Being on speed really can be the answer

This week a trusty colleague and I, stopped building our ark to escape Sydney’s fine weather, in favour of attending the annual MNC HR Team Briefing – an annual gathering of HR professionals from multi-national organisations. The session was great for a number of reasons, not least for two specific reasons for me. Firstly, I heard some new thought-provoking stuff – always good on a rainy day, and secondly, I finally won one of those business card prize draws (which I’ve always thought were rigged – I take it all back).

We heard speakers telling tales of the importance of culture when it comes to getting business results from the card people (Hallmark) and the biscuit and snacks people (Campbell Arnotts). But it was the final speaker, Dr Adam Fraser, who ran a fantastic and insightful session about how high performing organisations can lift performance even higher by getting their people out of what he called ‘grind’ and into a state called ‘flow’ where we perform our best (similar to ‘being in the zone’ for an elite athlete (not unlike myself – ahem). Clearly an important topic for anyone who works in employee engagement, internal communication or HR.

Now, logic tells those of us of sound mind that ‘being in the zone’ obviously sounds like the right place to be to perform at work. But, the most interesting insight for me was around the pace we work at. I know I’m not the only one who has said my biggest challenge is time, and the speed at which I’m expected to deliver, which seems to get faster and faster. My instinct here is to try to reduce my workload. Dr Adam’s comments reinforced my thinking, stating that specialists say the solution is to ‘do less’.

However, his research has proven some of the best, happiest people are those who are living at pace. People who are working at speed. That speed is OK. It’s just about being in the right frame of mind while you’re going at that pace. It struck me that those of us looking at internal engagement initiatives in organisations must work to help people get into the state of ‘flow’, which, as he put, is where we are truly and authentically happy. I loved his idea of looking deeper than the sheer volume of tasks we have on our agenda, and then started to draw parallels from our good internal communication practice.

Some of his points when questioning ourselves were:

1. Do we have clarity of purpose? – this is akin to having a vision – a common goal – something everyone can pull behind.
2. How about our environment?  Can we control this to minimise distractions?  similar to decluttering communication in an organisation.
3. Are we present? – This is about active listening – really focusing on what’s in hand. In the internal comms world, this is about two way communication – it’s got to be a conversation, not just one way
4. Are you positive when you ‘show up’? – being positive has such a good ripple effect on everyone. Dr Adam said, positive emotion encourages different parts of the brain to wake up and so leads to more positivity, more creativity and a culture of innovation – all these can only be good for business

His final point was again something we all know – just how important this behaviour is for leaders. For people to perform at their best, it’s leaders who can make this happen. Our suggestion is that internal communicators / anyone working in employee engagement start looking at these areas as if we get people in this state – this will make the true difference between being good, being great or being a company who is talked about.

Lipstick and a tedious debate on a very important day

Surely it was coincidence.

With Thursday being International Women’s Day, the timing of Monday’s article in AdNews was exquisite.

PR and corporate affairs a “pink ghetto” read the headline and in the story that followed we read concerns about the “rapid feminisation” of PR and “highly feminised corporate affairs”.

The article was from a 46 page report, Trends and Issues in Australian Corporate Affairs, on behalf of communications search and recruitment firm Salt & Shein. On display for all to read was “the delicate issue of a female-dominated industry in PR and corporate affairs”.

And the reaction here at Ogilvy, Australia’s largest PR organisation: Does anyone really care that much?

No doubt the unnamed “leading and most experience senior corporate affairs professionals” gave earnest and well-meaning responses when interviewed.

We have 130 people working at the five different companies which operate separately under the Ogilvy PR Australia umbrella. Those five companies are headed by four males and a female and I suspect the gender mix throughout the organisation is around 30/70, with females in the ascendancy. But the question again is: what does it matter?

There was a time when women – and people with different coloured skin or different religions or sexuality – were not considered for certain jobs. A time when factors other than ability determined what you did and how far up the chain of command you rose.

And until I read the AdNews story and the Salt & Shein report I thought those times had long gone. One of those anonymous interviewees says: “I don’t believe gender imbalance is good for any profession. I really worry that it makes us appear to be a bit of a ‘pink ghetto’, so that we’re perhaps taken less seriously by management.”

At Ogilvy PR Australia we work for a large number of corporate organisations and my experience has been that it is the quality of advice – not the gender of the person giving that advice – that dictates the degree of seriousness with which management views us.

