Communication Director 01 2010

COMMUNICATION

www.communication-director.eu

DIRECTOR

Magazine for Corporate Communications and Public Relations

01/2010

Confessions of an internet junkie

How the early Twitter bird can catch the worm

Russian Web 2.0 PR: the early years

Ten tips for networking success

The risks and opportunities of

Sowing the seeds of a digital

from a social media addict

pioneering new online tools

communications revolution

EDITORIAL

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henever the world of PR stumbles upon new tools of communication, corporate professionals need to answer one fundamental question: should they seize the day and be early adopters, or bide their time in the wings, waiting to see how the new techniques evolve once the dust of hype has settled ? For the past couple of years, this conundrum could be applied to a multitude of social media novelties. Should your company run its own Twitter account? Should it take the plunge and engage with Facebook? Should it create its own internal social network for employees to speak openly? There are sound reasons for corporations to exercise caution. Jumping on the bandwagon without prior ref lection is, without a doubt, a slippery slope to failure, for involvement with social media is not without its risks. Could employees misinterpret freedom of speech and abuse the internal forum? Could there be an increase in leaks to unscrupulous journalists? Communications specialists could also get it wrong, and swamping social networks with aimless self- promotion will hardly endear you to your stakehol ders. On the plus side, social media of fers a unique opportunity to engage with stakeholders on a more spontaneous and intimate level than has ever been possible, building an organisation’s image and discovering trends and potential sources of crisis long before they materialise in more traditional channels. In this issue’s Story Teller section, a diverse range of experts from the academic and corporate worlds guide us through the distracting white noise of hyperbole and explore the ramif ications of social media on PR and corporate communications. We hope you f ind some food for thought in this f irst issue of 2010.

Marc-Oliver Voigt Editor -in-Chief m.voigt@communication-director.eu

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COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

“Things can go wrong for a variety of reasons: a mishap or accident no one could have foreseen and prevented, lack of competence, lack of attention, lack of commitment, or opportunism.”

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“Prior to launching the campaign, we shared all the messaging and materials with our 186 Red Cross Red Crescent societies, allowing them to give feedback.”

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Communication ideas in the eyes of experts

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Heralding change

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Our world. Your move

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The dynamics of trust What do we mean when we speak of trust?

What are its foundations and implications?

Bart Noteboom

TEAM PLAYER LEADERS CEOs in the eyes of the media

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How to improve personnel management and your career

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The evolution of an organisation depends on leaders seizing the day and driving change

CEO Stockwatch by CARMA International

Judith Bardwick

40 The corporate and academic stand on communication

Su Mi Dahlgaard-Park

Scanning for information Daimler shows how soliciting the opinions of journalists can shed light on your own work

BORDER CROSSER Experiencing the unknown

Jörg Howe

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Campaigning without candidates The recent European Council presidential elections were a unique communications case study

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Peter van Aelst

01/2010

Systems, people and knowledge A mixture of three essential organisational components results in transformation

STRATEGIC THINKER 24

A clean sweep for reformers

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Experiencing the unknown – leading professionals working abroad Interview with Simon Sproule

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“Hierarchy and consensus are important.

Taking those elements alone you have a process that operates in many Japanese companies.”

STORY TELLER

Looking at the important questions of communication

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“The success of the social mediaenabled exchange lies in the fact that it benefits everyone.”

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The use of social media for Russian PR may be in its infancy, but opinion formers are leading the way

Getting plugged in to social media An overview of the application of Web 2.0 in corporate communications and public relations Richard Morgan and Dafydd Phillips

Marat Rakaev

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The future’s bright

Michael S. Salone

How SAP harnessed social media as an internal communications tool with a global reach

Ten PR commandments of Web 2.0

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European Association of Communication Directors

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Ian McNairn

Photos: www.flickr.com; private

European Association of Communication Directors

Power to the people The internet has empowered stakeholders, enabling them to shape your company

QUESTIONS TO...

The personal side of Communication Directors

Elliot S. Schreiber

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Communications Reader

ASSOCIATION

Best foot forward Being a social media innovator can have its risks and benefits, and needs constant monitoring

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BOOKS

A social media addict shares her hard-earned knowledge of the dos and don’ts of networking

Meg Pickard

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Time to collaborate Alstom’s Collaborative Way programme enables employees to learn from each other

Jürgen Zimmermann

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Digital revolution takes hold in Russia

Extreme opinions: now in real-time

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7

Claus Sonberg

The unimaginable expansion of the internet begs the question: is it in danger of getting out of control?

Geert Lovink

01/2010

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

AGENDA SETTER Communication ideas in the eyes of experts

HERALDING CHANGE As of January this year, the euro has replaced the Slovakian koruna, a currency closely associated with the country’s independence. Such a break called for a large-scale campaign.

by Dafydd Phillips

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ll through last year, prices in Slovakia were displayed in both koruna and euro, a small but significant way of smoothing over the transition between the two currencies. Slovakia is the latest of the new member states to adopt the euro, following Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus, while Estonia looks set to be the next country to adopt the euro in 2011.

Common concerns when facing currency conversion include fears of inflation growth, consumer protection, security and pricing. In this particular case, the Slovak koruna had a peculiarly symbolic significance, as it was the currency proudly adopted when Slovakia gained independence from the former Czechoslovakia in 1992. Such a monumental change clearly needed to be communicated sensitively yet on the broadest possible scale. To prepare Slovakia’s 5.5 million citizens, a long running and thorough communications campaign was coordinated by the National Bank of Slovakia and the Ministry of Finance, with contributions from other ministries and institutions such as public television.

The early planning stages occurred as far back as 2005, with the publication of a national changeover plan that included a section on communication, with more detailed planning following in 2007. According to Martin Suster, Director of the Research department at the National Bank of Slovakia, the reason for this relatively long lead time was because “public procurement in Slovakia, especially for things such as a communication campaign where you don’t have exact technical details which you could have published in the tender, can be quite difficult and time-consuming.”

LOOKING OUTWARD In developing the campaign,

the coordination team looked at the experiences of several other countries in the European community and the European Central Bank that had undergone their own change01/2010

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

overs, as well as similar communication campaigns in some of the 12 original countries that adopted the Euro in 2002. A “twinning programme” was established with the Austrian Central Bank, as well as an exchange with Belgian National Bank. During 2007 and 2008, the coordination committee also visited Cyprus and Malta and talked with Slovenian colleagues who had only recently completed their own campaign in 2007.

The projected start date for the campaign was July 2008, but following a public opinion poll in February that revealed general dissatisfaction with the level of information on the changeover, the start date was brought forward to March.

In less than a month, TV spots were produced in order to communicate basic milestones that would lead to the changeover, with more practical

AGENDA SETTER

information left to the later stages.

Originally, the idea was that the first tender would see advertising agencies cooperating with each other in contributing to a national campaign; however, according to Suster, “agencies really took this as very fierce competition among themselves so we had to change the public procurement format to select just one agency and not allow any of the other agen-

anybody. But it has to be very simple and very straightforward so that all the segments of the population, even the ones that have some difficulty in understanding things, will get it.” While the campaign also addressed the concerns of banks, enterprises and professionals, Suster stresses that “the largest part of the campaign was directed towards the general population, and it was not really rocket science: even though it’s about finance, it’s about a couple of simple procedures – exchanging money, converting prices, making sure you understand what the new currency looks like.” The general population is

Photos: .NBS/euromena.sk

Lively media messages helped pave the way for the euro

cies to have any influence in what the project would look like.” The chosen advertising agency – Bratsilava-based Creo/Young&Rubicam – helped to deliver the media aspect of the campaign, as well as proposals for individual fringe elements, such as the Euromobile truck that toured the country, visiting small towns and specifically targeting the elderly and the less well off. Several exhibitions on relevant topics such as the making of the euro and design of the Slovakian euro coins were also created by the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the National Bank.

Although the campaign was on a nationwide scale, simplicity was key. According to Suster, the campaign did not “have to be very fancy, it doesn’t have to be masterpiece of art since you are not competing with

a blanket term that covers many smaller sensitive target groups, including the Roma and the visually-impaired.

This is one element that Suster points to as setting this campaign apart from normal advertising campaigns. “We stressed these disadvantaged groups which otherwise in a commercial campaign would not be targeted because they have little purchasing power,” he explains. “But from our point of view where we wanted to deliver the information to everybody, we had to concentrate on where the information needs are more difficult.”

Each group demanded a different approach, and some rather ingenious solutions. For example, a special greetings

Although the campaign was on a large nationwide scale, simplicity was key. card similar to a musical Christmas card was designed for the sight-impaired, but instead of the traditional Christmas carol, opening the card would trigger a recording that explained the euro. A video with information in sign language was delivered to the hearing-impaired. Above all, the 01/2010

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EXPERT OPINION Toned-down creativity The most intense information campaign for introducing the euro took place in the second half of 2008, which was after the period of the conversion and before the changeover from the old currency to new one. The campaign itself had five waves and had broad media coverage using traditional as well non-traditional communication tools. The most visible were the TV spots as their frequency was quite high during the whole information period. Other communication means were the billboards, radio spots, posters, non-traditional advertising spaces, euro calculators, leaflets and brochures. If the goal of the campaign was to address the majority of citizens, the goal was successfully reached according to the surveys.

Creativity was toned down; instead of using non-traditional forms of informing the campaign operated mainly with simplicity.

Shared euro knowledge had a strictly informative and educative tone. Apart from this campaign, euro facts were repeated and intensively communicated to citizens through private as well as through the national media. If it was well synchronised with the euro campaign even the higher information and synergy effect would be reached. Each campaign has its stages.

The communication activities in such an important change in the life of inhabitants should not be stopped after the replacement of the old currency. After one year of using euro in Slovakia opened questions and doubts still remain, yet these can be eliminated by a continuous flow of information.

Andrea Danihelova, Kosice Head of

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Taming expectations Slovakia introduced the euro in 2009 and thus joined those countries which question the traditional myth of One Country One Money. After Slovenia, it is the second country from the former socialist world joining the euro club.

The new currency promotes the sense of European collectivity. This voluntary commitment is very essential in forming Slovak national identity, as a young country and a young nation. Slovakia, as with other eurozone countries, keeps its political symbols such as the flag, postage stamps, national sports teams, etc., but introduces the euro as an important political symbol of belonging to the European integration process. The widespread daily use of euro notes and coins will help to form a specific European identity also among Slovak nationals. Two impor tant facts led to the introduction of euro in Slovakia.

First, it was an unprecedented consensus among Slovak political par ties to follow policies which enabled euro introduction. Second, Slovak Central Bank created a very positive campaign which was to the point, made an image of professionalism, and in my personal opinion was very favorably evaluated by the general public as well as by the people dealing with money issues.

I also need to mention that after the euro introduction the Slovak Central Bank was especially successful in taming inflationary expectations. Inflation was kept stable and basically no sign of euro inflation was observed.

Julius Horvath Central European University, Budapest

Communications, VSE Andrea Danihelova is responsible for internal and external communication and CSR activities at Východoslovenská energetika. She began her career at the Slovak Chamber of Commerce and Industry as a representative of EU projects in Slovakia in cooperation with Italian region Lazio.

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Julius Horvath is chairman of the Department of Economics at the Central European University. His main interests are international economics, political economy of monetary relations, history of economic thought, and political economy. He is a member of the Slovak Accreditation Committee Board.

campaign turned to what were called multipliers – organisations that supported disabled groups. These people were given training in how to handle the changeover and would in turn translate this information into messages that would be understood by disadvantaged groups. The same approach applied to communications with hard-to-reach minority groups, including Roma people.

Despite all the measures to make sure that it would be as inclusive as possible, from the get-go the campaign encountered resistance to the changeover. Suster explains: “We always encountered a minority of people who are against the adoption, and if we had discussions or seminars then we had to argue or explain the things in mass media, we always had to be aware that there might be some reaction to some of the claims, and so we took this into account when we created the messages.”

In the light of this resistance, monitoring public opinion and the effectiveness of the campaign was crucial. Twice a month, the National Bank’s statistical office conducted a survey that measured satisfaction with the level of information available. For sensitive target groups, the trained multipliers gave feedback on their progress, and reports of the seminars and training sessions they organised gave qualitative evidence of the number of people reached, and also helped with requests to modify the strategy when needed.

Back in February 2008, just 18 per cent of the population replied that they were satisfied with the level of information about the euro changeover. In January 2009, when the final survey was conducted, 93 per cent of the population was satisfied with the information that they had received.

Photos: private

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AGENDA SETTER

Communication ideas in the eyes of experts

OUR WORLD. YOUR MOVE Can a global social media campaign really be enough to help us save the offline world?

by Richard Morgan

On June 24 2009, Geneva’s Jet d’Eau fountain was spectacularly illuminated in red to mark the 150th anniversary of the battle of Solferino.

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s he strode out across the battlefield at Solferino in 1859, businessman Henri Dunant was so horrified by the post-fight suffering he saw that he went on to create the International Committee of the Red Cross. His and the group’s work would go on to touch millions of lives and significantly influence the Geneva Convention. In 2009, 150 years on, the Red Cross (as most people

incorrectly refer to it) is more important than ever, endeavouring to prevent worldwide suffering by promoting and strengthening humanitarian law and universal humanitarian principles. And there is much to do, almost too much.

There are bloody wars being fought in all corners of the globe, and poverty, hunger and disease are widespread. The Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) national societies, which represent the ICRC across the world, are being stretched as never before. So, in 2009, as part of the 150-year anniversary commemorations of Solferino, the movement launched a call for global action: Our world. Your move.

CREATING WORLDWIDE CHANGE The campaign’s succinct slogan, “Our world is in a mess. It’s time 01/2010

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EXPERT OPINION More serious moves needed There it is: the first global social media campaign of the Red Cross Red Crescent movement. It is obvious that they have put a lot of effort into the campaign: beautiful design, a sexy slogan, catchy captions for the challenges. The campaign movie, Simple Gestures, is also well designed – moving music, clear message. And it is all translated into eight languages, and connected with all major social media tools – impressive.

More than 100,000 moves seems like a lot, but the campaign has been online for several months and could have gained more attention – also on social network sites or Twitter. What is the problem? I have to admit that I somehow got lost when I had a first look at it. There is a discrepancy between all these big global challenges, and the question of what you and I can do about it. I had expected a large “donate now” button. There is a small “donate” button, next to “tell your network”, “tell your friends”, and “keep updated”. Is the primary goal to spread the word? Or to really make a change?

It feels pathetic to help your neighbour while other people are starving. That is probably why the “tell the world in 150 characters the move you’ve made to make the world a better place” section does not contain simple gestures, but mainly general appeals for peace, love, and respect.There is nothing wrong with that, but concrete actions would be better. The campaign raises awareness of the global problems, but needs more serious moves.

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Just before writing these lines, I made the 102,229th move for the world. My first thought was that I could not see any human being refusing to participate in this global campaign. Based on the hottest topics affecting humans and the environment, the ICRC has built a highly effective call-to-action campaign using the most globally reaching tool, a website with a clear structure and easy navigation scheme. The campaign has a single, direct message, a massive potential audience and one relevant communications objective: to reach millions of people to act for the world. Does this single action reflect the people’s will in the real world? This is probably the core issue to evaluate: whether the humanitarian and environmental goals have been achieved. Under the umbrella of one of the world’s most recognised organisations, the campaign is primarily a corporate communications and activist engagement exercise, and a good example of campaigning: clear objectives, engaging message, emotional arguments, using celebrities as a hook and including social media for spreading the message. But the most outstanding fact is the online campaign is bolstered by onthe-ground action. Social media is changing the way we communicate and communicators should take advantage from the boost in online tools, but people must make the real difference by acting in the real world, beyond the clicking solidarity.

And online activism should not be for assuaging our conscience, but for achieving the changes the world really needs.

Prof. Sonja Utz

Miguel A.Valladares

Assistant Professor, VU University Amsterdam

Director of Communications, WWF Spain

Sonja Utz obtained her PhD in psychology at the Catholic University of Eichstätt with a thesis on the social identification with virtual communities in 1999. She researches on social networks, trustworthiness in social networks campaigning in social network sites, electronic word-of-mouth and strategic information sharing.

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Beyond the clicking solidarity

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Miguel A. Valladares is director of communications and publications at WWF Spain. He is a biologist specialising in zoology and animal behaviour with 22 years of communications, environmental training and campaigning experience at the NGO. He has also taught on environmental communications master’s courses.

to make your move.” is a call to action that has been rolled out across the RCRC’s 186 national societies.

Perhaps surprisingly, Our world.

Your move is the first worldwide RCRC campaign for ten years. It is also the movement’s first social media campaign, which, given the ubiquitous nature of the internet and personal computers, seems like a timely idea – because creating worldwide change with Web 2.0 requires local and personal interactions. The figurehead of the campaign is its multifaceted website, which presents viewers with a set of 14 varied challenges for the world to tackle. Each is given a short but emotive title – Deprived of Freedom, Women and War, Deadly Legacy, Increased Disasters, for example – and comes with harrowing descriptions of the situations that need to be turned round. At the bottom of each screen is a button inviting readers to “make their move”. In the real world, volunteers in more than 100 countries have taken part in demonstrations, exhibitions and more to get the message out to the world’s population.

For the target audience of such a campaign includes just about everybody, as Zach Abraham, the Our world. Your move campaign manager, explains. “We wanted to reach all audiences – from villages to metropolitan cities,” he says. This was attempted by targeting a number of different groups: RCRC volunteers, supporters and donors, national governments and local authorities, the traditional media (i.e. the press) and the online community.

One of the biggest potential problems of communicating with people all over the world is that of linguistic and cultural differences, which make presenting a unified, appealing message an extremely demand-

Photos: VU University Amsterdam; WWF Spain

AGENDA SETTER

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ing task. Providing information to the various national societies in advance has eased this situation, according to Abraham: “Surprisingly, we have not had any culture barriers to overcome through the campaign,” he says. “Prior to launching the campaign, we shared all the messaging and materials with our 186 RCRC societies, allowing them to give feedback. That definitely helped us protect against any cultural problems that could have arisen otherwise.” The Our world. Your move website is available in eight languages, and Abraham acknowledges that this is not always easy to manage. “With regards to language, the biggest challenge is translation cost,” he says. “In the next few years, I believe that online

The days of a standard press release being the centre of media attention are fading. translation tools like Google translate will help reduce costs, but we will have a continued need to review translations to avoid possible misinterpretation or mistranslation of ideas.” The website’s blog section is a case in point here, with each entry being translated into the eight languages. Of course, people commenting on the blog posts are doing so in their respective languages, which may not help in getting a unified message out.

MAKING A REAL MOVE As usual, the major difficulty with using a website as your main communications tool is in its online nature. It is easy to be an armchair activist, happily clicking away on links and making your moves virtually. But what effect does this have on the real world? On writing this, nearly 105,000 moves have been made on the Our world.

Your move website, but most of these amount to publicising or following the cause on other social networking sites. Unsurprisingly, however, Zach Abraham is rather impressed with the influence of social media as a communications tool: “Social media has revolutionised the way we communicate to the general public,” he says. “We are no longer solely reliant on the press to promote our stories.

Tools such as Twitter, blogs, Facebook and YouTube all allow us to communicate directly with our audience.” And Abraham believes that online communication is not too dissimilar from its more traditional counterparts. “We are already seeing that online action is the same thing as realworld action. The viral effect that videos and Twitter have has changed the way messages are spread. Individuals can now have a global voice without a global machinery of marketers and communicators. All it takes is one video, tweet or photo to go viral. The days of a standard press release being the centre of media attention are fading.”

Of course, a message or video going viral online results in a great number of people seeing a campaign’s message.

Getting those people to then go outside and do something, make a real-world change, is something completely different. Our world. Your move has bolstered its online presence with hundreds of events in countries around the world. A campaign bus in Lebanon made stops in more than 20 cities between May and August, providing a photo exhibition on the victims of war and first aid demonstrations from volunteers. In June, 13,000 young people gathered in Solferino to learn more about making a difference.

And in South Africa, volunteers provided advice on HIV and AIDS. The campaign has also used celebrity power to reach out to more people, with stars like the footballer Lionel Messi pledging their public support.

Ultimately, the success of Our world. Your move will rest on the will of the public. “It is about engaging people in making a difference at the local level,” says Abraham. “We have been asking people to make a simple gesture and to tell the world about that gesture on one of the campaign platforms. Even people severely affected by the economic crisis could still engage in positive action by simply taking a moment to help a neighbour, assist an elderly person, open a door for someone whose hands were full – engaging in positive actions.” Simple gestures are a start. But opening a door for someone is not going to put food on the plates of starving African children. Perhaps this is one case where all the communications in the world can only make so much difference. Because Our world. Your move can only tell people why they need to change the world. Now it is down to us to really make it happen.

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LEADERS CEOs in the eyes of the media

CEO STOCKWATCH Watching the people who run the commercial world provided by CARMA International By the final quarter of 2009, most of the major economies had started to grow again – including the US, Japan, Germany and France, but with the notable exception of the UK. However, hopes that the tender green shoots of recovery would rapidly blossom were tempered by worries about huge public debt burdens, high levels of unemployment and continuing concerns about the health of financial institutions. As a result, from October 1 to December 14 2009 (the period covered by Carma International’s latest survey of media coverage of the world’s leading CEOs), business leaders’ views of the economic outlook were mixed, with many expressing caution that economic recovery was likely to be sluggish and drawn-out.

addressed financial sector regulation and the curbing of

pay and bonuses at financial institutions propped up by taxpayers’ money. A chasm appeared to be widening between public anger and frustration over financiers’ pay and bonuses and the protestations of bankers themselves, who seemed to inhabit a parallel universe far removed from the harsh economic realities facing the rest of society.

Unsurprisingly, in Carma’s latest survey of reporting on business leaders, CEOs of banks and financial institutions continued to feature heavily, accounting for eight of the top 20 positions, testifying once again to the media’s continued fascination with their activities in the aftermath of the near-collapse of the global banking system in 2008. The listing included a number of the usual suspects, such as Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway and Ken Lewis of Bank of America, who remained within the top four slots. Other names that also featured in the previous quarter’s top 20 listing were Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman

Top 20 CEOs worldwide | Top CEOs by volume in Q4

Top 20 CEOs in Europe | Volume of coverage in Q4

AUTOMOTIVE AND BANKING INDUSTRY IN THE SPOTLIGHT On both sides of the Atlantic, politicians

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Buffett / Berkshire Hathaway Lewis / Bank Of America Henderson / General Motors Murdoch / News Corp Ambani / Reliance Industries Immelt / General Electric Blankfein / Goldman Sachs Schmidt / Google Benmosche / AIG Pandit / Citigroup Ackermann / Deutsche Bank Marchionne / Fiat Dimon / Jp Morgan Ballmer / Microsoft Otellini / Intel Rosenfeld / Kraft Foods Ghosn / Nissan/Renault Mittal / Arcelor Smith / ANZ Thodey / Telstra

Henderson / General Motors Buffett / Berkshire Hathaway Murdoch / News Corp Lewis / Bank Of America Ackermann / Deutsche Bank Blankfein / Goldman Sachs Winterkorn / Volkswagen Immelt / General Electric Marchionne / Fiat Rose / Marks & Spencers Ballmer / Microsoft Rosenfeld / Kraft Foods Schmidt / Google Gref / Sberbank Lombard / France Telekom Walsh / British Airways Daniles / Lloyds TSB Ghosn / Nissan/Renault Zetsche / Daimler Stitzer / Cadbury

0

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180

240

0

30

60

90

120

LEADERS

Quality of CEO coverage | Percentage of favourable, neutral and unfavourable coverage favourable

neutral

unfavourable

Thodey Smith Mittal Ghosn Rosenfeld Otellini Ballmer Dimon Marchionne Ackermann Pandit Benmosche Schmidt Blankfein Immelt Ambani Lewis Murdoch Henderson Buffett

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Sachs in seventh position, Robert Benmosche, who last quarter replaced Eric Liddy in the firing line at the troubled US insurer AIG, in ninth position, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup in 10th, Josef Ackermann of Deutsche Bank in 11th position and Mike Smith of ANZ in 19th position. Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan at 13th position entered Themes most beneficial for CEOs | Favourability of topics % favourable

% neutral

% unfavourable

100% 80% 60% 40% 20%

Society

Environment

Labour

Governance

Legal

Products

Commercial

Management

Finance

0%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

from outside last quarter’s top 20. Car makers also continued to attract media attention, with Fritz Henderson of General Motors still high up in the listing despite being forced out as CEO by the board by early December. Sergio Marchionne of Fiat (12th) and Carlos Ghosn of NissanRenault (17th) also generated interest as the leaders of the car industry continued to drive forward the sector’s global restructuring.

TRANSACTIONS RAISE AWARENESS Mergers and acquisitions activity thrust Mukesh Ambani of the Indian energy giant Reliance Industries into the media spotlight, while Kraft Foods’ hostile stalking of rival confectioner Cadbury kept CEO Irene Rosenfeld on reporters’ watch lists. Her counterpart at Cadbury, Todd Stitzer, featured in the listing of top European CEOs, but finished well outside the top 20 CEOs in terms of global coverage. Those veterans of media attention – Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdoch – retained high positions in the global ranking.

Buffett received coverage for striking the biggest deal of his life over the period: his 26.6 billion dollars takeover of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, one of the largest US railroad operators. CEOs of IT companies were also represented in the top 20, led by Eric Schmidt of Google 01/2010

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LEADERS

The best and worst presented CEOs | Top performers vs bottom performers: differences in topic 100%

Products, services Management Legal

80%

Labour

% of volume

Society Governance

60%

Finance Commercial

40%

20%

0% Ambani

Marchionne

Henderson

Otellini

Best performers on favourability

Blankfein

Worst performers on favourability

(eighth) and followed by Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (14th) and Paul Otellini at Intel (15th).

