Storytelling at its best – the tale of the tiger and the loaf

A blog that is short and sweet… just look at this wonderful letter which brought a smile to my face this Australia Day as I came upon it on Facebook.

An employee who completely 100% gets customer service, so much so that it’s been reposted online – and Sainsbury’s will reap the reputation benefits as I have no doubt this will get re-shared and liked many more times over the coming days.

In our world of employee engagement two things struck me. One is organisations must now start to trust their employees to have the brains to do the right thing when customers (of any ages) want to interact with them and secondly it highlights just how powerful tailored communication can be. While this is just a cute story, it really shows Sainsbury’s has really got it right and not only engaged its customer service team, but is showing strength and authenticity of brand in communicating like this.

And now thanks to social media, we’ve been able to share it too. Just imagine if your organisation was brave enough to empower the front line to communicate online in this way. A true army of passionate employee ambassadors – just so powerful.

In the meantime, I’m off to find some giraffe bread.

Tam Sandeman
aged 41 10/12ths (but wishing she was still 3)

How many leaders does it take to change a light bulb?

How many leaders does it take to change a light bulb in your workplace? Chances are, they’ll delegate it.

But you can’t delegate leadership. In fact, especially in 2012, you shouldn’t be running a business where leaders deflect responsibility.

It’s impossible to plan for 2012 – there’s game changing carbon legislation in July, dangerous surf conditions for our manufacturing and retail sectors and the wild rodeo ride of mining. And yet, everything hinges of China and Europe behaving well.

Wherever you are in Australia’s two-speed economy, your leaders need to be ready to engage employees to improve productivity and deliver exceptional customer service in the face of disappointing business results, or ready to reward and retain employees in strong performing industries. The Australian Financial Review (6 January 2012) reported recently that leadership is moving from the old concept of command and control to more intelligent leadership. Leaders need to learn and exhibit skills that include:

• Conflict in the workplace
• Cross-cultural communication
• Presentation and plain language communication
• Managing through change and uncertainty
• Working with a global, dispersed workforce
• Communicating with employees in a digital world

From our experience in employee engagement consulting and advice over the years, we sense that more than half of those in middle management and senior leadership positions are exceptional business managers, and have been promoted for those skills – rather than the inspirational and important employee engagement and internal communication skills required at that level to engage employees to be advocates, strive for performance and retain the best performers. So more than half your leaders are not fulfilling the basic requirements of their role – and you, and they, may not even know it.

All it takes is three steps to turn this around:

1. Benchmark what your people think about their leaders’ communication competency; how well they articulate and contextualise company goals and strategy; how they give and receive feedback that changes business outcomes.
2. Determine the gaps between your leaders’ competency and ideal leadership skills
3. Invest in leadership communication skills training

The importance of good writing

In these days of text messaging it’s easy to dismiss good writing as something we don’t need to concentrate on – after all, who but the pedants really care whether we write “their” or “there” or “they’re”.

Well, at Ogilvy PR we care a great deal. We care because good writing is correct writing. We care because it’s doing the little things correctly that differentiates us from other agencies. We care because our clients care. But most of all we care because good writing is powerful writing. It is writing that expresses the message in a manner that resonates with the reader.

Good writing looks effortless, but it is the product of endless practice and revision. Good writing doesn’t need jargon or endless adjectives, it just needs to get the message across.

Some of the Ogilvy PR team recently met with Christie Poulos, founder of Jumpshot Productions. She spoke about the new frontier of video content (and I’ll blog about that exciting future in the New Year). But just as we all know a poorly made video when we see one – wooden acting, trite dialogue etc – so do we recognise bad writing.

Here’s an example from the website of an architecture practice (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty):

“—- is an architectural practice that sees computation as a means of opportunistically collaborating with the heterogeneity and flux of social, cultural and ecological substrates. Employing both genetic and phenotypical strategies of formation in which multiple intelligences and behaviours compete for the gift of instantiation, —- seeks to move beyond the diagram as the dominant of architectural understanding. The resulting complex and adaptive morphologies achieve their definition performatively as the emergent outcome of highly specific architectural concerns embedded within generating rulesets.”