And when we talk to clients they really want to know just how we are responding to their needs. They want to know how we are going to be accountable for what we say we are going to do, how we can accurately measure success. They want to know that we understand integration, that we can advise them about new and emerging media channels, that we challenge them through our creativity and expertise.

They don’t want to know whether we wear lipstick!

And maybe, just maybe, the reason PR is not taken more seriously is that some in the industry seem to think “the delicate issue of a female-dominated industry in PR and corporate affairs” is important.

Launching Social@Ogilvy Australia

Last night, Social@Ogilvy Australia teamed up with Radian6 to host a panel discussion event in Sydney titled “Effective Social Entrepreneurs: Turning Insight Into Action”.

Over 200 industry folk,  clients and employees of both Ogilvy and Radian6 braved the rain and came together to network and participate in a panel Q&A. The audience were engaged, tweeting madly to the event hashtag, #R6Ogilvy and asking questions that were related to their buisnesses or workplace.

Charlie Wood, Vice President of Radian6 APAC was the MC for the evening and our panellists included David Alston, the CMO of Radian6, Nathalie Swainston, Brand & Marketing Manager of ReachOut.com, Chris Gross, Head of Social Media for Vodafone, Jess Hart, Digital Marketing Specialist at Sensis, Dirk Reckerman, Digital Marketing Manager at Nestle and our very ownBrian Giesen, Director of social@Ogilvy Australia.

The panel answered a variety of questions around topics such as choosing the correct social platforms for your brand, engaging internal stakeholders and getting them involved in social, training staff, agency versus internal and much much more.  But I particularly enjoyed the closing question “If you could give brands today one piece of advice about social media marketing, what would it be?” Here are the panellists answers:

• Brian Giesen – Think long term rather than current campaigns, look at the bigger picture and create a holistic approach for your brand
• Dirk Reckerman – If you are going to use social for brand purposes you need to embrace it, not keep it at arms length
• Jess Hart – Figure out your objectives first and then refer to them constantly throughout the process, it will keep you grounded
• Chris Gross – Invest internally for social, train up your staff and involve as many of your internal stakeholders as possible
• Nat Swainston – Always think of the user and spend time considering the user experience, this should be at the core of everything you do
• David Alston – Consider your community rather than your audience, they are the ones we want on board with our brand

A huge shout out to Scarborough Wines for sponsoring the event and treating us all to the taste of their beautiful wine throughout the evening.

Take a look at more photos of the event on the Ogilvy PR Facebook page. Read more Social@Ogilvy blog posts on Asia Digital Map.

My Generation

On Tuesday night I took part in PRIA’s My Generation event representing Gen Y in a panel discussion about how agencies can close the gap between the bosses (baby boomers and Gen X) and the employees (Gen Y).

The premise of the discussion was to look at the relationship between us as Gen Y’s and our bosses or vice a versa and to the dig through the things that divide us and bust a few myths.

Why does the industry need to care about working with Gen Y? Because there are 4.5 million of us born between 1978 and 1994 and we are dominating the emerging workforce. And PR is one of the industries where it’s even harder to escape us.  To put it in perspective, 76 per cent of Ogilvy PR’s current employees are Gen Y’s.

We are the most labelled generation ever and the discussion kicked-off with a few of those labels being thrown around. The bosses described us as selfish and always thinking ‘what’s in it for me’, only caring about more money and job titles, and not being able to listen as we are constantly checking our phones or updating our statuses.

While the stereotypes were being called out in the discussion it soon became clear that in order to close the gap between bosses and employees you can’t label us with one big brushstroke.

Gen Y spans almost 20 years so it’s not sensible to consider this a target audience.  Bosses should acknowledge life stages, career stages, professional needs, socio-economic differences when trying to motivate staff.

As employees we have a desire for customisation which I don’t think is unique to our generation. People of all ages want to know they can walk into a new job and carve out their own opportunities if they do well and are loyal to the company. It’s more about understanding expectations.

We were asked what the ‘shiny’ things beyond salary were that attract us to a new job or keep us satisfied in a current one. According to 2011 McCrindle Research one of the top priorities for Gen Y’s when looking for an employer is a “great culture”. And I agree with this. We come to work at least 40 hours a week so it’s important that we enjoy being here each day and I think the people we work with play a huge role in that. All the Gen Y’s in the room acknowledge the importance of great mentors in keeping us satisfied in a job.