The survey’s analysis of the focus of reporting showed that finance continued to be the dominant issue, accounting for around 47 per cent of overall coverage of issues followed by management with 25 per cent and commercial with 11 per cent. Products/services still accounted for a small proportion, representing around five per cent of overall reporting, as did legal issues. Governance, la-

bour, environment and society remained marginal issues, accounting for the smallest shares of coverage. In terms of the themes that proved most beneficial for CEOs, articles that focused on governance emerged with a high percentage of favourable coverage, though the theme also represented a high proportion of negative reporting. The themes of management, commercial and products/services accounted for small, but significant, shares of favourable reporting.

Top CEOs | Geographic spread of coverage

Themes most associated with CEOs | Share of coverage of issues in media

APAC

LATAM

EMEA

NAM

Environment (1%) Governance (2%) Legal (5%)

100%

Labour (1%) Society (1%)

Products/Service (5%)

80%

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Lewis

60% Management (25%)

40% 20% 0%

Ambani MarchionneOtellini Henderson Lewis

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Blankfein

Commercial (11%)

Finance (47%)

LEADERS

CASE STUDY OF A GLOBAL CEO: LLOYD BLANKFEIN OF GOLDMAN SACHS The spectacle of Goldman Sachs

storming back to profitability in 2009, far from enhancing its image, served to focus public outrage over pay and bonuses on the US investment bank. The Financial Times, in an article of December 5/6 entitled Risky Rewards, said

Goldman Reaps Rich Rewards From Crisis (Financial Times, October 16)

Goldman Bonuses to be in Shares Amid Effort to Quell Public Anger (Financial Times, December 4)

Euro

Goldman Sachs | Blankfein doing “God’s work” 195 190 185 180 175 170 165

Goldman Offers $500m Apology for Crisis (Financial Times, November 18)

160 155 150

01.10.2009 03.10.2009 05.10.2009 07.10.2009 09.10.2009 11.10.2009 13.10.2009 15.10.2009 17.10.2009 19.10.2009 21.10.2009 23.10.2009 25.10.2009 27.10.2009 29.10.2009 31.10.2009 02.11.2009 04.11.2009 06.11.2009 08.11.2009 10.11.2009 12.11.2009 14.11.2009 16.11.2009 18.11.2009 20.11.2009 22.11.2009 24.11.2009 26.11.2009 28.11.2009 30.11.2009 02.12.2009 04.12.2009 06.12.2009 08.12.2009 10.12.2009 12.12.2009 14.12.2009

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Goldman Sachs had “been cast in the role of financial villain as its soaring profits herald the promise of a bumper pay day for its staff.” The Sunday Times, in an interview with Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein published on November 8, said: “The public, politicians and the press blame bankers’ reckless trading for the credit crunch and, as the most successful bank still standing, Goldman is their prime target.”

The article continued: “Goldman’s reputation is suddenly as toxic as the credit default swaps and other inexplicably exotic financial instruments it used to buy with glee.”

Lloyd Blankfein had his work cut out in refuting the criticism. Instead of hiding from the world’s media, Blankfein engaged in a charm offensive to defend the bank’s pay policies. Over the period covered by Carma’s survey, Blankfein scored the highest percentage of unfavourable reports of the top 20 CEOs. Nevertheless, these negative reports represented just five per cent of Blankfein’s overall coverage, suggesting that the media generally did not hold the CEO personally accountable for the perceived sins of his firm. That said, Blankfein’s efforts with the media failed to win much support for Goldman’s share price, which slid around nine per cent over the period covered by the Carma survey, while the S&P 500 index gained eight per cent.

Goldman’s share price fell despite its rebound in profitability for the first nine months of 2009, a notable achievement after the bank was pulled back from the edge of the

abyss by a 10 billion dollars lifeline thrown by the US government. Earlier this year it repaid the US Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) loan and has also raised billions of dollars from investors, including Warren Buffett.

Goldman’s rebound, however, far from appeasing public and political fury over pay and bonuses, seemed to heap hot coals on the fire: “Goldman reaps rich rewards from crisis” and “Goldman looks ready to match record bonus pool of 2007,” said Financial Times headlines of October 16.

The Wall Street Journal Europe commented that Goldman was “hoping to defuse a politically combustible situation” with a “softsell campaign that pushes the usually reticent bank into the spotlight.” It went on: “For months, the New York firm has been working to dispel what it sees as misperceptions about itself to make its profit and bonuses go down easier, from a lobbying push in Washington to media interviews in which Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein reminisces about his humble roots.” (October 16, Goldman Shows its Soft Side). On October 12, the paper had carried an interview with Blankfein, which described the Goldman CEO as professing “to be more bemused than hurt by the slurs.” (Wall Street Journal Europe, The Bank Everyone Likes to Hate, October 12).

Blankfein | Coverage by region

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17 HARSH CRITICISM The press-schmoozing backfired spectacularly when Blankfein quipped that he was “doing God’s work” during the Sunday Times interview of November 8 (I’m Doing ‘God’s work.’ Meet Mr Goldman Sachs). The remark brought ridicule and was even criticised by religious leaders: “The blogs are now abuzz with a spoof 01/2010

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SPOTLIGHT ON A STRONG NATIONAL CEO: MUKESH AMBANI OF RELIANCE INDUSTRIES Mukesh

Ambani of Indian energy giant Reliance Industries leapt into the top 20 CEOs by volume of reporting over the latest period covered by the CEO survey. Intense coverage in Asian media thrust Ambani, who is India’s richest man, into the limelight. He was one of only three CEOs of Asian companies that found their way to the top of the ranking (Mike Smith of Australian bank ANZ and David Thodey of Telstra were the other two). Ambani also achieved the distinction of scoring the highest proportion of favourable reporting among the top 20 CEOs over the period.

The Economic Times of India accounted for the bulk of coverage of Ambani, with much of its reporting following the latest twists and turns of a long-running legal battle over the supply of gas by Reliance Industries, led by Mukesh Ambani, to Reliance Natural Resources (RNR), the company controlled by Mukesh’s younger brother Anil.

Anil was seeking to enforce a family pact requiring Reliance Industries to sell gas to RNR at a price below the government-approved price. The dispute between the two brothers started to be heard by the Supreme Court on October 20.

That the tone of reporting of the feuding between Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother was not unfavourable is perhaps evidence of the regard in which Ambani is held by Indian society. Indeed, he took two decisions over the period that show that he knows the importance of pleasing his investors and the public. First, in October, he announced that Reliance Industries would give one bonus share for every share owned Reliance Industries | A show of confidence Euro

PERSON OF THE YEAR In December, Blankfein responded to fury over pay by changing the bonus policy for Goldman’s 30 top executives so they are rewarded in shares that cannot be sold for five years, instead of cash. “We believe our compensation policies are the strongest in our industry and ensure that compensation accurately reflects the firm’s performance and incentivises behaviour that is in the public’s and our shareholders’ best interests,” Blankfein was quoted as saying (Wall Street Journal Europe, Goldman Bows to Pay Pressure, December 11).

In late December, the Financial Times paid Blankfein the compliment of naming him its “Person of the Year”: “His job and personality have made him the public face of Wall Street during its most testing period since the 1930s,” it said. However, the paper pointed out that the award was “not an unalloyed endorsement of either Mr Blankfein or Goldman, which the FT has sometimes criticised in the past year. Instead, it is a recognition that Mr Blankfein and his bank have taken the leading place in the world of finance, while others have fallen by the wayside” (Master of Risk Who Did God’s Work for Goldman Sachs but Won it Little Love, Financial Times, December 23).

Blankfein’s efforts to rebut criticism of Goldman had mixed results. His apology on behalf of Goldman for its part in fuelling the crisis might have been more effective in quelling public anger if it had come earlier. Similarly, the bank’s announcement on changes to its bonus policies for top executives did not occur until December. This meant the bank appeared to be bowing to public pressure instead of taking action for internally motivated reasons of corporate conscience. His jokey comment that he was “doing God’s

work” was much bandied around the media and shows the need for CEOs to choose their words carefully. Nevertheless, as the FT recognised, Blankfein also “steered Goldman adeptly through the crisis.” A CEO’s ability to drive execution will always be the paramount concern.

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Mukesh Ambani Takes 66% Pay Cut (Economic Times of India, October 16)

Reliance Close to Sealing Big-Bang Overseas Buy (Economic Times of India, November 9)

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‘Lloyd’s prayer’,” remarked the Financial Times (November 19, A Lost Glister). The article also noted that the bank had been branded a “vampire squid” by Rolling Stone magazine, as it “made the most of government money and stormed back to the top of Wall Street.” Whether provoked by this slip-up or not, Goldman’s public relations policy appeared to switch into a readiness to eat humble pie. Blankfein apologised for the role the vilified investment bank played in the financial crisis and announced it was pledging 500 million dollars over five years to help 10,000 small businesses across the US recover from recession. Blankfein told a corporate conference in New York that Goldman regretted its part in the cheap credit boom that had fuelled the pre-crisis bubble: “We participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret. We apologise.” (Financial Times, Goldman Offers 500 Million Dollars Apology for Crisis, November 18).

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in the company, in a “move intended to signal confidence to investors about the company’s growth prospects.” (Economic Times of India, RIL Kicks Off Festivities, October 8). A day later, the Economic Times reported Ambani’s assertion that Reliance Industries had “a long tradition of leaving something on the table for its shareholders.”

Second, Mukesh Ambani announced he would take a 66 per cent pay cut for 2008-2009 by capping his salary at 150 million rupees. This followed younger brother Anil’s decision in March not to take salary and commissions from the companies he manages. The Economic Times of India applauded Mukesh’s decision: “One can crib that Rs15 crore (150 million rupees) is not particularly austere. But the elder Ambani sends out the right signal that, at a time of widespread misery following slowdown, drought epidemic and now floods, the richest of the land will, if not quite share the sorrow, shed a part of their pleasure.” (Economic Times, Ambani | Coverage by region

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Mukesh Ambani Gets it Right, October 17). Mukesh Ambani also won praise from the government for his decision, with an official quoted as saying that he had shown a “remarkable sensibility to the prevailing scenario” (Economic Times, Khushid Lauds Mukesh’s Voluntary Pay Cut Move, October 17).

In another surprise move, news broke in early November that Reliance Industries had bid to buy a controlling stake in LyondellBasell, a Rotterdam-based bankrupt petrochemicals company. The Economic Times observed that the deal might take a while to close as it would have to go

through bankruptcy laws (It’s Advantage RIL in LyondellBasell Bid, November 10). The deal, if completed, would make Reliance one of the world’s largest petrochemicals companies. Initially, shares in Reliance rose on the news.

On November 23, the Financial Times reported that Reliance had made a preliminary non-binding cash offer of 10 billion dollars for LyondellBasell (Reliance Plans 10 Billion Dollars Cash Offer for Control of LyondellBasell, November 23). Reliance Industries shares, which have the largest weight in the Mumbai stock market index, plunged on November 25 and ended 51 per cent lower on December 14 than at the start of the period, on October 1. In contrast, the Mumbai stock market index finished the period flat.

TOP CEOS IN EUROPE Analysis of the CEO names

that attracted the most coverage in European and US media once again showed marked differences. In European media, Fritz Henderson of General Motors took first place, but finished third in US media. Ken Lewis was the most covered CEO in the US, but came only fifth in Europe. Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway was the second most covered name in both the US and Europe. Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation took third place in Europe and fourth in the US. Besides these four, only Jeff Immelt of General Electric and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs featured in the top 10 names in both continents. The list of top 10 CEOs in US media included four names that were outsiders in European titles: Robert Benmosche of AIG, Eric Schmidt of Google, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan and Brian Roberts of Comcast. In European media, four of the top ten most reported names were CEOs of European companies, with Josef Ackermann of Deutsche Bank in fifth place, Martin Winterkorn of Volkswagen in seventh place, Sergio Marchionne of Fiat in ninth and Stuart Rose of Marks & Spencer finishing 10th. None of the four appeared in the top ten in US media: Sergio Marchionne finished just outside at twelfth, but Ackermann, Winterkorn and Rose were way down the US list in terms of volume of reporting.

SPOTLIGHT ON EUROPEAN CEOS: MICHAEL GEOGHEGAN OF HSBC Michael Geoghegan of HSBC

featured within the top 20 European CEOs and presided over a significantly stronger share performance than the bank’s UK competitors. Coverage of the HSBC helmsman included reporting of his downbeat views on the economic outlook and his disappointment at the likelihood that the bank was likely to be frozen out of bidding for assets being sold by Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Lloyds Banking Group. In contrast to the more optimistic tone adopted by 01/2010

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some CEOs, Geoghegan told the Financial Times that he was so convinced there would be a second downturn in the coming months that he planned to delay any rush to expand the bank. “Is this a V recovery or a W? [I think] it’s the latter. [If I’m right], we have to be very careful we don’t grow the balance sheet so far before the recovery has come only to write it back into the impairment line later on. I’m cautious

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HSBC Makes Further Changes to Strengthen Asian Business (Financial Times, October 14)

about growing too fast,’” (Financial Times, HSBC Chief Delays Growth Plans Over Fears of a Second Downturn, October 5).

Despite this apparent caution about expansion, HSBC was reported to be in advanced talks to buy separate Asian assets being sold by ING, the Dutch lender, and RBS. This was a “further sign of its rising commitment to expand in the reGeoghegan | Coverage by region

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gion,” said the Financial Times (HSBC Eyes ING and RBS Assets, October 8). In September, HSBC had announced its decision to relocate Michael Geoghegan to Hong Kong. In mid October, it made further changes at the senior management level to further strengthen its position in Asia.

In November, Geoghegan expressed regret that HSBC was likely to be excluded from the bidding process for assets being sold by RBS and Lloyds in the UK. He told the Financial Times that though HSBC had not been explicitly banned from the sales, it was unlikely to be allowed to bid as the government was determined to see them sold to new competitors. “We are somewhat frustrated that there may not be a level playing field… HSBC is not as large in the UK and we feel we should be able to participate.” (Financial Times, HSBC Fears Lloyds and RBS Sales Exclusion November 11). On a more positive note, Geoghegan remarked on the media perception of a growing gulf between UK banks following the crisis. He said: “Two very different types of banks [are emerging] from this crisis – the winners and the losers.” (The Financial Times, HSBC and Barclays Lead 2-tier UK banks, November 11). His comment is in line with a media perception that HSBC and Barclays are the winners, with both expected to report decent profits for 2009.

SERGIO MARCHIONNE OF FIAT/CHRYSLER Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Fiat, was appointed by president Obama’s administration to take over the steering wheel at Chrysler in June, after the US car maker filed for bankruptcy on April 30. In a strategic alliance, Fiat would take 20 per cent of the new firm comprising Chrysler’s good assets, while Fiat would contribute technology to make smaller Chryslers. Following the deal announcement, Chrysler under Marchionne had shied away from media engagement. This reluctance to communicate with the media was in marked contrast with the proactive public relations approach of Fritz Henderson of General Motors (who was booted out by GM’s board by early December).

This survey, Sergio Marchionne became the subject of more reporting, finishing within the top 20 CEOs in terms of global volume (he was just outside in the previous survey).

However, at 12th in the global ranking, Marchionne was still way below Fritz Henderson, who finished third. Marchionne became Fiat CEO in June 2004, and brought the Italian car maker back from the brink of ruin to profitability in 2005. In a report of October 15, The Financial Times commented: “Mr Marchionne has yet to unveil his five-year recovery plan for Chrysler, but investors are already getting carried away by betting he will manage to pull off anoth-

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Chrysler’s Chief Says Recovery Under Way (Wall Street Journal US, November 5)

er spectacular industrial turnaround.” It pointed out that since he took over at Chrysler, Fiat shares had dramatically outperformed those of the Italian group’s European peers.

Investors were “banking on Mr Marchionne working the same magic at Chrysler” as he had at Fiat (The Financial Times, The Burden of Expectation of Italy’s Car Superhero, October 15). Over the period covered by the survey, Fiat shares rose 7.8 per cent. Media reporting over the period included Marchionne’s decision to allow Chrysler’s producMarchionne | Coverage by region

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tion agreement with Magna, the automotive supplier, to lapse: this would be “one of the biggest steps taken so far

by Fiat Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne to take control of Chrysler’s product development,” said the Wall Street Journal Europe on October 1. The paper also reported on

the reshuffle of top executives at the Chrysler and Dodge brands on October 6. On November 4, Marchionne finally unveiled Chrysler’s five-year plan: “Today is the first day of a new Chrysler. We have laid out our plans and we have become publicly accountable for the delivery,” he was quoted as saying by The Wall Street Journal US (Chrysler’s Chief Says Recovery Under Way, November 5). He rebutted suggestions that the firm was losing money, saying it had broken even in September. The plan included revamping the Dodge and Chrysler brands, a newly created Ram brand for its truck line, and new technology and cost savings.

Sergio Marchionne’s reserve with the media did not appear to have hurt either his own standing or Fiat’s share performance. However, remaining silent for a number of weeks, or even months, is usually a risky and controversial strategy for a CEO. Its success depends on the existing strength of the CEO’s reputation and a good sense of timing for the moment of reopening communication with the media. A comment in the Wall Street Journal Europe suggested that Marchionne was aware there was a right time to talk: he “acknowledged the long silent period would hurt the company,” (November US Car Sales Rose, December 2).

WHAT WE LEARN For communications specialists, there are a number of conclusions that can be drawn from the CEOs highlighted in Carma’s latest survey. Lloyd Blankfein was more successful at steering Goldman Sachs through the financial crisis and bringing it back to profitability than he was at rebutting criticism over its pay and bonuses. That his charm offensive with the world’s media yielded mixed results was perhaps because the bank appeared unrepentant for perceived wrongdoings for too long.

The apology, and changes to the bank’s bonuses policies, if they had come earlier, may have done more to assuage public anger, and brought more appreciation for Blankfein’s success in turning around the bank’s fortunes.

Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries showed skill in communicating with shareholders and the public, and the importance of empathy with the opinion at large.

Michael Geoghegan’s reference to the perception of a growing gulf between winners and losers among UK banks positioned him as a cautious and wise banker. His downbeat views on the economic outlook made for interesting reading, as did his disappointment at being shut out from bidding for rivals’ assets.

Sergio Marchionne showed that a period of silence can, paradoxically, be an effective communications strategy for a CEO, though the jury is still out on how positive it may prove to be for Fiat and Chrysler.

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������������������������������������� ���������������� ��������������������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������������������� � ��������� ����������� ����� ��������������������������� ����������������������������������������������� �������������������������������������� �������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� � � ��������� ��������������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������� ����������� ������������������������������������������� ������� ������������������������������������������� ���������������� ������� ������������ ��������������������������������������������� ������� � ��������������������� ������������������������������� ������������������ ����������� ��������� ������������������ �������������������������������������������������������������������� �������������������� ��������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������� � ������������������� ���� ������������������������������������������������������ ������������ ������� ������������������������������������ ����� ����������� �������������������������������� ���� ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������� ������������������������� �������������������������� ������������ ����������������������� ������������������ ����������������������� ���������������������������������� ����������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������ ��������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������� ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� �������������������� ������������������������ � ������� ���� �������������������� ����������� ��������������������� ����������������������� � ������������������� ������������������������� ����������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������� ����� ����������������������� ������������������� ����������������������� ��� ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������� �������������� ��������������������������������� �������������� ����������������������� ��������������������������������� ����������� �������������������������� ������������������ ���������������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������ �������� ������������ ������������������������������� ������������������������������� ������������������������ ������������������� � ������������������������������������������� ������� ����������������������������������������

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STRATEGIC THINKER The corporate and academic stand on communication

SCANNING FOR INFORMATION A study of journalists by Daimler revealed how the minds of this important group of stakeholders work.

by Jörg Howe

A

dynamic exchange between corporate spokespersons and journalists about their cooperation is crucial for professional corporate communications. However, in a fast-paced business environment it is often difficult to find the time and proper occasion for discussing issues that go beyond operational routines; and even if an exchange takes place, the information gained must be viewed as anecdotal since it is almost always based on the perceptions of only one or a few journalists. This is especially true of big organisations with relationships to journalists from diverse backgrounds with different professional attitudes and interests. Furthermore, spokespersons and journalists can not always speak frankly and say what they really think about the relationship to the professional counterparts in face-to-face conversations.

An anonymous quantitative survey among journalists who regularly report on one’s own organisation can function as a valuable instrument for finding out about the communication department’s strengths and weaknesses.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES An anonymous quantitative survey among journalists who regularly report on one’s own organisation avoids these problems for

Design of the survey Measuring media relations performance and corporate reputation

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Media relations performance

Content

Specialisation

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Position

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Reputation

CEO

Involvement

the most part. It can function as a valuable instrument for finding out about the communication department’s strengths and weaknesses and arriving at a reliable assessment of the department’s performance. For all these reasons, Daimler’s communication department conducted a comprehensive survey among journalists who generally report on us and our products. The survey was carried out in April and May 2009 with support from the department of communication management and public relations at Leipzig University. Together, it was our aim to create a valid and sustainable instrument that would go beyond the customary surveys

Organisation

Journalists

being offered by external service providers. In our opinion, most of these surveys often lack the necessary depth and precision, which makes it hard to draw any conclusions on how to optimise communication activities. Since this is exactly the yardstick for the value added of empirical research in an organisational context, we decided to invest additional resources in order to guarantee that the research design would be in line with our specific needs and to make sure that the survey generates relevant information for our operations.

JOURNALISTS INVOLVED WITH THE COMPANY In order

to achieve this goal, the survey had

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to focus primarily on journalists who are actually involved with the company and as such are crucial for image and reputation building among different stakeholder groups. In our case, we were able to utilise our department’s distribution lists, thus guaranteeing the relevance of the participants for us: 90 per cent of the 652 journalists who took part in the survey confirmed that they either report

directly on the company or edit media content dealing with the company or its products.

HIGH ACCEPTANCE OF THE STUDY A research

firm conducted the actual telephone survey. The interviews lasted 17 minutes on average. Although that might already be too much time to cut out of a journalist’s busy work schedule, the interviews in our survey were interrupted in only six occasions. Roughly 30 per cent of those being called refused to take part in the survey, which is an acceptable quota. The high acceptance of the study among the journalists can be partly ascribed to the timely 01/2010

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announcement of the study by email approximately two weeks before the start of the survey, stating the date, length and objectives of the study. Additionally, we enabled journalists to refuse to participate by simply answering the email. This is only fair, and reduces the possibility of annoying important stakeholders with an unexpected telephone survey during their stressful daily business.

It is crucial to elevate the journalists’ professional situation and possible specialisation. For a car manufacturer, this involves distinguishing between business journalists and motor journalists but, of course, also between TV, print and online journalists concerning the evaluations of test drives and press conferences, for example. Collecting this data is a prerequisite for the subsequent in-depth analysis of different journalist groups. In addition, the survey results can be connected to specific units in the communication department. Thus, we were able to separately evaluate the performance of the units in our communication department concluding from the answers of respective journalist groups included in the overall sample.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Surefire survey success Preview the survey via email.

Clear responsibilites for the project should be set within the department.

Sampling must reflect the opinions of relevant journalists.

A survey requires both external and internal support.

issues, like the relationship between the journalists and our spokespersons and, of course, the overall assessment of our work and the work of our main competitors.

Within this framework, the design of the study enables us to merge the approximately 100 items into greater categories like Content and Services.

It is also possible to abstract specific indices reflecting the performance of different units and communication initiatives. Hence, the survey did not only allow for immediate improvements of our work, but it also creates valid and reliable performance figures for a long-term communication controlling approach.

EVALUATING MEDIA RELATIONS We asked the journalists to evaluate different aspects of our media relations.

Within the scope of 25 sets of questions, the study covered evaluations of PR material, different communication channels and press conferences. It also addressed more complex Media types Basis: All journalists. N:652

Other 2% Radio 2%

News Agencies 3%

TV 10% Print 59% Online 6%

26 Print and Online 18%

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SOME JOURNALISTS WERE MORE CRITICAL One concrete

finding of the survey showed that the majority of the polled journalists are satisfied with our work and attribute a high degree of professionalism to us. We were of course pleased by these results, especially because they were being confirmed by another independent study by the polling firm com.X-Institut. However, a more focused analysis showed that important journalist groups within the overall sample assessed our work

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more critically. Business journalists, for example, demanded more background information with regards to specific issues and a more open dialogue. Qualitative elements of the study pointed in the same direction.

We have therefore started an initiative to better meet the demands of this important stakeholder group.

NEW COMMUNICATION CHANNELS Besides asking the

Relatively low acceptance of Twitter and RSS feeds Basis: All journalists reporting on Daimler. N: 490 to 535 Yes, I would use it RSS-Feed

Twitter

21%

0%

Only seven per cent could imagine using official Daimler tweets to inform themselves about the company.

Photo: Christian Klose

ANALYSING CORPORATE REPUTATION We also asked questions

addressing the overall reputation and more specific reputation criteria of our company. We inquired, for example, about Daimler’s innovation image in relation to the development of alternative drivetrains. In this context, the journalists believe that Daimler will

79%

92%

8%

journalists to directly assess our work, we also elevated the journalists’ preferences for new and established communication channels. Within this context, the study showed that on the one hand traditional channels like fax and mail have significantly lost acceptance among journalists: 69 per cent of all polled journalists said that they do not wish to receive any

information from Daimler by fax in the future. On the other hand, the study also supported our assumption that Web 2.0 channels are not yet adequate for communicating with journalists: only seven per cent could imagine using official Daimler tweets to inform themselves about the company.

No, I would not use it

25%

50%

75%

100%

advance to a leading position in the years ahead. Thus the study informed us of the high expectations among journalists in respect of our R&D capabilities, and we can now deliberate about the best response to this situation. Conducting a survey with a relatively large sample and a reasonable level of detail requires both time and resources. The exact costs of the study depend on the company’s existent inhouse expertise in empirical social research and the resulting need for external expertise.