That stunning example of gobbledygook is from the US but, as this first line of a media release here in Australia, Australia is not immune:

“It is the industry of body beauty and assumed smokescreen vanity that appears to be oblivious to the global financial crisis as getting people to sweat continues to smell of sweet success for fitness leader, best-selling author, lecturer …”

There’s a simple way to ensure that we never commit similar atrocities: write, revise, rewrite, revise … then get someone else to review.

And remember: no one – not even Shakespeare – started off life being able to write well. It takes practice, practice and more practice.

Yelp launches in Australia

In one of the first major launches of a social network in Australia since Foursquare, Yelp today officially launched its Australian presence at www.yelp.com.au.

To mark the occasion, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman met with local bloggers and social media marketers in Sydney to talk about the history of Yelp, some of the benefits to users and local businesses, and what lies ahead.

Some quick out-takes from this morning’s session include:

• More than 1,000,000 Australian businesses are already listed on Yelp.com.au and indexed in their mobile app
• Currently businesses from Melbourne and Sydney are included on Yelp Australia
• Roughly 80% of comments from Yelp users are positive
• The name Yelp comes from a combination of “Yellow Pages” and “help” – although they almost went with “Yocal”
• Businesses can use a toolkit to promote themselves and get setup on Yelp, and offer incentives and special offers to people who checkin
• Yelp users are fiercely competitive when it comes to earning a “First Review” status by being the first to review a business

Yelp is looking for a Sydney community manager, so if you’re interested and know someone who’s an expert on everything Sydney, check out the job posting on Seek.

Stay tuned to the #YELPAU hashtag today to follow the reaction to Yelp’s arrival in Australia.

Buyers Beware: One Size Does Not Fit All

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that we are living in a time of truncated oversimplification. Understandably, the tendency to want to reduce everything down to a sound bite is in reaction to the almost manic state of our 24/7 news cycles and multi-channelled communications feeds. True that there is a time and place for boiling down a complicated idea to its essential concepts. Yet, I fear that we have entered an era where important ideas risk getting overlooked entirely if they are not reduced to bullet points (having said that, I now wonder if I should also prepare a bullet point version of this blog post). I have seen this  inclination to summarise messages within environmental and sustainability communications, and am worried that people are missing the type of ‘big-picture’, ‘long-term’ perspective so vital to devising sustainability solutions. The fact is that, you simply cannot save the planet in “Ten easy steps” (I pause here for a moment to thank Annie Leonard, the creator of the fantastic viral video The Story of Stuff for reminding me of this last weekend when she delivered a talk in Sydney).

In my line of work, I am often faced with questions about how to best communicate sustainability messages. Generally, people are expecting a quick, elevator-pitch response. However, I usually reply with a question instead: “Who are you trying to communicate with, what are you hoping to communicate, and what do you want them to do with the information”? Too often, I have found people tend to jump to the tactical solution stage of an implementation process before having properly sat down to ask enough questions to form a proper strategy. Presented in this way, the majority of us easily agree that this is not an ideal way of communicating effectively, but you’d be surprised how many people skip the important preliminary steps.

Although communicating sustainability is sometimes most effective when messages are simplified down to snippets of information, I would argue that the majority of scenarios require a longer-term, more complex communications effort. This is because a most people talking about sustainability are not just trying to get us to change the length of our morning showers, they are trying to do things like facilitate deep culture and behaviour change, improve eco-literacy or devise win-win solutions between opposing groups. The reality is that it takes time to shift cultural norms and achieve long-term behaviour change, and if a communications strategy does not plan for phased-in or follow-up messaging, it is unlikely to achieve its desired objectives.

So, effective sustainability communications often requires a little more work at the outset and in the follow-up phases of a communications initiative. Sustainability practitioners must remember that we need to take the time to understand our audiences and clarify our own objectives. To change people’s hearts, minds and actions, we need to ask enough questions to properly understand what motivates them, what worries them, what their understanding of the issues is, how they like to communicate, who  they are influenced by, and so on. Without this information, we can only hope that some of our one-way monologue cookie-cutter messaging actually sticks and has any positive effect. Who knows? Perhaps after all this, we will still conclude that our audience only needs a list of “Ten top Tips” to save the planet. But, without asking all these questions, how can we know which ten tips to give? I have yet to see a situation where communications does not require some degree of tailoring and customisation. After all, communications is about connecting with people, and we humans are a complex and varied bunch that most certainly is not “one size fits all”.