Training also came out as being important to us. We like to feel like it is a mutually beneficial relationship, Gen Y want something back and training and development shows that the agency is willing to invest in us. I know I always walk out of a great training session feeling reinvigorated and and grateful that I work for an agency that offers inspiring training.

The discussion drew to a close with the topic of loyalty. According to McCrindle Research on average Gen Y’s spend two years with an employer versus the national average of four years. The bosses asked us what keeps us loyal to an agency.  As we tend to get bored easily it’s important to be presented with new challenges and we need to be able to see a future for ourselves at the company. Being rewarded for being loyal doesn’t hurt either. I just had my three year anniversary at Ogilvy PR and being rewarded with three extra days of Loyalty Leave is a nice little perk. It makes a difference.

The key takeout of the discussion wasn’t anything ground-breaking. Essentially not that much has changed. As a generation we might be labelled more than past generations, but at the end of the day the same fundamentals of great management and leadership remain.

Pinterested?

Remember the old days where you would tack up a postcard, a few pictures of your friends and some inspirational or funny images you found in a magazine on a little board in your room? The board of inspiration to share with your friends and remind yourself what keeps you driven?

Pinterest – a fairly new social media platform takes this to a whole new level. Pinterest helps you aggregate your favourite content and share it on a virtual bulletin board. According to compete data between September and December 2011 Pinterest traffic increased more than fourfold and brought in 7.51 million UMVs in December. Interestingly the site (according to Experian Hitwise) is especially popular among women, accounting for 58% of Pinterest’s traffic. Is this just an indication of how women like to interact with content and the skew of female to male social application users or could this have deeper implications? Check out this infographic showing whether Pinterest is the next social commerce game changer: http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/pinterest-infographic.jpg

Is Pinterest the next social commerce game changer?

What I find so powerful about Pinterest is that it is content rich. The fact that you have to include an image in your posts helps drive people to think about how their message is received in a visual sense rather than slapping a slab of text down on the page and forcing people to come to their own unguided conclusions.

How it works for those of you who haven’t jumped ship (FYI – It is by invite only which adds to the exclusivity of it all, but side note- it is not very difficult to get an invitation!) is that you have the option to create multiple self-titled boards. This could range from “My favourite foods” to “Places to travel.” The idea is to get themes happening so people know what you are interested and there is more structure to your content. You can pin things on to your page by locating content as mentioned before OR scroll through other peoples content and re-pin it to your wall.  This would be the Twitter equivalent of Re-Tweeting. You can also perform the standard social actions of liking, commenting, sharing it on your social platforms and saving the images. In my opinion, Pinterest is kind of like the point between Instagram and Tumblr

As a business tool, Pinterest would be a great way to share your brand’s  products and services in a creative and virtual environment. Boards can be used as product categories and a way of engaging with people who would not normally see your products in a creative space.

This great summary by Mashable which explains the How To Guide for Pinterest and gives some great ideas of how the platform can be used for business. (See more here: http://mashable.com/2011/12/26/pinterest-beginners-guide/) Also check out the 21 Must Follow Pinterest Users: http://mashable.com/2012/01/29/pinterest-users-to-follow/

How can you use it for your business?

1. You can create boards for types of products you sell.
2. Add boards for “things we love this week” or “Sale items”
3. Service providers can create boards for “Tips and Tricks”
4. Create a public board where you can get input from your customers, such as “Top picks”
5. Once Pinterest opens its doors to everyone (and no longer invitation only), consider offering a discount to just Pinterest subscribers – all they have to do is follow a specific board or like a specific pin.
6. You can also tweet your pins.
7. Add a Pin It button to your website, or specific product pages so you make it easier for others to share your products/company with others.

What else can you do on Pinterest?

1. On a personal note, you can add it to your Facebook timeline, which you can’t do on any of the other social bookmarking sites yet.
2. Curate lists on specific topics and share them, or keep them private. For example, maybe you are planning a wedding or redecorating your  room in your home, you can create pins of your different ideas.
3. Bloggers, you can add a pin to your blog or website to allow easy sharing of your content.

I would highly suggest checking it out even if it may not be right for your brand – rather to get a sense of where content sharing is moving and how visual and content rich platforms are quickly becoming a 2012 social trend.

Sources:

http://mashable.com/2012/01/29/pinterest-retail-infographic/

http://mashable.com/2012/01/29/pinterest-users-to-follow/#453218-Style-Me-Pretty

http://blog.shareaholic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Pinterest_Logo.png

http://cdn2.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/pinterest-cover-story.jpg

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”.

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