In most cases, the actual polling can not be carried out by employees, so the service has to be purchased from a service provider. On the other hand, employees must follow the development of the questionnaire and the interpretation of results very closely, since they have greater understanding of internal demands and know-how for integrating the results in the communication manJörg Howe agement processes. ThereHead of Global Communications, Daimler fore, it is important to define clear responsibilities for the project within the department and set specific objectives for the unit from the start. Nonetheless, a reliable external partner is definitely helpful when Jörg Howe has been Daimler‘s it comes to bringing in an head of global communicatiadditional perspective on ons since 2008. Prior to joining the project. Therefore, we the German automotive firm, opted for a mixed approach, he was head of corporate communications at holding which involved assigning company Arcandor. Earlier in internal resources to the his career, Howe was editor-inproject as well as utilising chief of German commercial television channel Sat. 1. external expertise.

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CAMPAIGNING WITHOUT CANDIDATES The recent election of the first president of the European Council upturned received wisdom about communications around an election campaign.

by Peter Van Aelst

I

n recent years, election campaigns have received growing attention from scholars in the fields of political communication and political marketing around the world. Debate performances, media coverage, the role of political advisors, opinion polling – in many western countries all these aspects are studied empirically.

As a consequence, our knowledge of political campaigning has grown accordingly. However, this knowledge seems rather useless in explaining the process that preceded the recent election of the first president of the European council. Not only because it was not a classical election by the people (but rather an appointment by colleagues), but also because the basic rules of political campaigning did not apply. On the contrary we witnessed a reversed

None of the people who were frequently named in the media as possible candidates confirmed they were.

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campaign logic that I will briefly explain with four basic lessons. Special attention will be given to Herman Van Rompuy, the former Belgian prime minister and the new ‘Mr Europe’, who proved better in this form of reversed campaigning than his competitors and his Belgian colleagues who failed to win major EU positions in the past.

CAMPAIGN LESSON 1: LOW VISIBILITY Probably the primary reason why politicians campaign is to get public attention, mostly via the mass media. It is not a sufficient reason to get elected, but with low public visibility a political candidate does not stand any chance of succeeding. It 01/2010

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explains why, for instance, US presidential candidates spend millions on advertisements and European parties try to create pseudo-events that can foster free media attention. In the case of the EU presidental election, the opposite is true: the less attention the better. Actually, visibility is seen as problematic because one is not supposed to openly campaign for the job. None of the people who were frequently named in the media as possible candidates confirmed they were. Even former UK prime minister Tony Blair, who was long considered the main candidate, never officially applied for the job (although the Labour government had stated months before that they were supporting Blair’s candidature for president of the council). The Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, called the strong rumours of his candidacy “nonsense”. This did not hinder the Dutch press from devoting massive attention to the possible promotion of their prime minister and the consequences for the Dutch government.

The main problem of such high visibility is that opposing countries also start focussing on the candidate and may start a negative campaign against him or her. Herman Van Rompuy

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managed to keep his name low on the bookmakers’ lists until two weeks before the election, although he was already contacted in the summer about his availability for the job. In the last week before the election, the British tabloids in particular started to criticise and mock him in different ways, but it was too late to organise real opposition.

Photo: Photographic service of the Council of the EU © European Communities

CAMPAIGN LESSON 2: NO OPEN SUPPORT In order to suc-

ceed, a political candidate normally needs support, not only from within his or her own party, but also from outsiders such as interest groups or public figures, as their open approval can convince others to follow their example. Nowadays, the public endorsements of celebrities are seen as especially beneficial to a successful campaign. Again, for the election of the EU presidency, the opposite is true: the less public support, the better. The problem with public support is not only that it leads to more visibility, but moreover that other countries might feel the decision is already taken without them. This is what happened in 1994, when German chancellor Helmut Kohl and French president Françoise Mitterrand did not include the British prime minister, John Major, in their decision to back the Belgian prime minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, as head of the EU Commission. Eventually, Major blocked Dehaene. A similar situation occurred ten years later, when German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French president Jacques Chirac somewhat too eagerly supported the Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, which led other countries supporting the British prime minister, Tony Blair, in his opposition against the Belgian. It seems that people have learned from

Herman Van Rompuy

the past this time, as President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel were both extremely careful in expressing their sympathies for their favourite candidate – Van Rompuy.

Also, Van Rompuy learned from his Belgian colleagues who failed in the past, and was more modest in seeking support. He made some strategic visits to other European leaders but avoided a real promotional campaign in the EU capitals.

CAMPAIGN LESSON 3: NO PROGRAMME In traditional campaigns, candidates need a programme. Perhaps the time of big ideological stories is over, but, more than ever, specific issues play a central role in an election contest. One could even argue that campaigns are a battle of candidates who try to focus the debate on ‘their’ issues.

However, this basic rule did not apply to the campaign for the EU presidency, where substantive statements were avoided as much as possible. Somewhat cynically, one could see this as the main strength of Van Rompuy: because of his short time in office as a prime minister, he 01/2010

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STRATEGIC THINKER

Tony Blair

CAMPAIGN LESSON 4: DIPLOMATS INSTEAD OF SPIN DOCTORS One of the most documented parts of

modern political campaigning is the growing role of external professionals who advise politicians and candidates on their strategies, particlarly people specialised in market research, media management, and strategic communication. In the US, these people operate mostly as external consultants, whereas in Europe these experts function often within the party organisation itself. In the case of the EU presidential election, no such campaign teams were established. However, a different type of professional was

In his long past as a national politician, Van Rompuy never devoted much attention to European policy.

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(very) active in the behind the scenes campaign, namely higher ranked civil servants and former diplomats. Because the candidates for the job are not supposed to be campaigning, the diplomats have to do it for them. I must admit that we have little hard evidence on who did exactly what. Several sources confirmed, for instance, that Dutch diplomats approached colleagues and politicians advocating for their candidate. In the case of Van Rompuy, it has 01/2010

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been said that Belgian diplomats provided information about their prime minister to countries who knew hardly anything about him and were still in doubt. The diplomats also learned from the failures of their colleagues who had lobbied for Verhofstadt in 2004 and avoided an overactive approach. Again, this is in line with the idea that Van Rompuy was not a candidate for the job, but only a candidate to be asked about it.

We can conclude that the election (or appointment) campaign of the first EU president turned much of the classical campaign wisdom upside down. This is less the case for the debate on the quality of the campaigns that usually starts shortly after the election. Roughly summarised, political campaigns are considered too negative and too insubstantial, turning voters into cynical spectators. In the case of the EU presidential election, the main complaint was related to the lack of transparency. Several commentators noted rightfully that the election of a new Pope or communist leader is guided by more clear rules than in this case. As a consequence, very few European citizens were thrilled by the elections and the

Photo: www.marco-urban.de

hardly made any statements concerning EU policy that could upset anyone. This was not the case for his main competitors, prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende and prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxemburg, who both made enemies – or at least lost friends from different countries – during their many years in office. Furthermore, in his long past as a national politician, Van Rompuy never devoted much attention to European policy. This is in sharp contrast with Guy Verhofstadt, who was known for his outspoken pro-European stance and expressed these views publicly in the run up to the election. In the weeks before the election, Van Rompuy never spoke about his ideas on the future of Europe. He made one exception in addressing the Bilderberg Group in Brussels. The Bilderberg Group is an international circle of political and corporate elite figures that hold invitation-only meetings.

Van Rompuy had accepted the invitation long before and did not cancel the meeting because of the group’s solid reputation for discretion. However, parts of his speech on the possibility of a green tax to support the working of the EU leaked to the press. Van Rompuy was able to limit the damage by not personally reacting to the news while his spokesperson nuanced the tax statements.

STRATEGIC THINKER

Jan Peter Balkenende

mass media in most countries only paid attention to the election if one of their own was involved in the race.

From a democratic perspective, this election can be seen as a missed opportunity to bring the EU somewhat closer to its people. However, from a perspective of efficiency things look quit different. Van Rompuy is a consensus candidate with little personal ambition. If he manages to improve the functioning of one of the main European institutions the European citizen might not be the loser after all. Time will tell.

Photos: EC/Wim Beddegenoodts; Leiden University

WHO IS HERMAN VAN ROMPUY? In February 2007, we

organised a small conference on the relationship between media and politics at the University of Antwerp. As some leading politicians were unable to attend we asked Herman Van Rompuy. At that moment, the 60 year old Van Rompuy could be considered as a parliamentary backbencher, who had played a more prominent role as a party president and high ranking cabinet member in Belgian politics until his Christian Democratic party lost the elections in 1999. Shortly after

our conference, his political career made an unexpected second start. Following the 2007 national elections that were won by his party (under the leadership of Yves Leterme) Van Rompuy became chair of the lower house of parliament. But in 2008 he moved on to become the prime minister of Belgium after a complicated struggle with the judiciary over the selling of the Belgian bank Fortis brought his predecessor, Leterme, into disrepute.

Van Rompuy was able to bring some stability and calm in the linguistically divided country, which had been in a state of confusion and conflict since the 2007 election.

After being in charge of the country for hardly a year, he was elected to be the first president of the EU council. Returning to that conference in 2007: Van Rompuy was outstanding in his analysis of how the relationship between media and politics has evolved over the years. He impressed the audience with his intelligence and dry sense of humour, two qualities that will probably come in handy as the first Mr Europe. (For a more detailed profile of Van Rompuy see the work of Van Assche: http://webh01. ua.ac.be/m2p/publications/1257767957.pdf) Why a European president? The idea of a European president was introduced years ago by former French president Giscard d’Estaing who was leading a commission to develop the first European constitution. The constitution was later replaced by the less ambitious Lisbon Treaty, but the introduction of an EU president remained. The main function of the president, officially called the Prof. Peter Van Aelst permanent chairman of the Leiden University European Council, is continuity. The president will chair the European Council for two-and-a-half years, replacing (but not completely abolishing) the current system where countries take turns at being president for Peter Van Aelst is assistant six months. The president professor of political psycholowill have much less official gy and political communication at the Institute of Political Scipowers, as in the original ence at Leiden University, the conception of d’Estaing, Netherlands. He wrote a PhD and will function as a guidon the role of media in election ing secretary, rather than campaigns and has published in several international jouras a leading president. The nals. His current research focuchoice for the low key leader ses on the relations between Van Rompuy can be seen in politicians and journalists in comparative perspective. line with this.

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THE DYNAMICS OF TRUST After a clarification of the notion of trust, this article gives an analysis of its foundations and the role of openness and communication in the building, breakdown and repair of trust.

by Bart Nooteboom

T

he notion of trust is rich and slippery, and evokes much misunderstanding that needs to be set right. What is trust, who may be trusted, in what aspect of behaviour, and on what basis?

A first definition of trust might be: “I am vulnerable to the actions of another but I believe that no significant harm will be done.”

Who is the trustee, the one trusted? One can trust individuals, organisations, institutions and systems. For example, in the financial crisis distrust concerning banking may concern individual bankers, banks and their policies, supervisory institutions (such as central banks), or financial and labour markets. One may trust people one is dealing with, but this is not enough, because whether they can honour commitments depends on their position and role

One may trust people one is dealing with, but this is not enough, because whether they can honour commitments depends on their position and role in the organisation.

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in the organisation. One can trust an organisation, e.g. on the basis of its reputation, but this does not by itself ensure that one can trust the people one is dealing with. That depends on the procedures of supervision, control, reporting and culture of the firm. Whether an organisation can honour its commitments depends on external pressures of competition and the state of the economy.

What is it in people that one can trust? One can trust the competence of the trustee, in other words its technical ability to honour commitments, and/or its intentions: in other words, its will and commitment to act according 01/2010

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to the best of its competence. Intentional trust may be further separated into trust in commitment/attention and trust in fairness: in other words, absence of cheating. When there is lack of competence, one will act differently from when there is lack of commitment or opportunism and cheating. Things can go wrong for a variety of reasons: a mishap or accident no one could have foreseen and prevented, lack of competence, lack of attention, lack of commitment, or opportunism. Often, one does not know which is the case. In other words, there is ‘causal ambiguity’. In particular, it is the opportunist who will claim a mishap as the cause.

This causal ambiguity has important implications for communication, as I will discuss later.

FOUNDATIONS

OF

TRUST

What is the basis of trust? Trust may be based on feelings and emotions of fear, self-confidence, friendship, loyalty, justice, morality, view of society, view of man, etc., related to character, experience and culture.

Trust can also be rational, based on information (for example on reputation) and evaluation of the likely level of trustworthiness. Mostly it is based on some combination of feeling and reflection.

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First, let us look at reasons people may have to be reliable. These are summarised in Table 1. This concerns only the intentional (not the competence) side of trust.

I make a distinction between reliability and trust. Reliability includes both control and trust that goes beyond control. Here is another source of confusion about trust. By trust, some people may mean that they trust someone because he is contractually bound, or because one is his boss, or because he is dependent or because he has other material incentives. Other people will object that trust goes beyond that. They would define trust as having the belief that “no harm will be done, even if the other has both the opportunity and the incentive to cheat.” I make the distinction between reliability and trust to eliminate this ambiguity.

In the two columns, the table distinguishes reasons for reliability on two levels: within a relationship

(micro) and in its institutional environment (macro). In the rows the table employs the distinction between control and trust.

One type of control is opportunity control. In this case, the action space is limited, either by contracts using the law (outside a relationship), or by hierarchy (within a relationship). A second type of control is incentive control, where actions are shaped by rewards. Within the relationship this may be a result of dependence: when the partner is dependent on me, he is more inclined to take my interests into account. This dependence may be due to the unique value that I offer to him or to his specific investments in the relationship. A specific investment is Table 1 Sources of (intentional) reliability Macro; institutional

Micro; relational

Control opportunity control

- contracts, legal enforcement

- hierarchy, managerial ‘fiat’

incentive control

- reputation

- dependence, hostages, bonus schemes

Trust

- values, social norms of proper - empathy, identification, routinisaconduct, moral obligation,

tion, affection, friendship

sense of duty, bonds of kinship

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an investment that has value only in this specific relationship, so that it has to be made anew when the relationship breaks. That yields dependence; the other side may threaten to break the relationship, causing a loss to you.

The partner may also be dependent on me because I hold a hostage, in other words I have control over something that is of value to him, but not to me. I will not hesitate to destroy this hostage if the partner behaves badly. Mostly, the hostage takes the form of commercially sensitive information that may be leaked to a competitor of the partner.

Another form of incentive control is reputation. That is a matter of self-interest: the partner behaves well because bad behaviour would destroy the perspectives for fruitful relations with others in the future.

Beyond control, in the lower part of the table there may be a basis for trustworthiness. Trust and trustworthiness are needed where control ends, and may help to reduce control. Trustworthiness may be a result of an established ethic, with shared social norms and values. Values and norms may be based on an ethic that is shared prior to the relationship, but may also develop as the relationship proceeds.

MENTAL FRAMING Should one start with distrust, until people have proven to be trustworthy, or with trust until people show limited trustworthiness? I recommend the second. Distrust keeps one from engaging in relationships that may prove distrust wrong, in showing that in fact people are trustworthy, to a greater or lesser extent.

Trust, on the other hand, is subject to correction: when in fact people are less trustworthy than assumed, one can adjust one’s expectations.

People operate on the basis of mental frames, or states of mind, that shape their perceptions and guide their acts. Relevant to trust, there are two basic frames of

Should one start with distrust, until people have proven to be trustworthy, or with trust, until people show limited trustworthiness? I recommend the second.

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mind: one is oriented towards ‘guarding your resources’, and the other towards ‘solidarity’. In the first, the basic attitude is one of distrust, of being afraid of loss, and actions of the other are scrutinised as possible evidence of lack of trustworthiness, and one is ready to retaliate or take preventive action. In the second, the basic attitude is one of trust, and one tends to see the actions of 01/2010

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The trials and tribulations of trust Trust is necessary when control has reached its limits.

Two basic frames of mind, guarding resources and solidarity, determine our levels of trust. These depend on character, experience and circumstances.

When both negotiators find out what the fears/problems of the other are, and look for solutions, an optimal relationship is achieved.

Disappointed expectations are the greatest threat to trust.

the other as cooperative. The claim that we have these two frames of mind is supported by arguments that both are in our genes as a result of evolution. We have a deep inclination towards survival and to guard the resources necessary for it, but we also have an inclination to be a loyal member of a community, and to make sacrifices for it, within limitations of survival.

Which frame one is in depends on character, experience and circumstances. If one has lack of selfconfidence or feels threatened, one is inclined towards the frame of suspicion. One feels more threatened under pressures of competition or adverse economic conditions. In the current economic crisis, one can expect that there is less trust. In a trust frame one can accept more criticism than in a frame of distrust. Therefore, trust is not being ‘nice’ to each other. It is precisely because people trust each other that they can afford to be more critical. Thus, an advantage of trust is that it offers more learning from criticism.

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TRUST AND COMMUNICATION The causal ambiguity of trust

Photo: Tilburg University

yields a plea for openness in communication. If one makes a mistake the instinctive response is to hide it, but that is a bad response. Sooner or later the problem will emerge and one is then asked why one did not report the problem when there was still time to do something about it.

A suspicion will arise that it was a matter not of a mishap or mistake but of cheating. That is the worst outcome. A mistake is seen as something that can be corrected, while a perception of opportunism will likely cause a switch to a frame of distrust, and once that happens it is difficult to switch back to a trust frame. Thus, when something goes wrong one should report it immediately, explain what went wrong, make proposals of how to mend the damage and how to prevent similar problems in the future. That is a response that inspires trust.

OPENNESS AND VOICE There is a well-known distinction between ‘exit’ and ‘voice’. In exit, if one is dissatisfied one walks away, breaks the relationship, fires the worker, or sells the division of a firm. In voice, one reports a problem and gives the other an opportunity to explain and mend.

One does not jump to the conclusion that there is opportunism at play as soon as something goes wrong. One gives the other the benefit of the doubt. Openness and voice require that the other appreciates them and reacts constructively. One should not immediately revert to blame and punishment when the other reports a mistake, but react appreciatively and constructively in jointly mending problems and taking measures to prevent them in future. Openness is required for a second reason. Good

negotiation is not a matter of saying or giving in as little as possible, even though that is what instinct prods us to do. Good negotiation is finding out what the fears and problems of the other are, to see if one can solve or prevent them at a cost that is low compared to the value for the partner. If the partner acts according to the same maxim, the relation is optimal.

Next to verbal communication one should also be aware of the signals that actions send. At any moment, one is in one of the two mental frames, but events can

Good negotiation is not a matter of saying or giving in as little as possible, even though that is what instinct prods us to do. cause a switch to the other frame. The stability of a frame and frame switching depend on how actions are interpreted as ‘relational signals’. For a stable trust relationship, one’s actions should signal that one is enacting the frame of solidarity. One’s actions should stimulate the other to maintain or adopt the solidarity frame.

Prof. Bart Nooteboom For example, one should Tilburg University show care and concern for the other, and accept his interests as legitimate. One should accept responsibility and not pass the blame, give timely and accurate information, be honest about motivations. One should be open Bart Nooteboom is professor to suggestions, complaints of innovation policy at Tilburg and criticism from the othUniversity. His research incluer, accept his influence and des innovation, entrepreneurvoice, and show that one ship, organisational learning, inter-firm collaboration, and values them. One should trust. He has published ten also manage expectations. books and 300 papers. He is The greatest threat to trust a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and arises when expectations Sciences, and was awarded are disappointed. Expectathe Kapp prize for his work tions should be realistic, and on organisational learning and performance and expectathe Gunnar Myrdal prize for his work on trust. He is rantions should be monitored ked among the top 30 Dutch in time and adjusted. And if economists and listed in Who‘s the partner lacks self-confiWho in Economics and Who‘s dence, bolster it.

Who in Management Science.

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How to improve personnel management and your career

A CLEAN SWEEP FOR REFORMERS If organisations are to evolve and thrive, change leaders must be found. These figures must gain power, find allies and master the facts to find success for their peers.

by Judith Bardwick

I

t is very strange, but in the roughly five years that I have been speaking to and consulting with management about the hundreds of studies in many nations that clearly demonstrate that high levels of employee commitment and engagement predict financial success, I have consistently found that virtually no one in management has ever heard of these facts.

Here is a tiny sample of the data that overwhelmingly demonstrates that when employees feel positively about their organisation and their work, financial results are high:

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• Companies consistently rated as the “best to work for” are run by people who (1) achieve their business targets and (2) sustain the wellbeing of their employees. These organisations have higher market value, growth, return on assets, and return to shareholders than peer organisations that do not value and involve employees.

• The consulting firm Watson Wyatt administered surveys of the Human Capital Index (HCI) to 51 organisations in the United States and Europe. When the HCI scores were compared with each corporation’s five-year total return to shareholders, companies with a low HCI score averaged a 21 per cent total return, companies with medium HCI scores achieved a 39 per cent total return, and those with high scores had a 64 per cent return.

• When customers gave a company high marks, that organisation earned a 160 per cent five-year return to shareholders when compared with the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Index. When both customers and employees give a com01/2010

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pany a high rating, that company’s five-year returns to shareholders is 320 per cent of the S&P. Over the last twenty years, numerous studies found that when people are very positive about their job and their organisation, feelings of commitment and engagement predict positive financial results.

The average is a gain of 30 per cent higher profits and a share price two to three times higher than a peer company with low scores. That happens simply because companies in which employees are really involved retain their employees and their customers. The reverse is also true.

When companies see employees only as costs and not as key assets, employees reciprocate with powerful negative feelings. Then, people come to work but they withhold discretionary effort, fear prevails, innovation disappears, and teamwork is only a slogan.

THE MESSAGE A critical leadership task is to create widespread awareness of this information throughout an organisation as a first step in reinstating employees as stakeholders and as assets. The key message is simple: when employees are viewed and treated as critical resources and commitments are made to them, the probability of financial success increases dramatically.

The reverse is also true: when employees are treated as costs and not as assets, they feel abused and frightened (for good reason). When people are neither trusted nor respected and their work is not regarded as significant, employees quit even if they come to work. The real cost of a nonengaged or an actively disengaged employee is enormous because they alienate custom-

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ers and customers leave. So do sales and profits. In fact, too many people are misers with praise and rewards.

And they are proud of it, more the pity. As a result, the most prominent current practices regarding employees essentially guarantee high levels of negative feelings and low levels

of commitment and engagement – a sure route to failure.

Many executives are unwittingly treating even valued employees in ways that will almost certainly assure employee alienation. Even when the economy was good, in many countries about half of all employees felt vulnerable economically and psychologically. I call these feelings a psychological recession, the feeling that while the present is awful, the future will be worse. Prolonged fear and depression invite failure because scared and alienated people can neither concentrate, nor focus, nor innovate. Chronic anxiety depletes people of their mental energy.

The first task is to create real awareness at every level of an organisation that (1) treating employees only as costs creates serious problems with powerful negative effects that impede success, and (2) there are policies and practices that make success much more likely. In order to have an impact, the message must be in line with how people are actually feeling and be simple, brief, and focused. It must begin with a sense of alarm that is based on the organisation’s reality and then move to the idea that when the core issues are faced, the right changes can be made and success and a better future become very likely.

CREATE CHANGE When I speak to employees who are not executives, they always relate to these facts and ideas.

I am, after all, describing what they have experienced and

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how most of them feel. So it is not surprising that they always ask: “Have you talked with our executives and upper level managers? If you have, what was their reaction? Are they even aware of what is going on? Are they concerned enough to do anything different now that they know how people feel? What can I do to make change happen?’’ The most visible leader in an organisational change effort is usually a top executive. But core change does not happen until and unless an aligned leadership develops throughout the organisation at all levels. Succeeding in creating major change has to ultimately involve the majority of people.

The answer to the essential question, “What can I do?” is, first, get the facts and master them. Every person involved in creating change has to be able to describe the facts easily and, more importantly, clearly and simply.

The next task is to be able to describe the problem and the solution in the “elevator speech”. That means you have less than a minute to get your views across. To achieve this, you need a great answer to the question: “What really matters?” In some ways, crafting the elevator speech is the hardest task of the entire change effort. It is difficult to be very brief, right on point, and be convincing.

Feelings are always much more important than facts in getting a buy-in to change, and basic change is always unsettling. That is why the majority of people in the organisation have to believe that you are telling the truth, you are guided by a deep sense of unease by current practices, and you are convinced real change will achieve success.

Change leaders must create the fear that not changing is much more dangerous than changing. Then, it is time to create hope: “If we pull together and we all get on the train, while it won’t be easy, we can do it! Count me in!”

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MAKE CHANGE HAPPEN Generating the motivation for change and specific ideas about how to succeed is only the starting point. Operationalising anything, actually making things happen, is at least equally difficult. The task for the organisation is to regain the perspective that people are a major asset and management must behave in ways that tell employees they are valuable and important. Ideas, attitudes, and behaviours must be aligned and converge on the single theme that making commitments to our people and gaining commitment from them is the only way we can succeed. When most people share that value and agree on that goal, lots of specific ways to reinforce commitment and engagement will be generated.

No one, not even the CEO, can make things happen alone. To make things happen, change leaders must gain 01/2010

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power. There are two relevant kinds of power: one involves role power, people at the highest levels in the organisation who are responsible for making decisions in the business of the business. In corporations, those are the people who have the major profit and loss responsibilities.

These positions have the greatest amount of authority and, frequently, the highest levels of influence and political power. Anyone who has access to these people is also seen as powerful simply because these people are accessible to him or her. It is the responsibility of change leaders to learn which of these decision makers is already in basic agreement with the view that people are a critical asset. The goal is to identify these

No one, not even the CEO, can make things happen alone. To make things happen, change leaders must gain power. people in order to gain powerful allies as quickly as possible.

The second kind of power lies in the power of numbers. When many people in an organisation clearly believe the same thing and are calling for change, the importance of their message is greater than that of even a few top decision makers. The large number of supervisors and middle managers are a ripe source of allies as they are in a position to really know how their subordinates are feeling and behaving and how wide are the gaps that cause people to be alienated.