The art of creating conversation

Not long ago I blogged about Australia’s PR industry dialling up its interest in the power of employees as brand ambassadors. So it was with great delight that I accepted the invitation from the PRIA (Public Relations Institute of Australia) to speak on employee communication at its annual conference yesterday – PR Directions 2011.

While it was clearly a positive move to see internal communication on the agenda – for me what was even more exciting was the title of the session – Cool watercooler conversations in your organisation: Effective internal communication – highlighting the industry’s understanding that we deliver so much more than newsletters, CEO blogs and mouse mats with the company strategy on it.

Driving conversation and dialogue is absolutely what it’s all about – and to be fair, in our view, always should have been. Long gone are the days when a charismatic (and unfortunately sometimes the opposite) CEO’s town hall speech at the start of the year was enough to rally the troops. Today, more than ever it’s simply not enough. Employees are more comfortable to ask questions after hearing from the CEO and actively demand more transparency around company decisions. We say leaders are at their most powerful when they don’t really think they’re communicating – in the corridor after the big meeting, on the way to the car park, in the bathroom (not ideal) – but it is these informal interactions during which more authentic, genuine communication takes place that really counts – because they’re believable and tailored to the individual.

I was asked to give 10 minutes of insight from our rather enviable position of having a bird’s eye view into the employee engagement and internal communication of many of Australia’s top organisations. Here were the four points (there would have been more, but 10 minutes goes fast) I believe all organisations need to consider when it comes to driving conversation:

1. The introduction of social media has meant ‘water cooler’ conversation now has a new channel – with informal conversations enabled online as well as face to face.  Companies taking social media seriously as an external channel but not for their own people do so at their own peril.
2. Avoid MMM (Middle Manager Madness) – Time poor leaders and diverse workforces mean that many organisations are simply not giving communication the time it deserves. But who is it that needs to be skilled up on the art of conversation with the right content? Not just the senior leaders. It’s the middle or frontline managers who are key to succcess – they have the opportunity to converse with the frontline every day – so it’s clear – THEY are the ones who need to be invested in and at the moment they are clearly forgotten.
3. Great conversations don’t just happen. Well, they do sometimes – but they need help. Providing managers with the right tools to stimulate conversation is key. Be creative. Provide them with stuff they actually want to talk about – something they see the point in. Journey maps and conversation guides are just two of the tools flying off our shelves at the moment. What’s better is… when measured – they really do work.
4. And finally…  be culture and demographically appropriate with your tactics. If you want to drive a culture of conversationists – it’s got to come from the top. Don’t choose something crazy and out there if you have a cynical workforce. This may come in time – road test anything you’re not sure about. Nothing worse than getting it wrong – this could do more harm than doing nothing.

As we say – it’s not rocket science, but we are all different creatures and there’s an absolute art to getting it right. Thank you to the filled room at the Hilton today – it’s great to know so many PR professionals are interested in this side of communication. I hope to meet you all at a water cooler some day…

Stream fatigue – are consumers flooded in social?

Just came across this post from a Twitter user I almost routinely ignore and was actually surprised when the link took me through to an insightful post on the clutter that consumers are becoming forced to wade through in social media.

The post focuses on a pretty interesting concept concerning how more and more brands are flooding social media networks and that there is an inevitable reaction from communities when brand’s simply run out of things to say. The consumer suffers ‘stream fatigue’ – the state of being bombarded with regular promotional content that they don’t need, aren’t interested in or simply don’t want. I’m not sure how many times we all would have read the sentence ‘it’s time for brands to rethink their approach in social media’ but I think in this instance – specific to conversation management at least – that it’s true.

What happens when you finally hit that KPI of 10,000 fans by launching a hugely successful social media competition? What happens when it’s over? How do you maintain your community? Do we know what they want now that their desire for the ‘grand prize’ has been extinguished? How many times can a loyal ‘fan’ of your page ‘like’ a post?

