography) session on the ethics of photo manipulation and Ramon Olle Jr.’s presentation on the new face of consumer branding. And, of course, the ample and various networking opportunities that the conference schedule so insightfully provided – plenty of time between sessions rather than a quick cuppa and off to the next session. It’s the space in-between that glues these things together so well.

Personally, I enjoyed presenting my session, chillingly entitled “Are you communicating with a fictitious construct?”

Although it was a late addition to the conference’s lineup as I was asked to cover a speaker who had to drop out, I had had some time to think through the issue of audience segmentation and the accompanying pitfalls and opportunities it entails. Having some 20 people show up, when I was expecting to present to the translator, the audio technician and a tumbleweed (given Michael Spencer’s presentation was next door), was a nice surprise.

I was gratified that most of the participants got into the spirit of the thing and didn’t take me too literally. It was really about presenting one or two case studies that I felt explored some interesting audience-related communication challenges facing two of the world’s leading organisations. An opportune question at the end of the session allowed me to steer it right back to where we started off: the rhetorical premise that an audience is a construct of the communicator suiting their communication objective. This holds some intriguing possibilities.

Perhaps not your typical conference presentation, then.

I was really gratified by the feedback – some of which is paraphrased below. (If I have got anything too far wrong, please let me know and I can make amends). I was pleasantly caught quite off guard when the work SAS did for KPMG resulted in spontaneous applause. Some paraphrased examples of the nice comments passed on to me:

• Russell Grossman (Director of Communications, Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform) – “We are all different people from moment to moment. The whole concept that your communication can be designed to ‘create’ an audience and engage it in a given context that you create has some intriguing implications and possibilities.”
• Yang-May at ZenGuide – “Great case study and presentation — it made me want to go work for KPMG.”
• Mike Klein (commsoffensive) – “Brilliant presentation. Actually made me (almost) want to work in an agency again.”
• Gloria Walker, ABC (consultant and former chair of the IABC Research Foundation) – “The ideas were so relevant to a specific client situation I’m dealing with that I couldn’t write fast enough. Helped me think through some new ways of engaging communication communities.”
• Indranath ‘Indy’ Neogy (enoptron) – “Completely applicable in a world of vanishing internal-external boundaries and the media fragmentation; audiences are not static and definable, but are constantly moving and shifting.” 
• Kristian Ruby, Danish Ministry for the Environment – “Excellent, inspiring and interesting presentation.”
• Sira Coll i Capella, Press Office Manager, Parc LaSalle Innovation (LaSalle) — “Can I use your presentation to add to our curriculum? Very innovative, useful, inspiring modern practice.”
• Marc Wright (Simply Communicate) – “I would have expected nothing less from one of the new generation of 2.0 presenters and their diffident style.”
• Julie Freeman, President, IABC – “It didn’t work for me at all. You said audiences didn’t exist, then showed some pictures of audiences, then showed some case studies demonstrating how you went on to segment audiences. And you shouldn’t have been so honest, telling the audience you put the presentation together that morning. You were too glib about the whole thing.”

(Irony can, alas, sometimes be lost on Americans, particularly when they rest in the arms of the gentle slumber of a Barcelona afternoon, peacefully jet lagged, through the lion’s share of one’s presentation. Clearly, not signed up to one of SAS‘s core values: Respectfully irreverent.)

Nonetheless, one must appreciate the sentiment, and if one were a betting man, he’d lay odds of 5-1 against seeing me presenting anything at an IABC International conference anytime soon.

So anyway … a very big thank you to La Salle University and its staff and students who were most gracious and accommodating hosts, to Silvia Cambie and her team for making the whole thing happen, and of course to the conference attendees who were the heart and soul of the whole endeavour. It was refreshing and inspiring to engage with such a fine group of people.

Well, Matt Helm is about to storm the villain’s hideout to capture the nefarious anti-gravity ray pistol, which the criminal mastermind has just used to unzip a young lady’s miniskirt.

A telling reminder to me that some things deserve far more attention than blogging.

Crowdsourcing inside your organisation

I caught up on a lot of reading over my long break (not to mention a lot of sleep).  I had two main thoughts about employee engagement.

The first is that (and thanks LS for prompting me on this one last time we spoke) the next time you go to see some “guru” talking about social media, ask them this question:  “Tell me about the last two projects you implemented for a live client, what the challenge was, how you went about it, and what the results were?” 

Because I think they’d faint.  There are a number high-profile guys on the speakers/web circuit talking as if they invented social media in internal communications, but by my calculations there is no way they have had time to use social media approaches to deliver anything to any client organisation, so busy has their schedule been talking about using social media to engage people.  Talking about it seems a lot easier (and probably more lucrative) than actually doing it.  Something about brand basics lurking in that sentence, perhaps?

 So: Somebody, ask the question.  Answers on a postcard please.

The second thought comes back to a recurring theme – using The Wisdom of Crowds to enhance engagement and decision making internally.  I do think 2008 is (finally) the year where some more organisations start to “get it.”  These things take time to filter through the collective consciousness, and now that there are enough case studies around to combat the naysayers (Eli Lilly, P&G, IBM, Cambrian House, the Mechanical Turk at Amazon, Virgin Mobile USA, what M80′s been up to).  There are more success stories than failures – and the failures tend to be because people generally don’t follow some basic “rules” to allowing group wisdom to flourish (for example, trying to use command and control approaches, allowing inflence among members, etc.).

 There is no reason why the crowdsourcing approach cannot be applied internally, particularly in large global organisations.  This is where social media can deliver value in engaging employees, in improving business performance and acting smarter and faster.  I have set a personal goal of delivering at least 1 and ideally three projects, at any scale, to help clients achieve something using this approach.  Watch this space.