In terms of numbers, the middle and lower rungs of the organisation are a potential source of the largest numbers. There are leaders everywhere; they are simply people who others trust, respect, and want to

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY How to treat your snakes and angels Change leaders must gain power and find allies from all levels of the organisation if they are to succeed.

Mastering the facts and presenting them clearly is the first step for change.

Disencouraged employees can lose motivation; rewards and achievable objectives will energise them and help distinguish between the cynical snakes and the eager angels.

Telling the truth reduces anxiety.

listen to and follow. Having less education is not a barrier to becoming a leader. Change leaders must find these potential allies wherever they are: at entry level, in blue and pink collar positions, in the collarless jobs of professionals, and in the different generations.

When change leaders have a firm understanding of the issues and a clear message of alarm and hope, and when they have identified allies, they need to create an initial basic plan that is so direct and focused that it fits on a single page. Inevitably, the reality of implementation will make the simplest plan very complex and complexity diffuses focus. The more complex the initial plan is, the less effective it will become.

Photo: private

THE CHANGE PROCESS: 1. Identify the real major problems.

Open the books. Speak the unspeakable.

2. Identify the core business and whether it is a cash cow or a highrisk, high-growth business. Create the essential strategy based on competi-

tive advantage. If there is no clear competitive advantage revisit the question: what is the business of this business?

3. Identify the most important goals and those that are easiest to accomplish. Balance the goals of importance and ease. Limit the number of goals at one time to three and determine due dates.

4. Designate the organisation’s few core values: e.g. for the US Marines, they are honour, courage and commitment.

This is critical, because values and not rules are the true guides of behaviour.

5. Create simple, honest, and direct communications in order to gain understanding and buy-in. Never assume your message is heard. Go into the field and find out what people think is being said.

6. Organisational units and individuals create line-of-sight goals from the organisation’s targets to their own with due dates.

7. Reward the angels and fire the snakes. Distinguish thrivers – people who are eager to make and lead the changes – from survivors – fence sitters and cynics – and strugglers or failures who oppose change. Move thrivers into leadership roles.

8. Fire trouble-making strugglers.

9. Fire chronic nonperformers.

10. Start again: Murphy’s Judith Bardwick law – if anything can go Management Thought wrong, it will – is the bedLeader rock truth.

Anxiety and fear can be reduced by opening the books and telling people the truth about what is known and what might happen, by being clear and specific about what people are expected to do, and by making as many people as possible part of the change process. And everyone must be working toward goals that are achievable because nothing motivates people more than being successful. It is in the organisation’s best interest to act in ways that increase their numbers.

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Judith M. Bardwick is a writer, speaker, and management consultant specialising in the psychology of the corporate environment. During her career, she has combined psychological research with practical business applications to optimise organisational performance, change organisational views and values, and help managers achieve financial and personal success.

Bardwick has held several professorial positions in her career.

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SYSTEMS, PEOPLE AND KNOWLEDGE Quality management, organisational learning and personal management are the ingredients of three disciplines represented here in a synthesis of three different authors.

by Su Mi Dahlgaard-Park

T

his article will analyse and compare three notable works of advice on how to make successful transformations and sustainable change.

The three authors have been chosen because they all contributed to popularising the three methodologies worldwide and their ideas complement each other in a supplementary way, which is is useful for organisations that want to design their own recipe for change and for gradually achieving excellence.

INGREDIENTS FOR CHANGE In his book The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education for Quality Management (1993), W. E. Deming proclaimed that the aim of the “system of profound knowledge” is to help effect a transformation of individuals, organisations, and countries. As the name indicates, the system of profound knowledge is above all a set of insights by which people can see and understand the essential conditions and structures of reality more accurately. The system of profound knowledge consists of the following four parts:

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1: APPRECIATION FOR A SYSTEM A system must have an aim, a value judgment, which should be clear to everyone in the system. The importance of aim and purpose is formulated clearly in the first of Deming’s famous 14 points: “Create and publish to all employees a statement of the aims and purposes of the company or other organisation. The management must demonstrate constantly their commitment to this statement.” In an ideal system, each component participates in an optimisation process toward achievement of the aim. Through this proc01/2010

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ess, all involved win. Optimising a system (make win-win solutions) is a basis for any kind of negotiation between different components. In a system, the role of each component is essential and inevitable, and at the same time each component is interdependent and interrelated to each other. “The greater the interdependence between components, the greater the need is for communication and cooperation between them.”

2. KNOWLEDGE OF VARIATION Variations between people

can give us knowledge about a process and about the people who work in a given system. Knowledge of variations in various situations is critical for management. Management requires knowledge of interaction of different forces, knowledge of the effect of the system on the performance of people, knowledge of dependence and interdependence between people, groups, divisions, companies, industires and countries.

3. THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE There is no true value in information that can be attained by meas-

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Photo: www.dreamstime.com

urement and observation of states, characteristics conditions and phenomena. Knowledge comes from theory, and without theory, there is no way to use the information that comes to us constantly. “Experience alone, without theory, teaches management nothing about what to do to improve quality and competitive position, nor how to do it... Experience will answer a question, and a question comes from theory.” Without theory, there is nothing to revise, nothing to evaluate, and experience has no meaning. Without theory one has no question to ask, nothing to renew, hence without theory there is no learning. Theory is a window into the world. Theory provides prediction, and without prediction, experiences teach nothing.

nurture and preserve intrinsic sources of motivation, to learn, to work, to love, to make innovation, and to build self-esteem. The leader must understand those mechanisms of people in order to achieve the optimisation (win-win) of the system.

SENGE’S LEARNING ORGANISATION Even though the main issues of Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (1990) are about systems thinking, the book is known as a theory of the learning organisation. Senge writes: “The tools and ideas presented in

4. PSYCHOLOGY: W.E. Deming writes: “Psychology helps us to understand people, interaction between people and circumstances, interaction between customer and supplier, interaction between teacher and pupil, interaction between a manager and his people and any system of management.” Knowledge of psychology is especially important for leaders, who must understand how they can lead people and provide a system that can promote joy in work and strengthen people’s intrinsic motivation. They should also know that some aspects of extrinsic motivators, which include a monetary reward system, take away employees’ dignity, intrinsic desire to learn and inner desire to expand their capabilities. Good management helps us to

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this book are for destroying the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. When we give up this illusion, we can then build ‘learning organisations’, organisations where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.” Senge distinguishes between two processes: 1.

A process of destroying human illusions, and 2. A process of building learning organisation. The five disciplines (figure 1), which are introduced as components of the learning organisation, must at the same time be regarded as components of the destruction process of human illusions, which is at the same time a learning process.

SYSTEMS THINKING The essence of systems thinking

of a system. These are reinforcing, balancing feedback and delay. Reinforcing processes are the engines of growth. Whenever we are in a situation where things are growing in a positive or negative direction, a reinforcing process is operating. The reinforcing process can thus acceler-

Mental models influence how we perceive and understand the world and how we behave, and how we make our decisions and judgments.

is to see the whole rather than a single part; underlying structures rather than surfaces. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots. In systems thinking, it is an axiom that every influence is both cause and effect. Nothing is ever influenced in just one direction. In these circles of causality, the human actor is also a part of the cause and effect chains, and cannot stand apart from them. Thus business and other human endeavours can be understood under the frame of systems thinking, which allows us to see how we are continually both influenced by and are influencing our reality.

THREE BUILDING BLOCKS There are three building blocks when we see and analyse the underlying structure Table 1: Deming’s profound knowledge, modelled by Su Mi Dahlgaard-Park

Knowledge of variation

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Knowledge of systems

Leadership

Knowledge of psychology

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Knowledge of knowledge

ate decline in a negative direction and accelerate progress in a positive direction. These reinforcing processes have their limits, however. When a reinforcing process is working in a certain direction, either in growth or in decline, the system meets its limit in the form of balancing feedback that can slow, stop, divert and even reverse the existing direction of the process. The third building block is delay. Delays between actions and consequences are everywhere in human systems. All feedback processes have some form of delay, and if these delays are not recognised, they can lead to instability and breakdown.

PERSONAL MASTERY Personal mastery is the discipline of continual learning throughout an entire lifetime. It is the spiritual foundation of the learning organisation. The discipline of personal mastery starts with clarifying the things that really matter to us, of living our lives in the service of our highest aspirations. People with personal mastery take more initiative and have a broader and deeper understanding of responsibilities in whatever they are doing. The characteristics of people with high personal mastery are that

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they are good at integrating reason and intuition, continually see the connectedness to the world through their daily activities, show compassion and empathy to other people and commitment to the whole.

MENTAL MODELS Mental models are our way of seeing and interpreting the world and phenomena around us. Mental models influence how we perceive and understand the world and how we behave, and how we make our decisions and judgments. They are not only a filter through which we understand the world, but they are also active, because they actually shape how we behave. However, in most cases, people are not aware of their own mental models, nor of the fact that mental models affect their behaviour. The vicious cycle is that when people are not aware of their mental models, the models remain untested, and because they are untested, the models continue to be unchanged.

SHARED VISION According to Senge, a shared vision is a force in people’s hearts – a force of impressive power. At its most simple level, a shared vision is the answer to the question: “What do we want to create?” Just as personal visions are images people carry in their heads and hearts, the same goes for shared vision. A shared vision is images or dreams that people throughout an organisation carry. When people throughout an organisation truly share a vision, they are bonded and connected and there is a spirit of corps. When there exists a truly shared vision, which reflects people’s individual personal visions, there is also commitment. The most important fact in shaping shared vision is that it should be rooted in people’s

personal visions. Essentially people are not egoists: in most of cases, they care for other people – family, colleagues, organisations, society, and even the world. Thus the very basic element of a shared vision can be founded in people’s individual personal visions, and because of this commonality of individuals, it is possible to build a shared vision based on an individual’s personal visions.

TEAM LEARNING Team learning is the process of de-

veloping the capacity of a team to create the results its members truly desire. When people master team learning one of the positive results is the synergy effect. The disciplines of team learning involve mastering the practices of several interpersonal skills and techniques, such as dialogue, discussion, inquiry and advocacy, and the handling of “defensive routines”. Furthermore, team learning requires that people understand their own assumptions, the skill of balancing dialogue and discussion, and the skill of balancing inquiry and advocacy.

COVEY’S PERSONAL MANAGEMENT AND PRINCIPLES: CENTRED SELF-DEVELOPMENT Stephen R.

Covey, who wrote the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), argues for the importance of principle-centred action. According to Covey, principles are composed of permanent values which are self-evident and factual, just like natural laws. Covey gives some examples of these principles, which lead people to individual success and, consequently, to organisational success.

These principles are expressed and identified by Covey as Table II: Peter Senge’s five disciplines of the learning organisation, modelled

by Su Mi Dahlgaard-Park

Personal mastery

Building shared vision

Systems thinking

Mental models

Team learning

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character ethic, competence ethic, production/production capability balance, the law of effectiveness, awareness of mental paradigms, and the maturity of continuum.

CHARACTER ETHIC AND COMPETENCE ETHIC Some of the sub-elements of the character ethic are fairness, integrity, honesty, goodness, patience and industry, and these are basic principles of effective living through which people can experience true success and enduring happiness. Some of the sub-elements of the competence ethic are communication techniques, strategy, positive attitude and interpersonal techniques. The competence ethic can be called a personality ethic and it has essentially two paths. One path concerns human and PR techniques, which can be strengthened by training in communication skills and influencing strategies. The other concerns the power of positive thinking, where people can be trained to focus on the positive side in any situation. According to Covey, both character ethic and competence ethic are necessary for personal success, together with the other above-mentioned principles such as the right mental paradigms and the maturity of continuum. However, it is argued by Covey that the most important success factor is the character ethic, which traditionally has been treated as the moral and value system and which has been neglected during the past 50 years. In other words, we need a paradigm shift.

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PARADIGM SHIFT A paradigm is the way an individual perceives, understands and interprets the surrounding world. People see the world not as it actually is, but as their mental paradigms are designed. A paradigm is just like a map, and if a person has a wrong or inaccurate map, the route he/she follows will also be wrong.

However, on many occasions people are unaware of the existence of paradigms. The more people are aware of their basic paradigms and the extent to which they have been influenced by experiences, the more people can then examine them, test them against reality, change them if necessary, and listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a wider and more objective view.

THE MATURITY CONTINUUM The maturity continuum is a progressive movement from dependence to independence to interdependence, just like the natural process of an infant to a child and then to an adult state. In the state of interdependence, the basic paradigm is “we” – we can make things better together when we cooperate, we 01/2010

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The main ingredients The transformation process starts with the individual.

Individual paradigm shift (spiritual conversion, repentance, reorientation of one’s way of life) is the first step.

Strive to attain a profound knowledge of systems, of people and of knowledge itself.

Practice the right actions based on the profound knowledge and wisdom.

can make synergy, we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together. Inter-

A paradigm is just like a map, and if a person has an inaccurate map, the route he/she follows will be wrong. dependent people know the power of cooperation and the mechanism of creating synergy, thereby achieving the greatest level of success, because they are aware that life is, by nature, highly interdependent.

PRODUCTION/PRODUCTION CAPABILITY BALANCE Effective-

ness is a function of two things – what is produced, and the capacity to produce – and effectiveness lies in the balance of those two functions. Too much focus on production without consideration of necessary investments on capability and capacity to produce will, in the long run, be destructive in the form of destroyed health, wornout machines, and broken relationships.

On the other hand, too much focus

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on production capability alone will not lead to effectiveness.

STEPS 1–3 The first three habits

help people move from a dependent to an independent state. Those first three habits are primarily concerned with self-control, self-discipline and self-mastery. People who are in the state of independence recognise their responsibilities, their active roles in different situations, and they carry them out by themselves with commitment and a sense of mission.

STEPS 4–7 However, to attain an independent state is not enough, because most daily situations have a social aspect. Thus it is important to understand and practice the right interpersonal skills, such as emphatic listening and other value based behaviours, essential to building a cooperative atmosphere. Based on character ethics such as loyalty, integrity, respect for others’ individuality etc., people can go further to work with principles required for attaining public victory. Some necessary principles required for attaining public victory are the we paradigm rather than the I paradigm and the win-win paradigm rather than the win-lose paradigm. Furthermore, it is necessary to master effective skills for building teamwork, cooperation and communication. The last habit is the habit of renewal of all four dimensions of life – physical, mental, social and spiritual – and all other habits are at the same time embodied into this renewal process, and so the process of growth continues.

Photo: private

MIXING THE INGREDIENTS Even though the three authors show differences in many aspects, it is also possible to find some common concepts. Those key concepts can be cat-

egorised in the following three categories: systems, people, and knowledge. These are not clearly separable from each other, because people are also a part of systems, and knowledge of knowlege includes also knowledge of people and knowledge of systems. From this point of view, Senge

Interdependent people know the power of cooperation and synergy, thereby achieving great success, because they are aware that life is, by nature, highly inderdependent. suggested that system thinking should be the discipline that integrates other parts, and “fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice”. In other words, they are interrelated to each other.

SUMMARY OF THE CONCEPTS It seems that the overall theme of the three ideas concerns transformation or change. Deming proclaimed: “Management must undergo transformation. The transformation requires profound knowledge… The first step is transformation of the individual. The transformed individual will perceive new meaning to his life, to events, to numbers, to interactions between people.” Covey states that, in order to change a situation, “we need to change ourselves” through “workProf. Su Mi Dahlgaard-Park ing on our basic paradigms”.

Lunds University The prerequisite for attaining personal and interpersonal effectiveness and success is a paradigm shift and thereby understanding some fundamental principles. “The seven habits are not a set of separate or piecemeal psych-up formulas. In harmony with natural Su Mi Dahlgaard-Park is curlaws of growth, they provide rently a professor at the Instia sequential approach to move tute of service management, progressively on a maturity Lunds University, Sweden. Her research areas have been continuum.” It seems that all HRM, quality management, orthree agree that the transforganisation theory, learning and mation is necessary, and the knowledge management, and transformation process starts organisational change. Within these areas she has published with a paradigm shift of the more than 100 research paindividual. Attaining knowlpers and books, of which seedge will help the process of veral have been translated into transformation. a number of languages.

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SIMON SPROULE Director, Communications Renault Nissan alliance Interview: Marc-Oliver Voigt

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thing I would call a compound mentality. People who go to different countries and cultures and work there but they then sort of recreate their own country and culture around them. I think it is therefore not necessarily driven by how much people travel, but it is rather a mindset.

What would be your definition of a cosmopolitan?

I think it probably is a mindset more than just having experiences.

Experiences help to build that, but I have met people in my career who lived throughout the world and are still very close-minded, some-

Would you say that you comply with that definition?

I would certainly aspire to that. For me, the values of a cosmopolitan are an open-mindedness, ease and willingness to learn about new cultures, enjoying working with them and learning from them.

You hold a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of London’s renowned King’s College. Did you study geography to explore the world and therefore for what I would call cosmopolitan reasons?

From a young age I was interested in travel and seeing the world. I chose a degree course that was more in my personal interest than in any kind of professional aspiration at the end of it. At that time, I also had an abiding love for cars and the automotive industry. When I was about ten or eleven years old we created one of those time capsules at school where, for example, you put in a letter describing what you want to do when you have finished school. This time capsule was buried for fifteen years. I happened to get a copy of the letter back when I went to a school reunion. The bizarre thing was that in this letter I had said that I wanted to become a foreign correspondent. I wanted to travel and I wanted to be in the media, so where my career ended up is quite close to what I originally wanted to do.

Photo: Renault Nissan alliance

When I was about ten or eleven years old, we created one of those time capsules at school where you put in a letter describing what you want to do when you have finished school. I wanted to become a foreign correspondent, travel and be in the media, so where my career ended up is quite close to what I originally wanted to do.

You started your career in communications as a researcher in the internal communications unit at Ford of Europe. Moving from geography to the automotive industry appears to me to be quite a large jump. How did that happen?

My first break in the communications business was joining a television production company in London that worked for Ford of Europe. I was very young, and had no television or communications experience at all, but I had 01/2010

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a really deep love for cars and the automotive industry.

I believe that everyone in their career gets some breaks where you are at the right place at the right time and connect with somebody who opens a door for you. There was no scientific or academic reason why I got the job. It was just about luck.

After you joined Ford, you stayed with the company and its brands such as Aston Martin for a total of eleven years.

This is an unusually long period for a communications professional today. What made Ford so attractive to you for such a long time?

I was lucky enough to have a series of positions where each job was different and stretched me enough that it almost felt like a new company.

Is communicating an Aston Martin so different to communicating a cheap Ford Fiesta?

Yes and no. It is the same principle. You have got a product, you have got a series of attributes and you have an audience where you have to figure out how to make them understand your message. From that point of view, there is not a lot difference. But throughout the eleven years of my career at Ford, each job change was also a different management challenge. I was lucky to pick up different sets of experiences and also different management

It was the single most challenging appointment in my career up until today. It was certainly in my mind that I would like to run the communications for an entire company, but I didn’t expect it to happen at that time and to be in Japan.

The second challenge was moving to Japan and adjusting to the life there. I was definitely apprehensive about it all. responsibilities along the way, managing a small team, then a region, and so on. The jobs were all different and kept me very engaged. Those eleven years just absolutely sped by. Ford was a terrific training ground.

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And in 2003 you’d had enough of training; was that your reason for joining Nissan?

The Nissan jump was interesting. It was in part driven by the fact that I had reached a point where the next job at Ford was unclear. It was not that I stopped learning at Ford, but I had reached the point where you naturally look for the next challenge. I then completely unexpectedly got approached by Nissan.

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How much influence do the diverse roots of companies have on their communications styles in general?

They have a lot of influence. It always depends on how the head office manages, whether it has a top down centralised approach or has a decentralised approach. If it is very decentralised, the local market will often be in the driving seat and the local communications will be more attuned to the local market needs. If it has a very centralised approach, the local communications will often be a little less locally attuned but will, on the other hand, have much greater consistency globally. I tend to think that this model is now more relevant because of the way in which the world is connected.

How would you describe Nissan’s way of communicating when you joined the company seven years ago? Has it changed since then?

I would hope so. I think in the early days of the alliance Nissan’s communication was more typically Japanese in that it tended to be very defensive and reactive, not proactive. It also tended to focus first on the needs of the Japanese media and only secondly on the foreign media. That is still typical for a lot of Japanese companies today. For Nissan, I would say that today it is far more open and proactive.

In 2004, you became Nissan’s corporate vice president global communications and started to work for the company in Tokyo. How quickly did you adapt to the new environment?

It was the single most challenging appointment in my career up until today. That was due to several factors. One is that I was head of

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communications for a global company. It was certainly in my mind that I would like to run the communications for an entire company but I didn’t expect it to happen at that time and to be in Japan. The second challenge was moving to Japan and adjusting to life there.

I was definitely apprehensive and aware of the spotlight I was under and the expectations the company had of me.

Did you only work with Japanese staff or did you lead an international team?

Globally, Nissan employed something in the order of 250 communications experts, which is relatively small given the size of the company and its revenue. In the head office, there were about 70 people, of which 90 per cent were Japanese.

The global team was of course international.

Is there something like a unique Japanese management style?

I would say so. Hierarchy and consensus are important. Taking those elements alone you have a process that operates in many Japanese companies.

Can a company be successfully run in a consensus style?

Some companies can do it, some can’t. In the end there certainly has to be leadership. That obviously was something that Carlos Ghosn brought to Nissan. He has a very clear sense of leadership and direction. But day to day there is definitely a bias towards consensus building. That could be a little frustrating at times, because I came from the US where I was used to a more American style which was much faster in terms of decision

making. I was used to a little more of the 80/20 rule: “We have 80 per cent of the facts, let’s go for it.” On the flipside though, I have never seen execution so good as I have seen it in Japan. Once the plan was agreed and the strategy was decided upon, the execution was almost always excellent.

For those who are not familiar with the Japanese culture, can you tell us some important rules to follow?

Firstly, don’t necessarily trust the people who speak good English. This is one of the lessons many foreigners learn in Japan. When they arrive they tend to gravitate towards the locals who speak good English but very often you get sent down completely the wrong track. You really need – even through an interpreter – to hear all voices. The second rule is that one has to be aware of the cultural dynamics of the country one is going to. Japan is not Asia, it is

If you are a Brit, you will fiercely say that you are nothing like the French or the Germans. The Germans will say that they are nothing like the Austrians, the Italians will say they are nothing like the Spanish. People tend to say ‘Asia’ and put all those countries together, but for the Japanese, Japan is Japan.

Japan. I have been lucky to have travelled across almost all Asian countries, and it is like with Europe. If you are a Brit you will fiercely say that you are nothing like the French or the Germans. The Germans will say that they are nothing like the Austrians; the Italians will say they are nothing like the Spanish. People tend to say Asia and put all those countries together but for the Japanese, Japan is Japan. So when you go there and you are doing business there, you need to understand the culture of the country to set the context for doing business.

Until 2009, your career seemed to follow a steady path upwards. Last year, for the very first time, you changed industries and became software giant Microsoft’s head of communications. What made you change?

It was at the same point I had reached in my career at Ford. I was unsure of what would come next. In this moment it happened that I was approached by Microsoft.

It was a long process of discussion before I decided to make the move. Microsoft is a hugely attractive company and has an enormously deep understanding for communications.

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But you left Microsoft after some months. What were your reasons for taking this unexpected step?

It certainly came as a surprise to Microsoft! I have basically worked for two companies in my life and so to leave after six months was obviously unusual. However, I got to a point working for Microsoft where I realised that in fact, I was really still looking for another challenge in the automotive industry and was fortunate that new opportunity came with the Renault Nissan alliance.

You were then appointed director and head of communications for Renault Nissan alliance based in Paris. Please explain to me what responsibilities this position includes.

Are you in charge of the communications activities for both Renault and Nissan at the same time?

The alliance was formed ten years ago when Renault took a stake in Nissan, and Nissan took a stake in Renault. The alliance exists as a small team of individuals

Nissan as a company had been struggling for a number of years. By 1999, Nissan was on the path to bankruptcy, having a product line and business model which were, frankly speaking, not sustainable. At that time, the management very pragmatically said that Nissan needed a partner. who are focused on enabling the two companies two work together. Primarily, that is in the operational areas such as manufacturing, purchasing and supply chain.

Carlos Ghosn is the chairman and CEO of the alliance as well as being the head of Renault and Nissan.

My role covers topics such as merger and acquisition activities, major new projects, and getting involved in synergies between the two companies. So my role is less operational than it was in my previous positions and more strategic. A lot of my responsibilities also have to do with the communications for Carlos Ghosn as the head of the alliance.

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The alliance between the French car manufacturer Renault and the Japanese automotive company Nissan was formed in 1999. Can you very briefly explain why this construct was created?

Nissan as a company had been struggling for a number of years. By 1999, it was on the path to bankruptcy, having a product line and business model which were, frankly speaking, not sustainable. At that time, the Nissan management very pragmatically said that they 01/2010

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needed a partner and would not be able to survive on their own.

They were talking to Daimler, to Ford and a number of companies.

The company that made it work for them was Renault. Renault approached them with the proposal that they would take a stake in Nissan’s business and give Nissan a stake in theirs, which was an offer different to the traditional merger or takeover which had always been the model in the automotive industry. This was quite extraordinary, as each company retained its own board of directors, its own listing on respective stock exchanges, its own strong brand identities. That was why it worked and still works after ten years. If you look at all the other car industry’s mergers and partnerships, you’ll see that they all failed.

Has forming the alliance been completely finished or is this kind of a constant process?

It is very much an ongoing process.

The industry is constantly changing. There are always new challenges for the alliance. We are now doing things in Russia and India which would probably have been impossible to do for each company on its own. As an alliance, we are able to pursue those projects. The other major example for the alliance is taking on a new role in electric vehicles. The Renault Nissan alliance has set out to become the leader in the mass marketing of electric cars. Across the alliance we now have seven electric vehicles coming into the market in the next three or four years.