From research conducted it was found that the two main reasons why a consumer would interact with a brand page was due to:

• Receiving a discount (61%)
• Making a purchase (55%)

Conversely, research was then conducted with businesses, with the top two reasons they thought consumers engaged with their brand was:

• To learn about a new product (73%)
• To receive general information (71%)

According to that research, brands are getting it wrong and it’s this mixed messaging that will result in lost fans, disenchanted communities and ignored engagement posts.

With that in mind, perhaps we should be thinking of the average social media consumer as your thrifty old grandma – hunting for the bargains and wanting to make a purchase as quickly and efficiently as possible – as opposed to the friendly, loyal community member we might think they are.

Have a read of the original post here:

http://www.briansolis.com/2011/10/social-medias-impending-flood-of-customer-unlikes-and-unfollows/

Big headlines, slow news

It’s been a huge news week. Between Steve Jobs, Amanda Knox and Kyle Sandilands’ imaginary love child, the press must have bruised fingertips by now. Well, about the first two stories anyway.

But beyond the gushing memorials and the frothing controversies, I think an important point has been missed.

Steve Jobs was many things to many people. He was a visionary, he changed the world, he was – and I quote here – the “greatest inventor since Edison.” But he wasn’t always first.

He wasn’t first to the MP3 player. He wasn’t first to the touchscreen smartphone. He wasn’t first to the tablet.*

But, more importantly, he got those designs right.

He took good ideas and made them into better products. He didn’t rush things out before they were perfect, which is why he was seen as a genius by the authors of his obituaries.

That lesson can be learned by the media.

This week, the verdict of Amanda Knox’s trial for murdering Meredith Kercher was handed down. It acquitted both her and Raffaele Sollecito (whose name barely gets a mention in most press – being ‘foxy’ gets you headline billing it seems) of the killing. But several media outlets, in their haste to be first, published articles stating their appeals had been rejected and they had been sent back to jail.

A couple even engineered reactions and quotes from the hypothetical situation.

Now, I understand many articles are pre-written – obituaries being a topical case in point. But when the rush to be first on the scene sees media miss the target this spectacularly it calls into question the credibility of their entire masthead. They need to learn from Mr Jobs – getting it right is more important than getting it first.

I am an admirer of the slow food movement as an alternative to fast food junk. Maybe it is high time for a slow news movement also?

*(I’m ignoring the PC because it doesn’t help my point at all!)

How to love the one you’re with: Hold on to your best employees in an uncertain economy

Let’s face it. Nobody knows what’s going on with the economy. Least of all, it appears, the economists.

When the GFC first loomed, most employees’ first instinct was to hold on tight to their employers and seek the comfort and safety of the familiar.

But this has gone on for long enough, and they’re starting to wonder if the relationship is going anywhere – mainly because so many employers here responded by freezing senior management salaries, benefits and training budgets, and have been very slow to thaw these out.

It’s not you, it’s me.

Many of Australia’s best high-performing employees have spent the past two years watching their careers in a holding pattern while propping up your company’s bottom-line. They are no longer as engaged as they once were, because many employers stopped talking long-term strategy and focused on short term shareholder-boosting activities.

These employees have had the time to think about what they’d rather be doing; what they thought they would be doing at this point of their careers. And many of them may be about to make a move.

These high-performers are already your company’s best ambassadors. You need them to stay aligned with your business and engaged in your progress.

You need to woo them back into your affections.

You need to identify the employees you don’t want to see walk out the door into someone else’s arms. They are usually the ones who are switched on to your business needs and operating environment, understand your customers and are strong respected leaders and influencers.

You need to bring them off the dance-floor and up on to the balcony – so together you can look down and check the rhythm of your company.

There are three key things you can do to re-engage with your high performers.

1. Make the time to talk: Give them exclusive face-to-face time with senior executive leadership, especially the C-Suite. Interpersonal and leadership communication is a tried and tested channel to engage with employees. Show your high-performers where the business is headed and ask for their views and feedback. Frankly and openly discuss the balance sheet and seek their solutions. Show them your vision of next year’s organisation chart with their name one box up from where they are now and talk about how you’re going to help them get there. Or better still, ask them to craft your vision and then communicate it to their teams.
2. Tease them with flowers: If you have a high-profile project, let them run it, and support them adequately. Not only does it give your project the best chance of success, it’s an opportunity to re-engage with your high-performing employees, re-harness their energy and allow them to re-gain the spotlight.
3. And a box of chocolates is always a winner:While remuneration is always attractive, a carefully selected suite of training and professional coaching programs (like leadership communication, stakeholder management and messenger training) will always be welcome.