At first glance, cooperation between a French and a Japanese company seemed to be a very risky step. But

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French corporate culture is supposedly very hierarchical, and so is, as you described earlier, the Japanese.

Did these kinds of similarities perhaps facilitate the creation of the alliance?

There were a couple of factors. One was that Nissan was really getting to the end of its survival on its own.

Fusion sometimes is a word that could imply a bland mix that doesn’t really take to anything. So part of my job is to add a unique third flavour, which is not Renault and not Nissan, but the alliance.

Photo: Franck Robichon

So there was a certain need for Nissan to do something. When you are really hungry, you act in a different way. So there was some kind of survival mentality which was very strong inside the company. Secondly, I think that Renault very cleverly managed the partnership. Renault did not come in with thousands of people and try to make Nissan another version of Renault. It put people in who were smart enough to understand what made Nissan special. But they were also smart enough to be able to offer good things that Renault had in terms of processes and management tools that Nissan could use to make itself more successful.

It is apt that you use the word “hungry”. In professional cooking, people call the combination of western and Asian ingredients fusion cuisine.

Could Renault Nissan alliance’s communications style therefore be called a style of fusion communications?

As far as the communication is concerned I would say yes. In my role, I definitely take from the best of both. Renault for its own com-

munications has its own style and the same applies to Nissan. Fusion sometimes is a word that could imply a bland mix that doesn’t really amount to anything. So part of my job is to add a unique third flavour, which is not Renault and not Nissan, but the alliance.

During the past 18 months the automotive industry has been particularly struck by the continuing global economic and financial crisis. Did the fact that two large car makers act as allies prove to be an advantage during the turmoil?

Absolutely, and I think that it is still an advantage. The alliance was a real strength. Take the field of product development as an example. Even in a crisis you need to pour a lot of money into new prodSimon Sproule ucts. Without the alliance to share those costs, to creDirector, Communications Renault Nissan Alliance ate synergies and avoid unnecessary costs, both companies would have struggled even further.

Please take on the role of a soothsayer for us: will 2010 be a better year for your industry?

That depends on the markets. In Europe it won’t be better, it will be worse. In America it will be slightly better. For Japan, we hope for a slowing of the decline.

In the rest of the world it will be a mixed picture: in some countries it will get slightly better, in others it will not change at all or get worse.

One last prediction, please: will we still see you communicating cars of any kind in twenty years from now?

In some form, yes, I hope so. I certainly don’t know what I will be doing, but one thing 2009 proved was that I do have gasoline in my veins.

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Simon Sproule has been Renault Nissan alliance’s director, communications since September 2009. He joined the alliance after a brief stint as corporate vice president corporate communications for Microsoft. Previously, from 2004 to 2009, Sproule was corporate vice president global communications for Japanese car manufacturer Nissan. Prior to joining Nissan, he held a variety of positions with Ford, Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover in both North America and Europe. In 2004, he was recognised by the Automotive Hall of Fame in Detroit as one of their four Young Leaders of the Year. Sproule holds a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of London’s King’s College. From August 2001, Sproule served as the vice president, communications and corporate affairs for Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover North America.

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STORY TELLER Looking at the important questions of communication

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THE SOCIAL MEDIA BALL “Getting plugged in to social media” by Richard Morgan and Dafydd Phillips page 54 - 57

“The future’s bright” by Jürgen Zimmermann page 60 - 63 “Ten PR commandments of Web 2.0 networking” by Meg Pickard page 64 - 67

“Best foot forward” by Ian McNairn page 70 - 73

“Power to the people” by Elliot S. Schreiber page 74 - 77

“Extreme opinions: now in real-time” by Geert Lovink page 78 - 81

“Digital revolution takes hold in Russia” by Marat Rakaev page 82 - 85

“Time to collaborate” by Michael S. Salone page 86 - 89

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GETTING PLUGGED IN TO SOCIAL MEDIA Make 2010 the year your communications take advantage of the growing range of Web 2.0 tools. But remember that a clear strategy will help you avoid the perils and pitfalls of this brave new world.

by Richard Morgan and Dafydd Phillips

S

ocial media seems to have become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe. Wherever we are in the world, whatever time it is, we are connected to the ever-expanding online highway of information – and it seems that there are no exit routes. Web 2.0 is here to stay (that is, at least until Web 3.0 comes along). But in addition to intruding upon our personal lives, the rise of digital media has far reaching implications not only for the application of public relations but for its very definition. The discipline is rapidly changing, and it will never be the same again. This raises a series of new challenges for today’s communicators, many of whom have been forced to jump straight in and deal with new technologies with which they are unfamiliar, or have had no professional

Social media seems to have reaffirmed the necessity to persevere with certain previously established communications techniques.

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training. Fortunately, though, despite this strange new world of tweeting, blogs and 24 hours a day, seven days a week real-time stakeholder interaction, there are still a number of tried and trusted techniques that communications teams can apply to aid their chances of success in the digital domain.

NEW AND IMPROVED? Perhaps the most noteworthy

aspect of social media is not the new direction it promises to take professional communicators, but rather that it seems to have reaffirmed the necessity to persevere with certain pre01/2010

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viously established communications techniques. Because it seems that the classic models of communications theory still apply, albeit slightly reconfigured to fit a set of newer, flashier tools.

Thomas Pleil, professor of public relations at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and author of the Das Textdepot blog, believes that “a lot of aspects that have shown up in earlier theoretical discussions now get practical relevance.” Pleil cites PR as relationship management as an example of an established paradigm having new life breathed into it by social media. Jody Koehler, founder of Dutch social media consultancy Coopr, agrees that social media has in effect put PR back in touch with “the real definition of our discipline.

PR has always been about practicing the management of relationships between an organisation and its stakeholders. Somehow, along the way, we became just spokespersons to journalists. The new media has given us new tools and new audiences, and I’m very thankful for that.”

IT’S ALL ABOUT CONTROL With the increased stakeholder power social media offers, though,

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comes a new challenge for communicators – that of having to cope with a lesser degree of control over the online flow of information about them and their products. Clients, customers and commentators have always been able to express their opinions on corporations, but sites like Twitter and Facebook have now provided a way for these thoughts to be broadcast across the globe in seconds. The potential audience for these comments is huge, and, most worryingly for communicators, there is nothing that can be done about it. As a result, reactive communications are becoming more commonplace, with firms seeking to limit the damage caused by irate posters. This lack of control has forced communicators to turn a problem on its head and look at it from a different angle. As Thomas Pleil points out, “most organisations listen to conversations like these and have strengthened their issues monitoring. This helps to find trends, new ideas, and expectations of the stakeholders but also critical statements.” Engaging stakeholders who are already talking about your company and disseminating information may help to strengthen your reputation, a situation that only occurs with the openness necessary to allow stakeholders to communicate.

REACTING TO COMMENTS The thorny issue of neg-

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ative commentary is one of the most difficult challenges for communicators. The anonymity of Web 2.0 has created an age of constant criticism, much of it libellous were it to appear in print. However, the nature of the internet means that these kinds of comments cannot be policed, and companies must choose how to deal with them, if at all. When it comes to measuring the importance of a criticism, a measuring scale must be applied: not all blogs are created equal, and not every critical comment is an immediate threat to the organisation’s reputation and therefore deserving of a response. In some cases, no reaction may be the wisest choice to avoid further bad publicity.

On the other hand, some cases demand a speedy response, not only in order to prove that you are truly listening but also to prevent the dissemination of misinformation via the spider’s web of social media. Internet rumour mongers are not normally concerned with whether or not they are posting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and many people simply forward on unverified news. A response from the company can help stem the deluge. As Jody Koehler puts it: “Don’t wait until it’s too late! Companies must learn to make the shift from reactive to active engagement online.” The next challenge is to get the tone of your dialogue right – no one wants to appear defensive or desperate. To facilitate this, Tho01/2010

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TWITTER & YOU Some tips on using Twitter for business Use Twitter Search to find out who’s talking about you and your competitors, and relevant issues.

Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted, is a great way to build a community.

But you don’t have to read every tweet directed at you, or respond to each one.

Used correctly, Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you actively search for it, and/or if you follow the right people).

Point out interesting and relevent news/articles/polls, etc., that you come across in your daily work, and not just about you.

Rather than answer the question of “what’s happening?”, answer “what has your attention right now?”

Ask questions, not only on your work but on the issues of the day. Twitter is an instantaneous and unfiltered opinion poll.

Twitter is a great place to look out for breaking news, often better than other sources (particularly when users are directly affected).

mas Pleil believes that organisations need to “have enough managers with social media training knowing how to react to be accepted within the community.”

OUT WITH THE OLD? The general perception of social media as a young person’s plaything raises the question of whether it is harder for senior communications professionals to engage with and adapt to the new medium: wouldn’t it simply

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INNOVATORS Smart social media strategies Given the difficult financial circumstances that we all find ourselves in these days, social media is a boon, especially for smaller companies who can find innovative ways to compensate for slashed budgets.

For example, Kogi BBQ, a mobile Korean food company based in Los Angeles, has built up an impressive 50,000 follower base on Twitter by tweeting the location of its trucks as they carry out their deliveries throughout the working day. This is a great example of taking something mundane about your business, and transforming it into an asset that starts conversations. A mobile food truck does not on the surface appear to be a riveting phenomenom, but a mobile food truck that tweets its way through the streets of LA gets people talking, and, as a pleasant plus, it boosts sales. Another nice example is The Best of Us Challenge, set up by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

It’s proving to be a very successful way for the IOC to engage young people in the digital space, using the wildly popular online video platform YouTube. It is a fun and colourful initiative that offers the opportunity to compete against world famous athletes by responding to their short videos displaying a particular sporting skill with ones of your own. A sense of engagement, accessibility and ownership of the experience is engendered, all key words for the Web 2.0 experience.

We would like to thank Jody Koehler for pointing out these examples to us.

be easier for companies to hire people who are more comfortable in this new world, thus forcing out not only older professionals but also older methods of communication? Pleil disagrees. “In my opinion,” he says, “they should team up and bring together their knowledge and experience.” Jean-Paul Chapon, who is responsible for coordinating telecoms firm Alcatel-Lucent’s internet and intranet, credits the arrival of new CEO Ben Verwaayan with helping

to open up the company’s intranet and communications to the possibilities of Web 2.0. However, he stresses that “age is not the critical factor. It is more a question of state of mind than a question of being familiar with new technologies.” As always, external realities determine the pace of technological adaptation: Mario Sundar, who is responsible for social media programmes at LinkedIn, suggests that although the average age of LinkedIn users is 43, “professionals across different age groups increasingly find LinkedIn a resource in these tough economic times.” Jody Koehler agrees that the rise of social media does not necessarily entail an overturning of the old guard, and installing young blood at the top of an organisation, whether a new CEO or younger managers, is not a prerequisite for implementing social media programmes. “Social media has nothing to do with age,” he says. “People who can adjust and have the capability of listening, sharing and learning will succeed.” On an internal level, what is important is an openness to redefine the rules of employee engagement, or, as Chapon puts it, “it requires a complete change in the way employees are allowed to participate and express themselves openly.” Web 2.0, then, is as much a cultural change as a question of adapting to a new strategy, a new way to consider hierarchies and the role and responsibility of each employee, necessitating a fundamental change in how a company interacts and communicates.

The challenge for organisations is to have enough managers with social media training knowing how to react to be accepted within the community.

By enabling users to actively research companies and potential employers (and effectively turning the tables, allowing employers to check for references of potential employees), LinkedIn is a fine example of how social media can reconfigure established corporate hierarchical norms. As Mario Sundar explains: “LinkedIn has enabled transparency in employee-employer relationships by surfacing (company) information in the right context to their networks.” This in turn helps companies build their employer brand; accrding to Sundar, “Nearly 80 per cent of HR executives surveyed on LinkedIn recently were of the opinion that the primary way to build employer brand was through employees who update their status on social media forums and networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. I believe this is a trend that will gain mainstream acceptance as social technologies like Linke01/2010

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dIn and Twitter get adopted at a far more rapid pace over the next few years.”

CUTTING THROUGH THE CACOPHONY The sheer

amount of content produced with social media is huge. The hive of activity can at times sound like an overwhelming din, especially to the novice. This tsunami of tweets, comments and blog posts must somehow be surfed, and your message needs to keep its head above water to be heard.

Taking the initiative is the key to sinking or swimming.

“Get involved,” recommends Jody Koehler, “and start building your relationships by being an influencer yourself.” Interacting with online conversations is your best bet for adding valuable substance rather than misinformed hot air, and the value you bring should ensure that you do not come across as defensive. This is particularly important when dealing with criticism: responding to angry stakeholders takes a great deal of skill, care, time and resources.

Giving an answer to everyone is nigh on impossible, so some choices of who to respond to – and how – have to be made. What is vital is that your message is heard loud and clear, because once someone’s thoughts are online, they are not going to go away. Some see this as a positive step in giving consumers power; communicators must see it as another challenge.

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ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT Being fully engaged and active in social media does not just mean opening a Twitter account and telling your stakeholders that you have a new product out on the market. It requires a company to build lasting relationships with stakeholders, which can only really happen if something of value is brought to the table.

As an example of a viable active strategy, Thomas Pleil suggests taking “the role of a curator to help stakeholders to navigate through a specific field having also strategic relevance for the organisation. A strategy like this could also be useful in earning online reputation and is a component of crisis prevention.”

Recently, we have seen a number of crises that have been broken by the public rather than the established news media or the companies involved, thus placing companies in a reactive position.

A memorable example of this occurred in January 2009, when a US Airways passenger jet was forced to land on the Hudson river. Eyewitnesses were the first to break the news with video and photos uploaded to Twitter, and the story went viral within minutes. It was then down to US Airways, and the news media, to react and take over the progression of the story. The headline in the UK’s Daily 01/2010

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HOW NOT TO DO IT Getting it wrong is easier than you think It can be very easy to get started with social media. But opening a Twitter account does not immediately make you a Web 2.0 innovator, and using that account exclusively to market your products is even worse. There are definite ways of mishandling social media tools, some more apparent than others, and even in these early days of experimentation, numerous companies have been criticised for their Web 2.0 tactics. Some have sneakily promoted their products on Twitter by using popular, although unrelated, hashtags to expose their tweets to more users, and in the process coming across like a demented spammer. Others reward bloggers to promote their products, a controverisal though not illegal new development. Some companies have even taken to producing flogs (fake blogs) whereby an employee pretends to be a member of the public who just happens to love the company in question. Savvy Web 2.0 users tend to sniff out these underhand practices rather quickly, resulting in an instant public shaming of the companies concerned (whether this directly affects sales, though, is another matter). Finally, there are companies who don’t endeavour to deceive the public with their digital communications – they are only guilty of being clueless. Not replying to online criticisms, replying too much, wasting time on pointless campaigns, spamming customers... the list is almost endless. Adapting to Web 2.0 can be a tough learning curve.

Telegraph summed it up: New York Plane Crash: Twitter Breaks the News, Again. Social media, work-

The reality of the situation means that, for the moment, the bulk of a firm’s social media work will be purely reactive. ing almost in real time, has meant that crisis communicators no longer have a few hours to formulate a press

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release, or to consider what they are going to do in reaction to a devastating event. Thinking on your feet is the new name of the game.

PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ARENAS It is undeniable that the lack of defined borders in social media can cause concern: how can issues of trust and discretion be reconciled with the freedom and anonymity of the web?

Social media seems to threaten the closely guarded border between internal messages and information meant for the public arena.

The best solution is to start with an internal dialogue to raise awareness of these issues. Ask questions.

How does the company propose that the social media tools be used?

What will they share with others?

Will there be boundaries, and if so, where are they? Social media policies can, according to Jody Koehler, “vary from 25 pages full of lawyer stuff to yellow post-its saying ‘use your common sense.’ ” The first Web 2.0 application to be put in place at Alcatel-Lucent was the opening of employee comments on the firm’s intranet system. According to JeanPaul Chapon, this was the result of soul searching over the extent of moderation and anonymity. “We chose not to moderate comments before publication and we also chose not to publish them anonymously,” he says. “For us, evolving towards Web 2.0 means empowering employees by giving them responsibility, which requires reciprocal trust and respect between all employees, regardless of their hierarchical relationship.”

Mario Sundar agrees that “every company should incorporate a social media policy to help educate their employees on best practices since it concerns the professional brand of the folks who work for them.”

STATE OF ACCEPTANCE – EUROPE VS THE US The social media situation seems to differ slightly across the world. American companies are said to have naturally adopted Web 2.0 far quicker than their colleagues across the Atlantic, who are struggling to come to terms with it.

American companies are said to have naturally adopted Web 2.0 far quicker than their colleagues across the Atlantic, who are struggling to come to terms with it.

For his part, Jody Koehler considers that, in comparison with the US, “the European corporate world is still one or two years behind,” when it comes to the state of acceptance and integration of social media within the corporate world. “European companies have to get more involved in the online space,” he says. “Most of them have a presence within social media, but not actively. Having a Twitter account isn’t a strategy. It’s still a bit of window-dressing in that regard.” A recent study of MEPs (members of the European Parliament) found that many were apprehensive of social media. A significant proportion were worried that once they started an online debate, there would be no way to stop it, should things get out of hand. This is in sharp contrast to the pioneering use of social media throughout the Barack Obama US presidential campaign. It is clear that fully integrating social media can be advantageous, then, but it remains to be seen when the majority of European companies will get on board – or if they ever will, even though it seems like they may get left behind if they do not.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME It is important to remember that although the medium may be constantly changing, the message stays the same. Communicators still have the same job as when all they had was a press release, an address book and a telephone. A healthy amount of cynicism towards the wilder claims made on behalf of social media tools remains (social media releases, anyone?) although this should not be a deterrent to experimentation and innovation. Creating a sense of community, generating buy-in for the work your company strives to achieve, has a very real value in the offline world, and the benefits of enabling your messages to interact with a diverse and active audience far outweigh the occasional misfire. Aligned with a coherent strategy and a clear message, there should be no limits to the reach that social media tools will bring to your communications.

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THE FUTURE S BRIGHT Getting the most out of the 1.7 million users of software development and consulting firm SAP’s Web 2.0 community network is a large-scale challenge.

by Jürgen Zimmermann

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eb 2.0 has taken the communications and marketing industries by storm.

At the heart of this revolution lies social media.

Expectations for the new forms of internet-based communication, including blogs, microblogs, and social networking, are high – but are they realistic?

USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO RETRIEVE AND EXCHANGE KNOWLEDGE New forms of social media

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have proven particularly invaluable when it comes to sharing knowledge. Experts can quickly get in touch with one another and discuss their specialist areas. Regardless of where they are based, where they work, or when – the new tools make it easier than ever to find the right contacts.

The SAP Community Network (SCN) is a perfect example of just how successful this approach can be. This entirely virtual community was founded by SAP around five years ago to foster the exchange between experts at SAP, customers, partners, and other interested parties.

Using various forms of social media, the experts help each other with technology topics and problems, irrespective of where they live or work.

More than 1.7 million people are now registered SCN members (scn.sap.com). Some actively transfer their knowledge online on a daily basis, while others log on to benefit from the shared expertise. A wide variety of social media tools are used for this virtual exchange: teams work together in wikis to develop solutions to problems and controversial topics are discussed in forums. More than 6,000 new entries every day in around 2,000 discussion forums and approximately 500 blog entries a month ensure a continuous flow of new information. The latest developments include an online job site and integrated LinkedIn profiles.

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The success of the social media-enabled exchange lies in the fact that it benefits everyone. Members searching for answers find them quickly and experts make a name for themselves, gaining recognition that transcends organisational and national borders and often boosts their careers. Last but not least, it also enables SAP to raise its global profile and profit from new insights and suggestions for improvements made by experts outside

Photo: www.nasa.gov

the company.These tools are also used internally at SAP – after all, the greatest asset of a software company is its intellectual capital, the knowledge of its employees. All 48,000 employees (half of whom are based in Europe, a quarter in Asia, and a quarter in north and south America) have access to a computer and the company’s intranet.

While many different solutions are used here, networking tools and wikis are without doubt the most important, as well as a growing number of internal blogs and community spaces.

The most frequently deployed Web 2.0 tool at SAP is the wiki. Using a centralised platform, individuals or small teams can use part of a wiki to document their collaboration. It is precisely the ease with which it is possible to publish on a website that has seen wikis become the de facto standard for documenting project work.

With no need for any special training

or extensive lead times, teams around the world can work on the same documents. Similarly, networking tools that help identify the right contacts for a particular topic are practically indispensable to a global company. It is often the case that information has not been documented, or that simply knowing the right person to ask leads to much faster results.

In such cases, a kind of internal Yellow Pages, something SAP has had for many years and continues to enhance, can help. Like Facebook, it contains the names and contact details of employees, but also includes entries about their particular responsibilities, areas of expertise, and fields of interest. The SAP People tool combines existing data from the HR system (such as telephone numbers) with information entered by the employees themselves (for example, Java expertise). The system also displays the employee in relation to his or her colleagues and manager. The result is an invaluable tool that allows employees to find the right contact wherever they may be based in the world.

What has this got to do with corporate communications?

Knowledge management is not a key topic you would generally associate with this area. Although we can debate whether this should or should not be the case in the future, one direct connection is clear: when it comes to communication between experts on a large scale, it is not just

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knowledge that is exchanged, but opinions too – opinions not only on technical issues, but also regarding strategy, decisions, and the organisation of a company. In this context, employees become representatives of their companies, spreading both positive and negative messages.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO EXPRESS OPINIONS Many PR employees are concerned about their colleagues publishing their opinions in forums that can easily be accessed by external parties, as is the case with SCN. What if an employee says something that does not toe the party line?

Or worse still, something for which the company could be sued? We cannot deny that this risk is real. The only comfort to the anxious employees in communications is that their counterparts in the legal department are probably sleeping even less soundly. To help clarify what is acceptable and what is not, SAP published a set of guidelines for employees and communities. Like many other companies, SAP created the guidelines for its employees and also published them externally. In the four years since SCN was founded, this has always proven successful. Trust is therefore both essential and justified in this case.Nevertheless, the advantages of the new media significantly outweigh the risks if you consider how employee communications benefits from the improved exchange. The new tools make it possible to quickly determine the general opinion and mood of the employees and give a voice to individuals who would not normally be heard in a large multinational company such as SAP. For the executive management of a modern company with virtual teams, this presents a very effective tool to recognise – and promote

HOW DOES GENERATION Y USE SOCIAL MEDIA AT WORK?

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As part of her thesis, Julia Friedl, a student at the University of Locarno, asked SAP employees under 30 years old (“digital natives”) based around the world about their preferences when it comes to social media at work. The results empirically showed that the younger generation also sees social media as a complementary offering to – and not a replacement of – traditional forms of media: the participants in the survey clearly preferred traditional forms of communication such as email or meetings to communicate strategies, company news, or customer problems. In contrast, when it comes to exchanging knowledge or expressing personal opinions, discussion forums, blogs, and networking tools topped the list. Another – and particularly interesting – finding of the survey was that there were no significant differences in the way employees from different countries used social media.

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or oppose – trends. In this respect, it is essential to offer the right mix of models that allow participants to express their views both anonymously and using their names.

One good example of this is the Point of View platform that SAP published to capture the mood when the new CEO came into office in June 2009 and new corporate values were introduced in the weeks that followed. In a central discussion forum in the SAP intranet, to which all SAP employees have access, on his first day, new CEO Léo Apotheker published his vision for the company along with the values he considered important, and asked employees to discuss these issues on this platform.

Within just a few days, more than 10,000 employees had visited the site and a lively discussion about the values had begun. Many of the comments were thoroughly critical, but nevertheless generally constructive.

With around 130 longer comments, posted from all corners of the world, it was neither possible nor intended for the CEO to reply to each one. In a few cases, Apotheker did respond himself, but in the main, the discussion focused on the views of the employees. They also had the option to rate every submitted comment anonymously on a scale of one to five, something which proved very useful in allowing general trends among the employees to be identified.

The next, and very important, step was to ensure that the valuable points gleaned from this discussion were not consigned to the realm of social media. Managers and communications employees used the forum and the employees’ anonymous evaluations of the comments to identify key issues and follow them up using more traditional forms of employee communications. As a result, for ex-

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Taking the industry by storm New forms of social media are proving invaluable when it comes to sharing knowledge.

Online tools come with risks, however, such as the possibility for employees to get their own firm into trouble.

Nevertheless, Web 2.0 is ideal for getting employees talking with the bosses.

All this requires a strategic approach from corporate communicators.

Photo: SAP

ample, the most controversial points raised in the Point of View discussion were included on the agenda at the next employee meeting and the most outspoken advocates and opponents of the ideas discussed were invited to take part in an open dialogue that was then printed in the employee magazine. By taking this approach, the communications department was able to close the loop and take a vital step towards a true culture of openness and dialogue. This example clearly shows that social media plays a very significant role in internal communications, especially in global companies, since it facilitates an exchange between employees across cultures, locations, and time zones. Social media is however, only effective if used in addition to existing communication channels.

It can never replace the more personal forms of contact, but does offer an invaluable opportunity to extend the conversation in the virtual, as well as facilitate conversations that would be impossible in the physical world.

WHAT EFFECT DOES THIS HAVE ON CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS? Social media pro-

vides us with as many opportunities as pitfalls. While we are constantly bombarded by new tools, new options, and new experiences in our day-to-day lives, at the same time, long-term changes are taking place that call for a strategic approach from corporate communications:

1. Blurred lines: the introduction of social media has resulted in an increased blurring of the lines between different target groups (internal/external, media/public, and so on). The different groups use the new tools to talk to one another. At the same time, the borders between exchanging only knowledge and actually expressing an opinion are also blurring, since more real-time communication is now possible online. Corporate communications therefore must take a holistic approach: it is no longer realistic to assume that a message communicated to a particular target audience will not be passed on to others. Topics must be planned and communicated in such a way that they are suitable and relevant to all target groups.

2. Managing, not monitoring, topics: the sheer volume of communication and the blurring of boundaries mean that it is no longer possible to monitor messages. While it has long since been the case that there is not one company spokesperson, but several, it has taken the advent of social media to make this clear. Every employee essentially speaks for – or against – his or her company. Social media simply makes it easier for any one Jürgen Zimmermann person to reach an audience of thousands. Corporate comVice President, Corporate Media, SAP Global munications must recognise Communications this and use aids and management measures to help take full advantage of these trends.

3. Speed matters: There are numerous examples of how social media can facilitate a crisis over the course of one weekend. The networked Jürgen Zimmermann is reworld, the ease with which sponsible for the corporate media department at SAP, opinions can be published, including consumer media, inand the intense competition ternal media, the intranet and in the media industry mean the internet. He has been with that companies must react SAP since 1998, and has held a variety of positions both in quickly. Corporate commucorporate communications nications can help in this reand related fields. Before joinspect by training employees ing SAP, he was responsible for on how to use these media. online PR at Allianz.

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TEN PR COMMANDMENTS OF WEB 2.0 NETWORKING Use of the internet as a means of connecting with stakeholders is increasingly popular.

Making contact is easy – but so is getting it all wrong. Here are ten steps communicators can take to make sure that their forays into the online world are as hassle-free as possible.

by Meg Pickard

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I

have a confession to make. For the past ten years, I’ve been engaging in something weird and highly addictive that has changed my life completely. I started doing it late at night in the privacy of my bedroom in a shared flat in north London, but the habit quickly escalated to encroach on breaks and lunchtimes at work. Soon, it was always on my mind. If I wasn’t doing it, I was thinking about it, and when I couldn’t do it because I was on the bus or out with friends, I would find myself thinking about doing it later. I learnt not to reveal my habit in public, because there was social stigma attached to it. I re01/2010

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alised it wasn’t a productive or even necessarily healthy way to spend my time. I even used a fake name. But I kept doing it, all the same. Gradually, through the internet, I became aware that there was a small but dedicated community of like-minded addicts, just like me, distributed across the UK and across the world.

We met up occasionally in pubs and felt reassured that we weren’t as weird as everyone else thought. In

fact, we dared to think that what we were doing might actually be exciting. Over the years, things changed.

More people started doing it. Some people got together because of it. A few lost their jobs because of it. But it gradually lost its weirdness and risky oddball reputation. In fact, only a few years after I started doing it, I found myself talking about the activity in a meeting at work. It felt strange to reveal that I’d actually been doing it for years by that point, but there was no getting away from the fact: I was – and am – a blogger.

It’s absolutely right that businesses should be using web channels to communicate with online users.

TRANSFORMATION As a direct result of ten years of blogging, I’ve made friends; developed an interesting network of contacts; discovered new people and ideas and sites and experiences and media; and watched as something weird and geeky has become mainstream.

Blogging used to be a peripheral personal web activity – something you’d never tell people – but as the internet has become an important (dominant, even?) part of everyday life, blogging has developed from

weird, niche, useless and unnecessarily revealing about the individual; but slowly at first, then quickly, they gained attention and acceptance and piled on users, until we got to a stage where people who don’t use them are considered odd.

Gartner’s famous Hype Cycle depicts visibility over time: after an early technology trigger, visibility shoots up to what Gartner call the “peak of inflated expectations” before dropping swiftly into the “trough of disillusionment”. Then there’s a long, slow, steady climb out via gradual enlightenment, before a product reaches a plateau of productivity. I think the experiences of companies and brands using channels like Twitter and blogs shows that

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being a personal narrative towards being an important way to communicate with the world (wide web). So now blogging is old hat and normal, and Twitter is the next big thing, along with social networking sites and platforms like Facebook. But they’re not that new, really. Or rather, the sites may be, but the central ideas, behaviours, user experiences, habits and patterns of adoption are the same.

It’s all about individuals finding ways to communicate.

There are striking similarities in the development and experiences in the early days of micropublishing, social networking and blogging. At the start, they all looked

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b

there should probably be another landmark on Gartner’s Curve graph – the pothole of corporate cluelessness, or the swamp of misguided good intentions.

It’s absolutely right that businesses should be using web channels to communicate with online users. It makes total sense to go where the customer is – and the more genuine and human that communication is, the better it is for your communication plan overall.

Some organisations are finding the potential of communicating with users online to be enormously exciting.

If you do it right, using social media to communicate with – and listen to – customers is extremely beneficial both for the message and for corporate culture generally.

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DOING IT BADLY But it’s remarkably easy to get it wrong. In the last few years, there have been a few brilliant – or should that be dreadful? – examples of brands using social media badly, with embarrassing or negative effects. In June 2009, premium furniture shop Habitat came a cropper on Twitter. They were using topic hashtags on to ensure their messages were seen by the widest possible number of people. That’s not such a bad move if they used hashtags like #sale and #decorating, but instead, they used hashtags for trending topics – things lots of people are talking about – which meant that their messages were completely inappropriate and irrelevant.

Some of their tweets included: #iphone Our totally desirable Spring Collection now has 20 per cent off!

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#mousavi Join the database for free to win a £1000 gift card!

So, not just interruptive and unwelcome, like spam, but also insensitive, barging in on a serious topic and trying to get attention. If a person acted like that, you’d think them rude and badly behaved. And so it was with Habitat.

Twitter users reacted swiftly – and badly. So how did Habitat respond? They deleted the offending tweets and replaced them with

Most corporate blogs are rubbish, because they’re full of PR speak. some generic product messages with links to their site, then a few days later, issued a statement: “The hashtags were uploaded without Habitat’s authorisation by an overenthusiastic intern who did not fully understand the ramifications of his actions. He is no longer associated with Habitat.” In many ways, this compounded the issue, because rather than taking full re-

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sponsibility for the activity that had occurred under their brand, and apologising for any offence caused by their clumsiness, they blamed someone else. Which led people to ask why they’d ceded responsibility for the whole social media marketing message and execution to an intern. Every company or brand needs to have a plan for what happens if you accidentally find yourself at the centre of an internet controversy.

Put bluntly, these days, the internet in general and social media in particular makes it simple and straightforward for people to exchange outrage, and the links and information required to act on that outrage to make a complaint.

do you communicate effectively and appropriately with the online community? The first thing to do, rule zero if you like, is to recognise that it’s not a single community, any more than there’s a community of mobile phone users or community of television watchers. People use social media in so many different ways and for so many different reasons that you need to understand them, their motivations and their culture before you can start to communicate effectively. So the first rule is to listen, watch and learn. You have to observe a group, get to know their ways, before you can understand them and start to interact with them usefully.

THE BEST ADVICE FOR DEALING WITH SITUATIONS LIKE THIS IS: Don’t be nasty, stupid or

The third rule should be obvious: be transparent. Be authentic. Don’t fake it. Don’t pretend to be something – or someone – you’re not. Genuine enthusiasm and humanity is obvious, and infectious. Think less about being on message and “communicating” and more about being authentic and conversing. In fact, given the choice, many people online don’t want to be “communicated to” at all; they’d much rather engage in conversations about the things that matter to them. Most corporate blogs are rubbish, because they’re not authentic – they’re full of PR speak. Changing

wrong in the first place. That’s it.

Prevention is better than cure. But if you can’t help it, and you’ve stumbled into something, then recognise that you’ve messed up, apologise quickly and genuinely, learn from the mistake and resolve to do better. So how

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That’s related to the second rule: interact! It’s a conversation between real people. Exchange views, ideas and values. Pay attention. Be careful. Ask questions and learn.

Answer question when asked. Be part of the community you’re with. Don’t just stand on the sidelines – give as much as you take: it’s conversation, not just “communication”.

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a press release to first person tense isn’t blogging. Squishing press releases into 140 characters isn’t Twittering.

The fourth rule is: be responsive. If someone asks you a question, reply with an answer. That means you have to ensure you have the capacity, will and corporate culture – and the time to respond to comments before you embark on a social media communication strategy. Remember, it’s supposed to be a two-way conversation – if it’s all one way, that’s not communication. That’s a broadcast.

But it brings me to rule 4b, which is: don’t be creepy.

Don’t be a stalker. Don’t seize onto any mention of your product or brand and jump out at people from the murky shadows of the internet. Some companies set up alerts/ monitors which mean that they are instantly alerted at the merest mention of a keyword they’re watching, like a brand name. They pop up like a jack-in-the-box and start chatting as if they’d been participant in the conversation all along rather than the subject of it, or else they are silent and invisible online, only becoming active when someone invokes their name (negatively, usually). They might think they’re being responsive and reactive, but to users it feels intrusive, big brother-like, odd.

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The fifth rule is to be consistent across channels and time.

The way a company uses social media should be properly integrated with other communication channels or strategies. It’s all very well allowing customers to have a twoway conversation with you on Twitter or a blog, but what about when they try and call your helpline or visit one of your stores – can they expect the same level of personal, 01/2010

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responsive, human service? And consistency over time means keeping up momentum. Social media shouldn’t just be an afterthought or an add-on, and it really needs to represent and reflect your brand culture and personality in order to be engaging. And it’s not just a passing fad, so if you start a blog or Twitter feed, it needs to be maintained.

The web is littered with the husks of abandoned blogs, microsites, Twit-

Blogging used to be a peripheral personal web activity – something you’d never tell people. ter accounts and the like, abandoned as soon as the project is over or the next big thing came along. Don’t let yours be one of them!

Rule six: be prepared for how you will tackle it if you mess up. Respond quickly, accept criticism with good grace, try to learn from it, and always, always, act with integrity.

Don’t underestimate the power of a social media backlash.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Confessions of a serial blogger Social networking used to be a personal web activity, but it is now used by businesses across the world.

Communicating online is simple – but it’s remarkably easy to get it wrong.

There are a number of different rules that communicators can follow to try to maximise their online success.

Many of these rules seem rather obvious, but tend to get forgotten by firms.

Ultimately, social media is constantly shifting, so adaptability is crucial.

Photo: Guardian News and Media Limited

The seventh rule is a bit like the first, but it’s important, so I’ll say it again: listen to people. Forget about broadcasting to an audience and think about networks instead.

Tapping networks for input – suggestions, ideas – helps groups and individuals and brands achieve better results. Even your harshest critics can reveal interesting perspectives about your organisation which you may not have considered – or confronted.

Rule eight sounds simple, but you’d be surprised how infrequently it’s done. Social media isn’t just about your relationship with a user – it’s about their relationships with each other. So the rule is: help people look good in front of their network of friends or contacts. Help your users be first with the news; give them sneaky peeks at new products; publicly highlight their suggestions if you value them. Make them look influential, wise, wonderful, and they’ll appreciate you even more.

But be warned: make them look

like a press release mule or a viral campaign schmuck, and they’ll look stupid, cheap or exploited in front of people whose opinions they care about, and may resent you for it.

Earlier this year, a company called Moonfruit encouraged people to tweet using a particular hashtag in order to win a computer. On paper, the results looked like a huge success, generating more than 250 tweets a minute for several days. Traffic to Moonfruit.com increased 600 per cent. But the flip side is that they were encouraging people to spam their friends to be in with a chance of winning.

Many did it without thinking, but for a small but vocal group, there was a palpable sense of discomfort because the competition mechanic encouraged people to prioritise free stuff over the norms of social communication. Very effective for the brand, not so pleasant for the community.

The ninth rule is to make good stuff. Make sure your content is good. If it’s supposed to be funny or resonate with a particular audience, then ensure it does. The secret to making things viral isn’t in the communications plan: people get excited when you make good/interesting/convivial/stimulating things.

Finally, we arrive at rule ten. Rule ten is… there isn’t one. Or at least, not a fixed one.

Since social media involves a constantly shifting social, cultural and technological landscape, rule ten is to learn from your own experiences, and write your own rules.

You know best what your particular organisation has the appetite and culture for, what they’re ready to handle.

You’ll also learn quickly from your communities about how they want to be communicated with, and how they want to communicate with you – which platforms, tone, frequency suit their patterns of life and media. So above all: try, learn, adapt, and stay flexible.

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Meg Pickard Head of Social Media Development, The Guardian

Meg Pickard has been working in new media for more than ten years, mainly in creative roles for media companies.

She curently works as head of social media development at the Guardian, where she is responsible for working with journalists, technologists and users to develop and manage new social web strategies and experiences for the newspaper.

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BEST FOOT FORWARD Early adoption of new communications techniques can be advantageous, but the process also involves a certain amount of danger and risk taking.

You do not need to be Christopher Columbus to explore the world of social media, but a little courage will always be helpful.

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ocial networking, social media and social computing are the poster children of the Web 2.0 brigade. The huge growth of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the resultant explosion of client applications on mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry are testament to the demand for social collaboration between not only the digital natives (Gen Y and the Millennials) but also the digitally aware Baby Boomers and Gen X. While the impact of these technologies is more than evident on the internet, organisations big and small have be01/2010

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gun to adopt, and adapt, social computing tools to internal use on their intranets as well as in communities with their business partners and customers. While some organisations have jumped in early, like IBM did, most others are still wrestling with the dilemma as to whether to climb on the social bandwagon or not, and if so, how soon. These tools can be classiďŹ ed according to many dier-

Photo: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Reproduction Number: LC-USZC2-1687

by Ian McNairn

ent schema, but at the end of the day it really boils down to their ability to help you share information, find and connect with people, and collaborate with people in both real-time and store and forward modes.

From instant messaging, real-time file transfer and web conferencing at the real-time end, all the way to messaging, file sharing and collaborative working, these tools – such as wikis, blogs, profiles, social book-

Simply clarifying where your employees should discuss business issues will begin to reduce the risk considerably. marking, social filesharing, microblogging, activities and to do lists, and communities – are available as a standalone tools or integrated solutions like Lotus Connections.

While commercial internet solutions are focused on fuelling their own growth and success by attracting as many participants as possible, the growing trend towards interconnection between the various tools suggests a maturing outlook towards users demands to be placed at the centre. While this trend is desirable, it cannot stretch across the firewall into your organisation for obvious reasons of privacy, security and commercial advantage. For this reason alone the rapid adoption of these tools inside your organisation becomes a matter of survival.

BUSINESS DRIVERS AND ADVANTAGES By providing these so-

cial tools inside the organisation, in some ways you alleviate the concern as to whether or not you have to control the use of similar tools outside the firewall by your employees.

As part of your social computing

guidelines, which we will discuss at the end of the article, simply clarifying where your employees should discuss business issues will begin to reduce the risk considerably.

Furthermore, providing social tools inside the firewall will increase the productivity of knowledge workers, get everyone involved in innovation and make individuals’ talents visible and accessible by leveraging the expertise of everyone. This improved social capital within the organisation creates a dynamic environment that will provide sustainable business advantage through improved employee satisfaction and staff retention. Most importantly it improves with size!

EARLY ADOPTER RISKS AND BENEFITS Being an early adopter in this space provides you with first mover advantage. You are able to show industry leadership, and to your customers, by adapting these tools to your unique business requirements early on in the cycle. This makes it far easier to change your processes and capitalise on the advantages these tools provide, than it would if you were to take on board fully finalised processes, designs and toolsets, and have no opportunity to adjust them to your unique business processes. Clearly the ability to make gradual incremental changes in direction during the process is far less disruptive than a huge course change would be.

The message you would be giving your staff, particularly those already engaged in using social tools on the internet, would be hugely positive, and serves to bind the workforce together in a way not possible before.

Clearly there are dangers in being on the leading edge (or maybe bleeding edge!) If your organisation is very risk averse, and tends to punish failure rather than treating it as part of the learning curve, then early adoption would cause warning signs to flash. However, rather than reject the concept because it is strange, I would suggest you consider it from a different viewpoint. Be very clear at the outset what it is you hope to achieve. This in my mind is the true test as to whether early adoption is important for your organisation or not. If you are able to clearly express what you hope to gain by early adoption, and that matches your business ethos and strategy, then the risks associated are hugely reduced. You are able to measure the benefits and risks, and are not jumping in simply because it is a new technology.

FACILITATING EARLY ADOPTION So, let us assume

you have decided that early adoption will bring significant advantages if successful, how do you facilitate this early adoption? There are three prongs to successful early adop01/2010

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tion, and while they do not need to occur in this order, all three are equally, critically, important. Visible support from a senior business champion is essential, not only in terms of the project, but also in terms of their active involvement in it. Initial participation and pre-population of data needs to be done by a carefully selected team of early adopters who ideally have each volunteered rather than having been selected by management.

Throughout the initial process of pre-populating data and customisation to the organisation’s specific needs, there needs to be a single passionate, focused, dedicated facilitator, or catalyst, who keeps a close watch on every aspect of the new deployment as a user. This is not a project manager or IT person who is concerned with the success of the project, but rather a business person who is passionate about the business benefit that this early adoption is aimed at bringing about. This role cannot be a small, part-time add-on to their normal daily activities, but rather needs to be, for the duration of the early adoption phase, an almost full-time, obsessive role. The reason for this is that the eventual success or not of this project is absolutely dependent on the early adoption phase. Understaffing it, or expecting it to grow while the demands on everyone’s time remain the same, will lead to its eventual failure at worst, or ambivalence at best.

Besides the obvious advantage that pre-population of data results in when deploying the application beyond its early adoption phase, it also provides a great shakedown when changes can be made easily with minimum disruption. Try and engage the participants in interaction at every possible opportunity by using polls, interactive widgets and clickable items which give the users positive feedback.

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MEASURING SUCCESSFUL DEPLOYMENT The first trick of measuring successful deployment is knowing what to measure. What is the business outcome you are striving to achieve? Look for linked indicators that might enable or hinder this business outcome and aim to measure those.

Even better, see if you can measure the individual components associated with this, but it is critical that you are very clear what changes you are trying to get in behaviour rather than simplistic gross measures like turnover or unit sales or profitability, however vital they may be. These are affected by so many different factors that it is exceedingly unlikely that the adoption, early or otherwise, of a social tool would be able to single-handedly change them in a measurable fashion. What you are looking for is to understand the cause and effect relationship of the aspects that you intend to measure. Just because it is easy to measure, for example 01/2010

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the number of blogs, does not mean you should report on it. If what you are trying to do is reduce the amount of time experts spend repeating the same information on a daily basis in response to queries, and you hoped that by getting them to blog they would reduce this, then measuring the number of blogs is pointless.

What you need to measure is the degree to which you have reduced the number of calls these experts have to deal with on a daily basis as well as the satisfaction of the people they have helped. In other words, has the introduction of blogging achieved the business outcome you intended, namely giving your expensive experts more time in the day while not dropping service levels? Whether this was achieved through 10,100 or 1000 blogs is immaterial.

The first trick of measuring successful deployment is knowing what to measure.

Rather than measuring the easyto-measure number of blogs, wikis, pages, etc., consider measuring action-related items like postings, comments, tags, bookmarks, dynamic links, prints, members and even ratings. All of these give a better daily indicator of the amount of effort the users have expended, thus probably giving a truer indication of the value of those activities to them.

ACTIONS RATHER THAN OUTCOME Try to measure the actions

that people take rather than the outcomes you are hoping to achieve, as they are invariably easier to observe and thus measure. For example, if you were hoping to shorten the time taken for certain problems to

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Adopting early for success later on Social networking, social media and social computing are the poster children of the Web 2.0 brigade.

Being an early adopter with new products and techniques can give first mover advantage and shows industry leadership.

However, there are risks and dangers associated with moving early.

The first trick of measuring successful deployment is knowing exactly what to measure.

The most important thing to give your users is a clear understanding of what is allowed, as well as a clear business explanation as to the reasons why.

be solved, measuring end-to-end time taken is possible, but fraught with difficulty. It might be better to measure the number of FAQ answers opened, and had the checkbox “this solved my problem” ticked, if the change involved offering selected FAQs before allowing a new problem to be posted.

Another lateral way of thinking could be in order to measure the importance of an early adoption

Photo: IBM

Rather than measuring the number of blogs or wikis, consider measuring action related items like postings, comments, tags, bookmarks... tool, to the community who use it, by including a single button that the user pushes when they experience a problem in the application, and then intentionally disabling the application, but not the button, for a limited

period. The number of people pushing the button would be a direct indicator of the apparent importance this application has to them. Obviously this is a high risk strategy that should be very sparingly used, and only towards the end of the adoption period, when one would expect greater user participation. Needless to say, everyone who participated by pressing the button should be given immediate feedback that this was part of the test process, and not in fact an actual outage, and then they should be given immediate access to continue using the application.

SOCIAL COMPUTING GUIDELINES TO HELP PROTECT YOU AND YOUR ORGANISATION Last of all,

the most important thing to give your users is a very clear understanding of what is allowed or not, as well as a clear business explanation to the reasons underpinning this.

At IBM we created social computing guidelines based on the understanding that very early adopters got in the space and underpinned by our business conduct guidelines, which are a series of the business rules that every IBM has to sign off on each Ian McNairn year. The social computing guidelines are as simple as: Programme Director for Web Innovation and “be who you are, speak in Technology, IBM the first person, use a disclaimer, respect your audience, add value, don’t pick fights, be the first to respond to your own mistakes, use your best judgement, and don’t forget your day job,” and are publically available if you want them: http:// Ian McNairn is the programme director for web innovation and www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/ technology within the office of guidelines.html

ADVANTAGES Ultimately, there are huge advantages in becoming an early adopter, but first be clear why you are doing it from a business outcome perspective, then try to ease the early adoption with dedicated facilitators, and at all stages measure your progress in terms of linked actions to your desired business outcomes.

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the IBM chief information officer, based in the UK but in a worldwide role. He acts as a catalyst between innovators and implementers, facilitating the flow of ideas, best practices, standards and leadership and is an evangelist in the social software, collaboration and knowledge management arenas. Before joining IBM, he was the global IT strategy director for the global insurance broker Sedgwick (Marsh & McLennan), and prior to that was a lecturer and researcher at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

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POWER TO THE PEOPLE The internet has empowered consumers, giving them the chance to shape brands to fit their own personalities and tastes. Now it is up to companies to listen to them.

by Elliot S. Schreiber

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he internet, although still in its infancy, has fundamentally altered our social, economic and political lives.

The impact of the internet is equal to that of the printing press, which shifted the means of information from central authorities to the masses, helping to destroy feudal society, principalities, and undermining the church’s authority over publishing. Until the internet, news gathering, editing and distribution were still owned by large corporations. Anyone can now gather and distribute news, and the mass media is finding it difficult to keep pace. Consider that the 2008 Mumbai massacre was tweeted and emailed around the world by those caught in the carnage to other individuals before the news media was covering the situation.

The internet has transformed the market environment for virtually every company, empowering consumers, increasing the threat of new entrants, and creating new competitive opportunities or risks for existing companies. The economist Ronald Coase had found in his Nobel Prize winning article The Nature of the Firm (1937) that the primary economic rationale for integrated corporations was the lowering of

Prior to the internet, companies believed that they were the central repository of information for their employees and stakeholders.

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search and transaction costs. The internet has stripped these advantages from many companies, changing industries as diverse as automobile, travel and entertainment.

The nature of what we term a market and the value of the market also has been changed. The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) noted that “markets are conversations already taking place” in cyberspace. Christopher Anderson noted in his 2004 Wired Magazine article that a “long tail” had 01/2010 COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

developed, allowing businesses to use the internet to realise significant profit from selling to niche rather than mass markets in ways not previously possible.

FROM RECIPIENT TO PRODUCER The term social media re-

lates to those web-based activities that allow individuals to publish, share or network with others. The consumer is no longer simply a recipient, but now also a producer of content. We have moved from communicating one to many to a new environment in which many communicate with many.

It is in these social media where people increasingly form their opinions of brands and reputations. A 2009 study by the Razorfish agency found more than 97 per cent of consumers said that social media conversations influenced their purchase decisions. This confirms the Edelman Trust Barometer that found that the most trusted source of information is “someone like me.”

Prior to the internet, companies believed that they were the central repository of information for their employees and stakeholders. The relationship between companies and their stakeholders has been changed.

Smart companies recognise that the new market environment provides opportunities to bond with stake-

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holders. The book Digital Capital (1999) quotes me as saying that the internet would eventually make it possible for me to get a “personalised Schreiber brand.” I sensed then that the internet was moving information and knowledge to the “edge of the network” and that customer-centric brand management would arise, allowing individuals to shape brands to fit their own personalities and tastes.

We are evolving toward that vision.

Many companies have come to realise that brands are co-owned with their customers. This is an exciting change since the emotional connection with the brand enhances perceived value.

IMPACT ON REPUTATION It

can be costly to act as if things have not changed. For example, PepsiCo had to reintroduce the old packag-

ing for its Tropicana orange juice after customers reacted negatively to the new package design. The reaction was energised by social media conversations. A wiser future procedure for Pepsi and others would be to engage customers in co-creating the new packaging design. It could be a shared experience, coming closer to the personalised brand I envisioned ten years ago.

If branding is becoming more difficult, there should be little wonder why companies are concerned about the impact of social media on their corporate reputation (“the perception by a stakeholder that an organisation is distinguished from its peers and competitors on attributes of importance to the stakeholder”). Reputations are built primarily on actions, not words, and actions are more transparent than ever before. PepsiCo may have sought to change a brand and package design, but its actions impacted the company’s reputation in ways that would not have been expected prior to social media. Companies are now part of, not the centre of, their stakeholder universe.

Individuals can now compare and contrast, challenge and contest information. Company websites are secondary sources of information, not primary. The following are 01/2010 COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

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some key issues social media raises for companies and the challenges these pose for corporate communications:

1. ISSUE: The traditional media is no longer the primary

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source of information for customers and other stakeholders.

Communicators have historically been hired from the ranks of journalists and their relationship with the media and access to reporters was an important consideration.