Show your high-potential employees the love, and you’ll have an engaged team who’ll stay with you, say great things about your brand and strive for your business success. You can’t ask for more in an uncertain world, can you?

Beyond the Shouting Match: the Role of Communications in Sustainable Supply Chains

Last week, I was invited to speak at the Campus Link Trade Show and Conference to share some insights into the role that effective communications can play in creating Sustainable Supply Chains. As Sustainable Supply Chain Management continues to gain ground, the number of emerging evaluation tools, tips, criteria, grading systems and issue-areas is enough to send procurement teams’ heads spinning. Too often this leads to organisations getting so caught up in the technicalities and questionnaires involved that they overlook the need to cooperate, collaborate and co-create solutions in order to develop Sustainable Supply Chains. Instead of focusing on common objectives, conversations can turn into confrontational shouting matches where suppliers and buyers argue over details of environment policy requirements or customers and NGOs attack organisations for the way they source their products. Ideally, procurement teams will learn to strike the right balance between technical evaluation tools and constructive conversations, so that business can continue to see the benefits of creating Sustainable Supply Chains.

The idea that companies share some degree of responsibility for the upstream impacts of supply chain is not new. Corporate Responsibility and Sustainable Supply Chain ‘hot buttons’  like sweatshops, blood diamonds and dolphin safe tuna would have caught the attention of even the most casual of observers. Until recently, it seemed that that these concerns were reserved for only the biggest brands and the largest suppliers. Wal-Mart’s recent work to figure out how to improve the sustainability of its supply chain is a classic example of how negative attention has triggered big business to take responsibility for improving the sustainability of supply chains.

Nowadays, a growing number of smaller-scale suppliers and procurement departments are being pushed to start scratching their heads about Sustainable Supply Chains too. As the field of ‘Sustainable Supply Chain Management’ matures, pressure from customers, shareholders, Boards and stakeholders has moved beyond big business and started targeting small and medium size companies as well.

In most cases, the challenge is twofold: firstly, these smaller procurement departments are usually less resourced to handle the additional task of managing a Sustainable Supply Chain. Secondly, they are entering the Sustainable Supply Chain conversation at a point that is much more complex and advanced than it was when bigger brands began discussing the issue several years ago.

So, for anyone still in the early stages of considering the sustainability of your supply chain, or for anyone who feel like you’ve hit a plateau and need a bit of inspiration, here are a few hints on how communications can help you deliver a Sustainable Supply Chain:

1. Figure out what “Sustainable” looks like to your organisation: “Sustainability” means different things to different organisations.  Find out what the sustainability impacts and considerations are for your organisation by talking with players in your industry, or with academics or specialist research organisations.  Try talking to NGOs who have approached you or your competitors in the past with concerns about your practices. You’ll either find an opportunity to show leadership by being a first-mover in this space, or you’ll save yourself time by learning from others’ experience.
2. Think beyond questionnaires and evaluation criteria: Evaluation tools are helpful tools, but sustainability requires big-picture thinking, so don’t get so caught up in the questionnaires and evaluation tools that you lose sight of the overall objectives.  Use regular and open conversations with industry members, stakeholders and customers to help get an outside perspective and use this insight to define your own path to sustainability.  This puts you in a proactive position instead of a reactionary one.
3. Start with ‘hot button’ issues: Chances are, you can’t deal with all of your Sustainable Supply Chain challenges at once. So, try starting with the ‘hot button’ topics most likely to draw negative attention or pose a reputational risk. Honest conversations with stakeholders and customers will help build a trusting relationship where you can listen to their concerns and in turn show them openly how you are trying to find a solution.
4. Measure and Communicate: Almost as important as improving the sustainability of your supply chain is measuring your progress and being able effectively communicate your achievements.  Make sure you are capturing the kind of information that allows you to tell the story of your continued efforts and progress. If your audiences can’t see all the work you’re doing, they’r
   

   Tags: Campus Link Trade Show and Conference, communications, Sustainable Supply Chains

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