CHALLENGE: Corporate communications needs to see media in its widest sense and begin to distance itself from its traditional media relations focus. Companies need to share, to listen, and to participate. Bloggers are more engaged with, and in many cases are more important in, shaping perceptions about a company than traditional media, and they should be treated as such.

2. ISSUE: The internet has increased the number of stakeholders the company deals with. More people have access to information about the company and more are willing and able to utilise technology to comment on the company or otherwise impact the company’s reputation.

CHALLENGE: This is an area that offers great opportunity to corporate communications. No other function in the corporation has responsibility for weighing the countervailing interests of the organisation’s myriad of stakeholders. Reputation management is a process that balances financial interests against the informed interests of stakeholders. Corporate communications should assume a major role in corporate decision making.

3. ISSUE: Brand management has changed. The internet puts the power in the hands of the consumer. This can undermine brand value. Consumers have insight into costs and pricing. This puts tremendous pressure on brands that seek to position themselves on value.

CHALLENGE: Corporate communications needs to help focus the organisation on greater transparency, relationships, customer service, and quality to maintain advantage and build brand. Companies can listen to customers and use that information to develop new products or improve existing ones. Branding and packaging will need to adapt to an open engagement model, encouraging customers to become actively involved in helping to define the brand and personalise it.

4. ISSUE: Social media is blurring the distinctions between marketing and communications. Both functions are engaged in social media. Activities are often difficult to distinguish as being marketing or communications and corporate executives are not certain in what area to invest.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Time for companies to start listening The consumer is no longer simply a recipient, but also a producer of content.

Many companies have come to realise that brands are co-owned by their increasingly empowered customers.

Social media raises some new key challenges for corporate communicators.

The technology is constantly evolving, and while it is dangerous to ignore it, playing the Web 2.0 game can be risky.

develop more metrics to show the financial value of relationships.

Marketing wants to sell via social media; communicators to date seem content to build relationships and listen. Corporate communications has a core competency in relationship building. A middle ground is needed, but to seize the opportunity public relations will need to do a better job in showing the value of social media relationships, both in terms of monetisation and risk mitigation.

5. ISSUE: Companies find it difficult to hear criticism of their products and services. Corporate communicators have been those who are charged with producing positive messages and refuting criticisms.

CHALLENGE: It is impossible to deal with every criticism that occurs in cyber space. Companies need to have better metrics to delineate important criticisms, i.e. those that can become ‘sticky’, and those that are unimportant. Communicators also need to both learn and help their companies learn that criticisms are an opportunity to engage and have a dialogue with their critics. Social media provides an important focus group for those who adapt well.

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6. ISSUE: Reputation management is a process, not an activity.

Its goal should not be to make the corporation well liked, but rather to build competitive advantage.

CHALLENGE: This will be a difficult transformation for corporate communications, which has traditionally pushed programmes and philanthropy based upon a philosophy that these engender goodwill from stakeholders. Communications professionals will need to become more process oriented and adopt research and measurement to prove that their programmes are strategic to the company and that they build value, not just esteem.

Photo: Drexler University

Companies often ask if there is a risk in not investing in social media.

The risks are great. As noted here, social media is not an add-on to other media. It is transforming markets.

Not being involved will put the company at a disadvantage versus more engaged competitors. The company’s ability to listen and its knowledge of where the market is going will be compromised versus more actively engaged competitors. I would offer the following recommendations to corporate communications and public relations professionals:

- Technology will continue to evolve and change. Focus on strategy and reputation objectives, not on the technology. Be clear about what you want to be known for and by whom you want to be known and valued.

- Understand that social media is not all the same. Some is good for listening, some for sharing, some for networking, and other types for publishing. It is important to use the social media appropriately.

- Become a real member of the community – do not try to always per-

suade the community or sell them something (product or perspective of your company). Social media is the ultimate cocktail party. If you went to a cocktail party trying to sell something to everyone, you would likely find people moving away from you. Once you have built credibility as a legitimate and concerned member of the social community, you might be asked for some suggestions.

- Focus on your organisation’s values – they must be honest and transparent. Values are the foundation of reputation. They determine the corporate culture (“the way we do things around here”), which determines who we hire, who we reward, who we promote, and what behaviours we accept. Identify and clarify your values and make certain that you hold people responsible for following the values – they are now on full display.

- Engage your employees and help them to understand your reputation objectives and their role in building them. They are the ones who give your brand life. Make certain that you have clear guidelines for employee use of social media.

Get them involved in sharing honest stories about the company online; ask them to help you listen and monitor what is being said about the company externally. Companies Prof. Elliot S. Schreiber have done a poor job in this Drexel University, regard.

Philadelphia - Monitor, listen and remain calm and good humoured. Not everything said will be positive.

Not every blog is important, but some are very important.

There are a number of companies that offer monitoring software to help companies Elliot Schreiber is clinical profeskeep track of what is going on sor of marketing and executive in social media. director of the Centre for Corpo- Build relationships. As noted, rate Reputation Management this is a core competency of at the Bennett S. LeBow College of Business, Drexel University in corporate communications Philadelphia. He was also a proand public relations. Comfessor at the DeGroote School panies will need to be open of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario from to building relationships with 2001to 2004, and has been a responsible stakeholders with visiting professor at Penn State, whom they might have had Syracuse, Temple and Villanova. little contact in the past. New From 2006 to 2007, he was senior adviser to the Reputation relationships may turn into Institute, New York. Other develnew partnerships and help to opments in his career led him further build reputation, which to work for major corporations in turn builds value. such as Bayer and Nortel.

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EXTREME OPINIONS: NOW IN REAL-TIME The colonisation of real-time, the rise of extreme opinions and the emergence of national webs are all recent internet developments.

by Geert Lovink

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eb 2.0 has three distinguishing features: it is easy to use; it facilitates the social element; and users can upload their own content in whatever form, be it pictures, videos or text. In this text, I discuss three recent trends in internet culture: the colonisation of realtime, comment culture and the rise of extreme opinions, and the emergence of national webs.

THE COLONISATION OF REAL-TIME There is a fundamental shift away from the static archive towards the

ow and the river. We see this occurring in metaphors like Google Wave. Silicon Valley is gearing up for the colonisation of real-time, away from the slowly changing webpage, which still had similarities with the newspaper front page. Some have even said goodbye to the very idea of a search because it is a timeconsuming activity with often unsatisfactory outcomes. This

The rise of the machines has implications for freedom

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Photo: Moritz Vennemann

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could, potentially, be the point where the Google empire begins to crumble – and that is why they are keen to be at the forefront. Google Wave integrates the feeds of Facebook and Twitter accounts into one real live event happening on the screen. It is a meta online tool for real-time communication. Google Wave looks like you are sitting on the banks of a river, watching the flow go by. It is no longer the case that you approach the PC with a question and then dive into the archive. The internet as a whole is going real-time in an attempt to come closer to the messiness, the complexities of the real world.

The main driver of the real-time internet is the microblogging service Twitter, but we can also think of the social networking sites and their urge to pextract as much realtime data out of their users: “What are you doing?” Frantically updated blogs play a role in this process, as do frequently updated news sites. The driving technology behind this is RSS, which makes it possible to get instant updates of what is happening elsewhere on the web. The increasing proliferation of the mobile phone has a significant background role as the main facilitator in mobilising your computer, the social network, video and photo camera, audio devices, and eventually also your TV. The miniaturisation of hardware, combined with wireless connectivity, makes it possible to incorporate technology into everyday life. Web 2.0 applications are responses to this trend and attempt to find value in every situation we find ourselves. The machine constantly wants to know what we think, what choices we make, where we go, and who we talk to.

There is no evidence that the world is becoming more virtual; the cyber

prophets were wrong here. The virtual wants to penetrate and map out our real lives and social relationships. The virtual is becoming more real. All the investment is there, and moving away from Second Life and virtualisation and pretending to be someone else. We are not being encouraged to pretend to be someone else, but to be ourselves. We constantly log in, create profiles in order to present ourselves on the global marketplace of jobs, friendships and love. We can have multiple passions but only one ID. The earlier idea, that the virtual is there to liberate you from your old self, has broken down. It is all about self-management and techno sculpting: how do you shape the self?

NETIZENS AND THE SPREAD OF EXTREME OPINIONS Where has the rational and balanced neti-

zen gone, the well-behaved online citizen? The internet seems to become an echo chamber for extreme opinions.

Is Web 2.0 getting out of control? At first glance, the idea of the netizen is a mid 1990s response to the first wave of users that took over the net. The netizen moderates, cools down heated debates and, primarily, responds in a non-repressive manner. The netizen does not represent the law, is no authority, and acts like a personal adviser, a guide in a new universe. The netizen role is proposed in the spirit of good conduct and corporate citizenship.

Users had to take social responsibility themselves. It was not a call for government regulation, and was explicitly designed to keep legislators out of the net. Until 1990 (the late academic stage of the net) it was presumed that literally all users knew the rules (also called netiquette), and would behave accordingly. Of course, this was not always the case (in the end, we are all human , all too human...), so, when misbehaviour was noticed, the individual could be convinced to stop spamming, bullying, etc. This was no longer possible after 1995, when the internet opened up to the general public and the world wide web, with its browsers that made it so much easier to use. Because of the rapid growth, the code of conduct, carefully developed over time by IT engineers and scientists, could no longer be passed on from one user to the next.

At the time, the net was seen as a global medium that could not be easily controlled by national legislation. Perhaps there was some truth in this. Cyberspace was out of control, but in a harmless way. But after 9/11 and the dotcom crash, things changed dramatically. Over a decade later there is a great deal of legislation, government bodies and a whole arsenal of software tools to oversee the national web, as it is now called. Retrospectively, it is quite easy to deconstruct the rational netizen approach as a lib01/2010

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ertarian form, a figure from the neoliberal age of deregulation, but the issues have only grown exponentially, not gone away. These days we would probably rather frame it as a part of education programmes in schools and general awareness campaigns. Identity theft is a serious business.

Cyberbullying among young kids does happen, and both parents and teachers need to know how to identify and respond to it. Much like the mid 1990s, we are still faced with the problem of massification. The sheer user numbers and intensity in which people engage with the internet is phenomenal. What perhaps has changed is that many no longer believe that the internet community can sort out these issues itself. The internet has penetrated society to such an extent that they have become one and the same.

IMPULSIVE REACTIONS In these times of global recession, a rise in nationalism and ethnic tensions means that comment cultures in Web 2.0 seem to have become a major concern for media regulators and the police. Blogs, forums and social networking sites invite users to leave short messages. It is in particular young people who react impulsively to news events, often posting death threats to politicians and celebrities without realising what they are doing. The professional monitoring of comments is becoming a serious business, as the following two Dutch examples prove.

Marokko.nl has to oversee 50,000 posts every day, and the right-wing Telegraaf news site gets 15,000 daily comments on its selected news items. Populist blogs like Geen Stijl encourage users to post extreme judgments – a proven tactic to draw attention to the site. Whereas some sites have internal policies to delete racist remarks, death threats and libelous content, others encourage their users to do exactly that, all in the name of freedom of speech. Current software enables users to write statements, often without the possibility of others to respond. Web 2.0 was not designed to facilitate debate. The terror of informality inside walled gardens like Facebook is increasingly becoming a problem.

If the web goes real-time, there is less time for reflection and more technology that facilitates impulsive blather. This development will only further invite authorities to interfere in online conversations.

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RISE OF NATIONAL WEBS Due to rise of the worldwide internet user base, focus has shifted from the global potential towards local, regional and national exchanges. These days, only around 25 per cent of the content is in English, and most conversations are no longer conducted in English.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Three recent internet culture trends Social media tools like Google Wave and Twitter have shifted the internet from a static archive into real-time.

Web 2.0 seems to have become an echo chamber for extreme opinions.

An increase in the worldwide internet user base has shifted focus towards local, regional and national exchanges.

The Obama campaign is a great example of the internet’s democratisation.

immediate surroundings – and there is nothing wrong with that. This was predicted in the nineties; it just took a while to be implemented. The background of the national web is the development of increasingly sophisticated tools to oversee the national IP range (the IP addresses allocated to a country). These technologies can be used in two directions: to block users from outside the country from watching national TV programmes online

What people care about first and foremost is what happens in their immediate surroundings – and there is nothing wrong with that. and visiting public libraries such as in Norway and Australia (in the case of new ABC online services); and to prevent citizens from visiting overseas sites (mainland Chinese not being able to visit YouTube, Facebook, etc.). The democratisation of the internet really only happened over the past five to ten years and the Obama campaign was a significant landmark in this process. Participation, in this

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context, is an old school concept. It presumes that firms and politicians have a goal and then invite others to contribute. In this age of large corporations, big NGOs and government departments, it is all too easy to deploy Web 2.0 strategies as a part of your overall communication plan. It is true that this open knowledge for all has not arrived everywhere, and there is still a role to play for the Web 2.0 consultant. But Web 2.0 is certainly no longer a well-kept secret. There is already a lot known about web demographics, usability requirements, and which application to use in which context. One would, for instance, not use MySpace to approach senior citizens, and it is also known that young people are reluctant to use Twitter, it is just not ‘their thing’. These are all top-down considerations.

Photos: Moritz Vennemann; private

AMBIVALENT DEVELOPMENT It gets more interesting if you ask the Netizen 2.0 question. How will people themselves start to utilise these tools bottom-up? Will activists start to use their own Web 2.0 tools? Remember that social networking sites did not originate in a social movement setting. They were developed as post-dotcom responses to the silly e-commerce wave of the late 1990s that had no concept what users were looking for online.

Instead of regarding users merely as consumers of goods and services, inside Web 2.0 people are pressed to produce as much data as possible. From the so-called user generated content profiles are abstracted, which are then sold to advertisers as direct marketing customer data.

Users do not immediately experience the parasitic nature of Web 2.0. From a political point of view, the rise of national webs is an ambivalent development. Whereas

China’s national internet firewall is an example of the rise of national webs

communicating in one’s own language and not having to use the Latin script keyboards and domain names, can be seen as liberating necessity to bring on board the remaining 80 per cent of the world population that is not yet on the net, the new digital enclosure also presents Prof. Geert Lovink a direct threat to the free University of Amsterdam and open exchanges the internet once facilitated.

The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it does not lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. Increasingly, auGeert Lovink is an assistant professor at the University of Amthoritarian regimes such as sterdam. He is also the direcIran are making tactical use tor of the Institute of Network of the web in order to crack Cultures and a media theorist.

In 2004, he was appointed down on the opposition. research professor at the HoAgainst all predictions, the geschool van Amsterdam (inGreat Firewall of China is teractive media) and associate remarkably successful in professor (new media) at the University of Amsterdam. Lovink keeping out hostile conholds a PhD from the University tent, while monitoring the of Melbourne. In 2003, he was internal population on an a postdoc fellow at the Univerunprecedented scale. sity of Queensland in Brisbane.

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DIGITAL REVOLUTION TAKES HOLD IN RUSSIA Although still in its infancy, the application of Web 2.0 in Russian public relations is viewed with great enthusiasm, if not yet fully-developed expertise.

by Marat Rakaev

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I

n Russia right now we are witnessing a boom in public companies entering social networking sites and the blogosphere – the name of the game is Web 2.0, which is so popular nowadays. Brands get socialised in three ways. Some stick their necks out and immediately singe their feathers with bad experiences (these types of brands are thus far in the majority). Others take a wait and see attitude, analyse the competitors, and undertake occasional attempts at social media and randomly taking a crack at this market. And, in third place, the most numerically insignificant group establishes an integrated strategy for their presence in Web 2.0 and follows it. But, at any rate, 2009 could be called a Web 2.0 year 01/2010

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for the Russian corporate world.

One of the major problems that prevent companies from using Web 2.0 capabilities to their maximum effect is a catastrophic shortage of social media specialists in the Russian market – specialists who would be able to work as public relations operatives in the blogosphere and on social networking websites. Although it is true that small companies specialising in the development and promotion of virus video sprout like mushrooms after summer rains,

but they only carry out small jobs in social media, these being aimed mainly at special product advertising at specific moments in time. No integral approach exists, which is supposed to come from the client in the first place. Here, a second problem emerges – a blatant lack of coordination between the marketing and public relations functions and a conflict of opinion on how best to enter social networking sites. It is no secret that the public relations departments of many large Russian companies, including the representations of foreign corporations, appear to work on the same objective, but are often in fact following a separate plan. The social media advertising campaigns of the marketing department are not always coordinated with the public relations service strategy – moreover, they can often even contradict one another. Social media strategic activity planning should be aimed at making direct or indirect profit and sales increases, but, so far, no company can boast of being able to convert its social media activities to a substantial profit. Nevertheless, experience is gradually gained and that means that conclusions and results will surely follow. And it is very important to be among the pioneers in this process rather than among those who will have to catch up with the pioneers afterwards, making childish errors which the pioneers have already made and learned to avoid.

Among the major Web 2.0 channels that are really efficacious for PR service activities, we can single out the following:

BLOGOSPHERE The Russian segment of LiveJournal is rather active, and this platform is popular with students and young people rather than just with teenagers expressing

their thoughts with laconic words, like cool, lol, etc. At the moment, three million bloggers are registered in the Russian segment of the blogosphere, and, of this number, less than a half are more or less active. According to Google statistics, 29 per cent of all LiveJournal posts are in Russian. So, as regards the Russian market, it should be recognised that a company should be present on LiveJournal in one form or other. Speaking of Samsung’s Russian office, we have a corporate blog of our own on LiveJournal (http://community.livejournal.com/ru_samsung/), which was established for more informal communication with our end-user audience.

While working on the corporate blog, we had to take into account a number of significant issues in order to learn to talk with the audience rather than to speak to ourselves. The complexity also consists of the fact that

It is no secret that the PR and marketing departments of many large Russian companies, including the representations of foreign corporations, look like they are working on the same objective, but they often have a separate plan. people will more readily look for and discuss, say, cheap travel and inexpensive hotels, but, how do you get them to take part in your company’s LiveJounal community?

GIVING ADVICE We are now already in a position to be able to give some advice on what are the must dos of a corporate blog. Samsung Russia has decided to establish just a community in LiveJournal rather than a blog. This has been done so that anyone can write a post addressing the community, and discussion will be concentrated right on this post. As a result, the information contained in the community will be of interest to everyone, including rumours and so forth. It is bad form to publish dry and formal press releases in such a community. Probably the main prerequisite should be the presence of a formal representative from the company in a social media community. Besides taking care of regular communication activities, the representative should respond to comments online; in other words, it is important to let people know that the community is not just termed official but is actually and demonstrably so. Of course, some difficulties may exist related to the fact that a company representative is not always able to comment on unofficial rumours, but the right words can almost always be found depending on the situation. It was only in 2009 that bloggers in Russia 01/2010

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began to be accepted as a potentially interesting audience to be invited to press events, press tours or press product tests. Now bloggers are perceived in virtually the same way as journalists, but the problem is that companies have not yet gained enough experience of dealing with bloggers. In fact, while it is the job of a journalist working for a high tech publication to write articles on high tech subjects, a blogger is not supposed or compelled to do so, and, correspondingly, the template for working with him/her must be different. Here we are getting to grips with one of the major problems of the Russian Web 2.0 segment – a lack of a sufficient number of proficient public relations specialists in social networking websites and the blogosphere, and also a lack of public relations Web 2.0 subscriber service experience for agencies. Of course, public relations sup-

Twitter is most popular in Europe and the USA, but the Russian segment of Twitter is just beginning to develop.

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port in social media channels is offered by agencies, but it is often misunderstood what exactly is on offer. In order to work effectively with bloggers, it is necessary, so to speak, to lead them. That is, you first have to decide on the list of those who are of potential interest to your company. You have to regularly read the contents of a blog in order to know the overall tone of the blogger’s posts, preferences, etc. And you should not use a typical formal letter to invite bloggers to events, but should instead prepare an optimal individual text where you show why your company event can be of interest to them. A separate subject – paid posts in the most popular blogs. Some are flat against this, but some won’t reject out of hand, and others suggest that these posts are strictly marked as being for publicity purposes. In my opinion, this situation is not worth a heated debate. Nobody is forced to read a blog where advertising posts can be found. If a blogger succeeds in presenting ads in a manner that appear attractive and interesting to their readers, then the readers will not abandon him or her. And if a blogger fails to do so, then there will be no more readers and no new proposals for paid advertising posts. At any rate, this phenomenon exists already and is used by almost all those companies in the Russian market who are involved in social media.

SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES The most popular social networking website with Russian users is Vkontakte. ru, which is virtually a replica of Facebook. To date, Vkon01/2010

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takte has more than 50 million registered users, while the Russian version of Facebook has well under a million. Vkontakte.ru has over 15 million unique visitors a day, and each visitor views scores of pages. That is why Russian companies try to open their own groups on this particular social networking site, and invite users to join these groups through a variety of means. Samsung has its own group (vkontakte.ru/club2611), which comprises more than 42,000 “friends”. According to the statistics, a daily audience of the group is about 1,500 to 2,000 readers, that is, about three to four per cent of the overall number. It should be noted that these readers spontaneously emerged as a group of Samsung product lovers, to whom we only used to offer information support, but now we are taking control of it and mean to increase the number of participants in this group by three to four times during 2010.

SELECTING THE RIGHT ONES Otherwise, the social networking website Odnoklassniki.ru is the most popular in Russia in terms of registered users, but its interface is not so user friendly, the audience is not so active and the site is more overgrown.

That is why we at Samsung decided not to establish our presence in this particular social networking site. But we do mean to represent ourselves on the Russian part of Facebook. We do not expect the Russian audience of Facebook to grow quickly, due to the overwhelming majority of internet users already “residing” at other social networking websites. Nevertheless, Samsung’s Russian office is opening a group on Facebook, but, in view of the similarity of this social networking site to vkontakte.ru, the optimal option would be the establishment of a “mirror” group. Although social

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A Russian PR buzzword Public relations Web 2.0 is a young development in Russia.

Companies are only beginning to learn how to view and interact with bloggers.

Early pioneers are tomorrow’s opinion leaders, and will help determine future development of Web 2.0.

Photo: Samsung Electronics

In the future, direct sales will be conducted through Twitter.

networking sites feature their own unique peculiarities when it comes to public relations promotion of a company, fixed similarities do exist.

The company’s formal representative should be on the administration of a group. This statement is valid for any public relations activity of a company in Web 2.0. Of course, beside the aforementioned, there are other social networking sites popular with Russians, and some companies choose to establish their own groups at each and every social networking site, but we have chosen a different approach.

Official groups are established in the key social networking sites, plus a mirror in Facebook; additionally, two more social networking websites have been picked: Habrahabr and LinkedIn. This is mostly because we have our own audience on these sites with their own peculiarities and partialities, and it would be much more logical to deal with them directly in the place where they are used to and comfortable with. Habrahabr.ru is a social network where the majority of visitors can be described as high tech geeks, and you must admit that it would be strange for a high tech company not to work with such an

audience. On LinkedIn it is best to speak to the audience in a language they understand very well – the language of figures and statistical presentations, and show works of research companies, etc. That is, to aim for the business audience and show it the business success of your company, the promising outlook for investments and so on.

TWITTER This service is most popular in Europe and the USA, but the Russian segment of Twitter is just beginning to develop. For example, there were about 100,000 registered users of Twitter in the autumn of 2009, of which number eight to nine per cent were active. Clearly, this is not a sufficient audience as yet for doing mass market business, but this does not mean at all that this platform is worthless to work with. If anything, the most active internet users who are joining Twitter in Russia right now are opinion leaders, and it is they who will help shape the development and tone of Twitter in Russia. That is why companies need a Twitter account that should aim at a small but important audience, namely opinion leaders. I am positive that in about one or two years the Russian segment will be large enough to carry out public relations activities aimed at a mass audience, and in the long run direct sales through Twitter will be conducted.

To sum up, it could be said that Web 2.0 has become an unavoidable buzzword in the field of Russian public relations. Both large and small Marat Rakaev companies alike are mastering the blogosphere, microHead of PR, Samsung Electronics, Russia blogs, and social networking sites. However, in the meantime a lack of practical experts can be seen. So far, so-called social media experts in Russia are generally people without real work experience, but who can set out their ideas in an engaging manner. The Marat Rakaev is head of PR overwhelming majority of of Samsung Russia. He joined experts – both real and fake the company in 2006 and is responsible for all PR activities – offer services in the field of in the Russian market. This inmarketing; in other words, cludes the PR strategy as well promotional activities on soas all activities for media, Web cial networking websites. But 2.0 channels, corporate PR, internal and external commuthe public relations market in nications. Previously, he was a Web 2.0 is very narrow, and journalist and worked in media experts with practical experifor almost eight years as an editor and new project director. ence are few in number.

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TIME TO COLLABORATE It is hardly a business secret that working together is the key to success.

Alstom’s all-encompassing Collaborative Way programme has allowed the group to get the best out of its communications and its employees.

by Michael S. Salone

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ince the first appearance of social media, the way we interact with others has dramatically changed. The latest forms of information and communications technology allow us to improve interaction with those in close proximity but also with those who are far from us.

A social medium is designed to be propagated through a form of social interaction created using simple to use publishing techniques. Most social media is web-based and transforms what is usually a one-way interaction into a social media dialogue. It contributes heavily to the spread of information and knowledge transforming internet surfers from consumers to producers and building on the idea and technological foundations of Web 2.0. It allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content (UGC) anywhere at any time.

Social media is separate and distinct from conventional mass media like television, film and newspapers. One is cheap, accessible, providing information in little time across the globe not limited by shelf space in the physical world, with wide and fast distribution. The other can take significantly longer to produce, requiring expensive resources and a skilled workforce, and once produced, cannot be altered easily. For social media to work, it relies on interactions and collaboration between people to build on a common meaning and goal using the available technology as a platform.

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THE FOUR CS There are many different definitions of social media, but they can be summarised by using the 4 Cs: content, collaboration, community and collective intelligence. The first C, content, refers to the idea that media tools allow everyone to become a creator by making multimedia free and easy to access, even for those who are not Web 2.0 savvy. Collaboration is about the idea that 01/2010 COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

social media has been a major contributing factor to the aggregation and combination of small individual actions into meaningful collective results. These can range from the signing of online petitions, mobilising people toward a specific cause or fundraising, as we saw during the presidential election in the US when millions of people tweeted as they watched the inauguration. Communities are groups of people brought together by common opportunities,

There are many different definitions of social media, but they can be summarised by using the 4 Cs: content, collaboration, community and collective intelligence. problems and forces that may be professional or personal. The last C, probably the most important, is the value brought together by collective ideas and knowledge sharing. The old adage holds true: “Two heads are better than one.” Or, as authors Barry Libert and John Spector say: “We are smarter than me.”

CHALLENGE FOR ALSTOM Social media can take various shapes and forms, such as blogs (Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga), microblogs (Twitter), social networks (Bebo,

Facebook, hi5) and wikis, online web pages where users can generate and modify content on the site.

Like many companies, Alstom is faced with the challenge of staying abreast of socio-technological changes and innovations while harnessing the collaborative potential of employees. New social media tools and communication technologies, now standard networking platforms, are evolving at a furious pace and this major shift cannot be

ignored. We are all used to hearing about B2C companies or other consumer goods companies using social media as a marketing tool. However, for a high tech industrial company such as Alstom, the use of such media is not so evident in the culture, thus challenging everything from hierarchy to intellectual property, ideas that were previously often taken for granted.

COLLABORATIVE WAY Alstom is a leader in the world

of power generation and rail infrastructure and sets the benchmark for innovative and environmentally friendly technologies. Alstom built the fastest train and the highest capacity automated metro in the world, and provides

Photo: www.dreamstime.com

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turnkey integrated power plant solutions and associated services for a wide variety of energy sources, including hydro, nuclear, gas, coal and wind. The group employs 79,500 in 70 countries, and had orders of 24.6 billion euros in 2008/09.

With this in mind, Alstom set up the Alstom Collaborative Way (ACW) approach in 2008. ACW was in response to the collision of three forces: people, technology and economics. This programme aims to progressively integrate state of the art collaboration in working practices using communities, networks and collaborative information systems. It is based on the social media model by which anyone can produce, copy and share information with anyone at almost no cost. The scope of the project is to share, search and connect through the use of people databases, methodologies and processes across all functions, projects and business units. This approach is based on experimentations and pilots and is not dictated or predefined. The project will bring many benefits to Alstom and will offer its employees the opportunity to learn and share more with other staff members, help employees change their ways of working and increase staff engagement and involvement across all Alstom businesses. It is hoped that in the short term everybody in the company and not just some, will be able to: replace long written documents by short videos, share their thoughts and feelings with other staff members they might not know, work with complete mobility, draw on the entire talent pool of the entire world and generate ideas on an as-needed basis. But in order to achieve this, it requires new management approaches, to develop ways of integrating communities and Web 2.0 tools, to develop and work on governance policies that support the collaborative culture in the company and to truly understand the different meanss of collaboration within Alstom.

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SUPPORTING THE GOALS We want collaboration to serve our strategic drivers and HR priorities by managing the integration of new employees by meeting their expectations and encouraging them to contribute. We want to improve our operational performance by promoting the dispersion of our activities and people and accelerate access to state of the art practices and their diversity and to make Alstom the best place to work by sharing our culture and values (trust, team, action) and capitalise on expertise and know-how. We can generate organisational effectiveness by helping formal and informal communities be more active and efficient and by avoiding possible silos often created by geographical 01/2010 COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The collaborative way New social media tools and communication technologies are evolving at a furious pace and cannot be ignored.

Social media can be summarised by using the 4 Cs: content, collaboration, community and collective intelligence.

Alstom’s Collaborative Way is in response to the collision of three forces: people, technology and economics.

Fostering collaboration can lead to stronger communications, happier employees, and better company results.

location and company history. We strive to help communities achieve breakthrough performance, work smarter not harder, and share information, knowledge and resources.

The results of the ACW approach

by Alstom are ahead of the curve and according to one recent report

We can generate organisational effectiveness by helping formal and informal communities be more active and efficient. only 9 per cent of companies are using collaborative tools for learning.

Within the company three pillars categorise the different types of collaborative possibilities that are on offer to employees. We’ve tried to define this under three pillars: collaborative workplace, communities and people.

DIFFERENT TOOLS The first pillar, collaborative workplace, consists of the tools. There are cur-

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rently 20 document sharing systems where employees can store and retrieve documents held in a variety of formats (currently 140,000 documents are shared through this system), various blogs with an average of 2,000 page views daily, and nearly 100 wikis, a collection

What was not expected, and has been a very positive impact, is that our employees have quickly adopted to new technology.

Photo: private

of web pages allowing users to add or edit content with an average of 22,500 pages views daily. The global financial crisis has also helped us advance with other collaborative tools. Ten Cisco Telepresence conference rooms have been installed globally across Alstom sites and more than 950 web meetings have taken place so far thanks to web conferencing systems. These of course have brought the expected benefits of reduced travel costs.

What was not expected, and has been a very positive impact, is that our employees have quickly adopted to new technology they might not have otherwise been ready for, and in addition have seen an impact on work-life balance due to reduced days away from the home.

CONNECTING PEOPLE The second pillar, communities, consists of connecting people with knowledge.

There are more than 30 structured communities in the Alstom Collaborative Way programme ranging from indirect sourcing, environment, health and safety (EHS) to the financial graduates community.

Within these communities collaboration possibilities exist at all levels

and can be either formal or informal. These should not be confused with teams where members know each other: there are clear task interdependencies, explicit timelines and goals, and there is expected reciprocity. Communities are also based on common interests, however members may not know each other before joining the group. There is a focus on learning with contributions remaining voluntary. By asking questions, obtaining advice and sharing ideas and experience people are able to expand their knowledge and know-how and solve problems in a more informal and direct manner.

GIVING OPPORTUNITIES The third pillar, and the most important under the Alstom collaborative programme, is people. This pillar is not only about the adaptation of training programmes around collaboration with skills that are evaluated and recognised, but also about giving more opportunities to employees to reap the full benefits from what the ACW has to ofMichael S. Salone fer. This pillar also strives Vice President Alstom University to appease the apprehensions employees might have about new technologies or the change in working methods. The expectations the net generation brings to the workforce, and the ability of managers to develop the competencies required American-born Michael S. Sato effectively communicate lone is experienced in strategic as a collaborative leader, is human resources responsibila change we are working on ity in the areas of strategic planning, employee relations, continuously. recruitment, learning and deFostering collaboration velopment and international is an essential need for Alissues in various manufacturing, technical, sales, field and stom, both to successfully corporate environments. He implement its growth strathas been vice president of egy and execute complex opAlstom University since Seperations in the best possible tember 2006. Prior to this, Salone has held different huconditions. We must capiman resources positions at talise on expertise, knowAlstom, such as vice president how, diversity, creativity at management development all levels. Communities help and vice president human resources. Before joining Alstom us go beyond our national in 1998, he managed human frontiers and sustain collabresources activities for Schlumoration across organisational berger in England, the United States and France. boundaries.

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BOOKS Communications Reader

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collection of essays on crisis commun icat ion in Finland and Sweden after the Asian tsunami in the winter of 2004? “What in the world did the tsunami have to do with Finland and Sweden?” is probably the first thought that comes to mind. How could the tsunami, which struck the coastlines of the Indian Ocean five years ago affect communications some 10,000km away? However, though the basis for the book may at first seem slightly far-fetched, a closer inspection reveals it to be a highly interesting lens through which we can view crisis communication in these two countries. Both countries were affec-

ted badly by the tsunami, as their citizens took advantage of the Christmas holidays to seek out some winter sun, only to find their lives endangered by this disaster. More than fifty Swedes died, and many more Finns and Swedes were left stranded or injured in the aftermath of this freak natural disaster.

DRY THEORY News of the disaster quickly reached all corners of the globe, so the compilation benefits from being an event about which everyone knows at least a little. By placing what can often be dry communication theory within the highly emotive framework of an event we can vividly remember, the authors make the theory more accessible, helping retain the reader’s interest. The effects of the tsunami were covered more extensively and for a longer period in the media than those of any other natural disaster. Mervi Pantti explains that this was a unique catastrophe because the western audience was not only in the position of witness and helper, but also a victim, which Pantti argues was the reason behind the concentrated media coverage afforded to it.

This collection of essays, which were primarily written in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, were rewritten to be included in this new edition, which was published at the end of 2009. The essays deal primarily with how the governmental agencies of the two countries handled the crisis in its immediate aftermath, as well as how the media reacted in the days and weeks after the news of the tragedy first broke.

REACTIONS Perhaps of most interest here are the ways

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in which the two governments, similar in many ways, reacted differently, and the reasons behind this, as well as the differing levels of criticism which were aimed at both governments, by the press and the public. There is also a stand-out chapter by Tomas A. Odén, Marina Ghersetti and Ulf Wallin, who take the reader on a journey from the moment the news broke to the coverage in several of the largest Swedish daily papers and broadcast organisations over the following days, an approach that allows us to observe the decisions made on ground level as if we were a fly on the wall of these offices at one of their most trying moments. By building on prior knowledge of a horrific event, this worthy and thoroughly readable compilation effectively manages to create an interesting and illuminating account of how an unimaginable crisis was seen and handled from a communications point of view, helping to flesh out our understanding of the tragedy, as well as of latest strategies in crisis communication. Neil Cranswick

BOOKS

NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY: HOW BUSINESS PROPAGANDA HIJACKS DEMOCRACY DONALD GUTSTEIN KEY PORTER, OCTOBER 2009

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re large, faceless corporations inherently evil? Most of us would probably say so. After all, these industrial giants are responsible for cutting down vast swathes of rainforest every day, selling us gas guzzling cars by the million, and offering women contraceptive pills that might prevent them from having babies, but that cause all manner of dangerous, potentially lethal, side effects. The list, formed by the sole overriding desire for financial gain, goes on. And yet we continue to buy their products on a daily basis, stuffing their already bloated coffers further and safeguarding their corporate futures for years

to come. Lots of us work for them, too. So it’s all rather hypocritical of us to complain at all. Governments, on the other hand, are fair game. We constantly berate our politicians whatever their decisions. Whenever anything goes wrong, it’s an error on the part of the administration. But although our elected leaders may often be at fault, they are at least trying to make life better for the citizens they represent.

What the majority of us fail to recognise, however, is that corporate-sponsored propaganda techniques are being used, and have been for decades, to undermine public confidence in government institutions. At least, this is the view put forward by Donald Gutstein in Not a Conspiracy Theory. Gutstein is a senior lecturer at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and is seemingly a man on a mission, having previously written a number of other “acclaimed but controversial” – in the words of his publishers – books on the immoral and self-serving nature of big business, mass media and corporate propaganda. This latest volume picks up where the others left off, diving in immediately to discuss the relationship between the Canadian and US economies post 9/11.

STICKING THE BOOT IN Gutstein comes across as a rather proud Canadian, and so wastes no time in sticking the boot into the policies of his nearest neighbours – or the Yanks, as he teasingly refers to them early on. The first chapter is dedicated to the integration of the two economies, and is therefore rather uninteresting for those on the other side of the Atlantic. Fortunately, though, proceedings do start to spice up a little in the following sections.

The rise of corporate dominance throughout the 20th century is dealt with in extended detail, with a number of case studies highlighting the author’s highly critical view of capitalism’s role in delaying action on climate change, highjacking democratic debate, reducing public levels of confidence in politicians, and more.

Unfortunately, it’s all a bit hard to follow. Gutstein’s complex layers of intellectual analysis come thick and fast, and there are precious few devices used to split the blocks of text up, meaning that you might be ploughing on for 30-odd pages of solid prose before you get a break. It can get rather mindboggling. Chances are if you approach a chapter from anything but the first paragraph, you won’t be able to follow proceedings at all – just dipping in and out when and where you choose is not an option. But for those who can stick with it, this is an extensively researched, challenging read, whether you agree with the author’s strongly held views or not. Richard Morgan 01/2010

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European Association of Communication Directors

COMMUNICATION SUMMIT 2010 Mark your diaries now for the European Communication Summit 2010, which is to be held in Brussels on July 1 and 2.

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lthough the new year has only just begun, the European Association of Communication Directors is already completing preparations for this year’s European Communication Summit.

Now in its fourth year, the summit is the largest conference for inhouse communication professionals working in Europe, and represents the highlight of the association’s calendar.

The European Communication Summit 2010 will take place at the Square in Brussels on the first and second of July, and around 400 inhouse communications professionals are expected to attend. Building upon the success of previous summits, it will gather leading communications figures from companies, associations, NGOs, politics, academia and the media to speak and participate in a wide variety of activities, all with the aim of creating an even more value-packed and inspirational experience for those in attendance.

The summit will seek to reveal exactly which communication ideas and strategies have been 01/2010

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effective in achieving results for communicators in recent times, thereby shaping the future state of the profession. This year’s summit will focus on two main topics: communication strategies, and communication tools and campaigns. Best case presentations will focus on the topics of strategic communications, change and international communication, issues management, crisis communications and reputation management. There will also be case studies on the communication tools used in social media and digital communication, storytelling and branding, consumer and product communications, and intercultural communication.

The first evening of the summit will also see the presentation of the European Communication Award in a glamorous ceremony at Brussels’ elegant Concert Noble. The award is presented annually to the individual or organisation who is judged to have been the most effective in communicating the European idea.

More information about registering for this year’s conference will soon be available online at: www. communication-summit.eu

Photos: Jesse Benjamin

by Neil Cranswick

ASSOCIATION

NEW EUROPEAN SURVEY The results of the new European Communication Monitor, published by the European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA) in partnership with the EACD, will be revealed at the European Communication Summit 2010.

Prof. Ansgar Zerfass has been involved with the project as the EUPRERA research leader since its inception, and is currently making preparations for the European Communication Monitor 2010.

You have worked on the European Communication Monitor (ECM) for three years now. What were the biggest surprises for you in the data you have collected over this time?

A most interesting fact is that communications professionals are still struggling to link their activities to business strategies. This has been identified as the most important issue in European PR each year since 2007, so there have been no significant advancements.

The surveys tell us why: only six out of ten communication managers feel responsible for helping to define corporate strategies, and measurement practice is often focused on media output, not on value creation.

Photo: archive

What are the goals you have set for the ECM 2010?

The survey will focus on communication strategy and identify factors for communications excellence. In addition, we will take a critical look at social media. Many respondents said that they will switch their activities to those platforms in previous years. We will check the reality of 2010: are PR departments responsible for those budgets? Who takes the lead? And so on. Last but not least, job satisfaction will be an issue. Many professionals started to think about benefits, threats and career opportunities again during the crisis. We’ll take a closer look into this.

The monitor is run by professors from 11 countries. Can you explain who is involved and how the collaboration works?

It’s quite complicated to run an intercultural research project in the academic world, so we have implemented

a clear structure. The research group, led by me, and involving colleagues Angeles Moreno from Madrid, Piet Verhoeven from Amsterdam, Ralph Tench from Leeds and Dejan Vercic from Ljubljana, defines the questionnaire, evaluates the data and interprets the results. An advisory board formed by professors from the universities of Bordeaux, Milan, Oslo, Mälardalen, Lugano and Poszan helps with ideas, pre-tests and national dissemination. This is a non-profit project, so we collaborate online and involve student assistants for dealing with the statistical information.

What impulses do you think a study like the ECM can give to communications practitioners in their daily work?

Identifying trends and future developments helps to reflect one’s own concepts and worldviews. It’s challenging to see the visions and realities of colleagues throughout Europe, and identify new ways to compete in the future. I myself worked in communication practice for a long time, and some of the best ideas were inspired by these kinds of studies.

The results of the European Communication Monitor 2010 will be announced at the summit, with participants each receiving their own personal copy. To help make this an even more representative survey of the state of the industry, we would ask all members to devote a little of their time to providing answers when the survey reaches them in March.

93 PROF. ANSGAR ZERFASS Prof. Ansgar Zerfass is professor of communication management at the University of Leipzig. He is executive director of EUPRERA and the editor of the International Journal of Strategic Communication.

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ASSOCIATION

CHANGING WITH GRACE Mattel’s Christian J. Schultz will speak on authentic leadership and communication after change at the European Communication Summit 2010.

In your talk at ECS 2010, you will be reflecting on change communication and how it should be adapted when companies recover and get back on track. Why should companies not go abruptly back to business as usual, and which steps are important in this process?

In times of change and crisis, some businesses go into a mode of panic as they see the change as a break from routine and a turn for the worse. A healthy business should always be looking to change and adapt to its environment regardless. The global financial challenge of 2009 was not a mere crisis but a game changer for the business world, and those businesses that haven’t realised this and adapted will not be with us long term. As Charles Darwin once said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

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Authenticity is definitely one of the PR buzzwords of the moment, but it is mostly used in the context of external communication. What role do you see it playing in leadership and internal communication?

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crisis. Leadership and management teams can no longer hide behind complex organisations and intangible numbers as employees and stakeholders demand full transparency and accountability. Being an authentic leader today means that you involve and empower employees in the decision making process at an early stage so they get ownership and help shape the direction of the organisation. At the same time, the whole work-life balance thought is being replaced by work-life integration.

You will also reflect on ways to escape the silo mentality and win a seat at the boardroom table. What are the main hurdles to overcome in these areas?

All of us within the industry are a big part of the problem. For example, why is it that most bachelor’s and master’s programmes in communication only have subjects that focus on communication? When we sit around the boardroom table, most of our colleagues from finance, HR, sales, etc., have broad and rounded university degrees which have touched most business subjects. They all speak the same language, so I am never surprised to hear stories that senior management often find communication professionals to be fluffy, which is why many in our industry are merely executing strategies, rather than developing them. I would therefore urge programme leaders at universities and organisations such as EACD to lobby for a bigger variety in subjects offered by universities to enable the next generation of communication professionals to be more rounded.

CHRISTIAN J. SCHULTZ Christian J. Schultz has been head of communications of Mattel in central, northern and southeast Europe, as well as the Middle East and Africa, since 2008. Before that, he was running Ogilvy PR in Denmark from 2005. Schultz will speak at the ECS on July 1.

Photo:

2009 was a great year for Mattel, with the celebrations of Barbie’s 50th anniversary getting a great deal of publicity and attention. How much were you affected by the negative economic environment?

2009 was a milestone year for Barbie and the full year of publicity she received truly underlined her iconic status. My team and I thoroughly enjoy working with a power brand such as Barbie, who is the number one worldwide property in the traditional toy industry. In regards to the challenges in the global financial environment, we were obviously affected like everyone else, but the toy industry has historically always been less impacted than other industries as parents would rather save money on themselves than on their kids.

ASSOCIATION

ASSOCIATION NEWS

Photo: Nikos Daniilidis; private

There have been several notable developments within the EACD over the last few months, with a number of new coordinators being appointed at regional and working group levels.

CSR WORKING GROUP

EACD IN LUXEMBOURG

FINANCE WORKING GROUP

Yannis Freris (head of corporate communication and sustainable development, Gefyra SA) was elected as head of the EACD working group on CSR at the EACD Anniversary in November.

He initially proposed the creation of the group to the EACD board earlier in the year, and has taken an active role since its formation as the organiser of both of its previous meetings (at the European Communication Summit and the EACD Anniversary). Freris is an IEMA-approved CSR practitioner and was a nominee for CSR Manager of the Year in 2008. His past experience includes research as scientific director of the Institute for Research and Policy Strategy (INERPOST), communication and event management of the Greek action plan for the 1997 European Year against Racism, as well as and consultancy work as part of Planet SA.

Philipp von Restorff (head of communications, ABBL) has recently been announced as the new co-coordinator of the EACD’s ac-

Véronique Bockstal (communication consultant, Febelfin) was elected as deputy head of the EACD working group on finance and insurance at the November group meeting at the EACD Anniversary. She will serve alongside working group head Miriam Roemers (public relations manager, European Association of Public Banks), who has led the working group since the EACD’s foundation in 2006. Bockstal has previously held various management positions in corporate, marketing and internal communications as well as investor relations. She has served at international healthcare insurance consultant Vanbreda International, Fortis and the EVCA (the European private equity and venture capital association) among others. She started her career in the banking industry, holding different sales positions at Générale de Banque and Kredietbank Luxembourgeoise.

tivities in Luxembourg, where he will work alongside Jean-Jacques Picard (secretary general and head of communications, Luxembourg for Finance), who has held the post of regional coordinator since it was introduced in 2008. Von Restorff is a graduate in the field of communication sciences and holds a master’s degree in business administration, as well as being responsible for marketing and communications for several startups in Germany and Switzerland.

Before taking up his current position at the Luxembourg Bankers’ Association, von Restorff worked for the press service of the government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

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ASSOCIATION

REGIONAL FOCUS: FRANCE The EACD hosted a well-attended regional debate on Web 2.0 in France in November and has welcomed a lot of new members in recent months. Here, regional coordinator Jeff Archambault gives his views on the assication’s activities in his region.

What do you see as the main benefit of hosting regional debates, with reference to the French communication community?

The creation of strong events attended by a critical mass of communications directors in France will permit us to establish the EACD as the association for networking and the exchange of best practice in the communication community. Clearly the regional debates are the most important vector for the credibility of the EACD in France.

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Given the increased freedom that regional coordinators now have to organise their events, are there any changes in particular you would like to make to the traditional format?

I believe we found a good format for our recent debate: a late afternoon time slot, a topic of strong current interest and a prestigious location in the centre of Paris.

However, having three speakers made the formal presentations too long and limited the time available for networking. For the next debate, I will limit it to two speakers, totalling one and a quarter hours of presenta01/2010

COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR

tion and Q&A with three quarters of an hour for cocktails and networking.

What plans and ambitions do you have for the French regional group in 2010?

As I said at the conclusion of this year’s summit in Brussels, I want to increase membership in France to the same levels as the UK and Germany. This can only be achieved through successful, well-attended French regional debates. We need to repeat our success in the spring.

What seem to be the issues most affecting communicators in France at present?

Like all communicators, we in France are concerned with the evolution of the media from traditional to online and how to manage this new paradigm. In addition, most communicators are still determining how and what to implement with regards to Web 2.0.

G

JEFF ARCHAMBAULT

Jeff Archambault is vice president of communications at Euro Disney Associés SCA and has been the EACD regional coordinator for France since 2008. For more information on all of the EACD’s regional groups, and to get involved in the regional debates, please visit the Regional Coordinators page at: http://www.eacd-online.eu

Photo: EACD

Congratulations for recently hosting a very well-attended event in Paris. Can you tell us a little about what you were able to take from the event as a group?

The topic of social media remains one of the most important for all communications directors today and was certainly one of the main reasons for the exceptionally strong turnout. Our three speakers were able to share their experiences with Web 2.0 as an internal communication tool, engaging all of those present. The Alcatel-Lucent internal communications implementation of Web 2.0 throughout the company demonstrated that, despite initial concerns about no longer being able to manage what employees were saying (a concern shared by most executive committees), the results showed that employees felt empowered, and in fact shared great ideas to improve the performance of their company.

ASSOCIATION

WELCOME! The following communicators have joined the EACD Vitor Bento, Marketing Manager, PANELUX S.A. Sheri Besford, Head of Communications, Building Design Partnership Limited Caroline de Bie, Associate Director Corporate Communications Europe, Genzyme Belgium NV/SA Sofie Bockaert, Manager Internal Communications, DE POST/LA POSTE - Belgian Post Veronique Bockstal, Communication Adviser, Fédération belge du secteur financier Martin Boer, Group Head of Public Relations, ING Group Bent Bøkman, Head of Press and Communications, The Danish Consumer Council Cor Brockhoven, Director Communication, Enexis Nathalie Brosse, Communications Manager, Danisco Ing. France SARL Bärbel Bussenius, Manager External Communications, Federal Express European Services Nicole Chemali, Director of Communication, Genopole Viviane Clauss, Responsable Marketing, Banque de Luxembourg José da Costa, Marketing Manager, Loterie Nationale du Luxembourg Maria-Isabella Detand, Assistant Public Affairs, Electrabel Kristin Dom, Communications Manager, Atlas Copco - Belgium Ildegarda Ferraro, Media Relations Manager, ABI - Italian Banking Association Virginie Ferre, Corporate Communications Manager, ociété Générale Anne Grandjean, Senior Manager Manager External Communications, SPE NV Pascale Hemmer, Marketing & Communication Manager, Alter Domus Florence Henriet, Head of Business Development & Communication, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP Christina Hippisley, Secretary General & Spokesperson, Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in the UK Nick Hyrka, Communications Manager, RIPE NCC René Jacobs, Team Manager Communications, Loyens & Loeff N.V. Robert Jenkins, UK Head of Corporate Communications, BNP Paribas UK Holdings Limited Simon Johnston, European Project Manager, Corporate Communications, Chubb Insurance Saskia Kapinga, Global LNG Communications Manager, Royal Dutch Shell plc Chris Kersbergen, Global Head of Brand Activation & Identity, ING Group Päivi Korhonen, Director of Communications, Laurea University of Applied Sciences Jelena Krstovic, Corporate Communication Director, Delta Holding Åsa Kultje, Director of Communications, School of Business, Economics and Law University of Gothenburg Simone Lauper, Head Media Relations & Financial Reporting, Swiss Reinsurance Company Marcvan der Lee, Director Corporate Communications, Vion N.V. Helma van Leeuwe-Bak, Senior Director Internal Communications, Schering-Plough Dirk Lemmens, Head of Corporate Communications, ING Belgium Jake Locke, Head of Media & Communications, SATRA Technology Centre Oliver Lönker, Pressesprecher, Siemens Wind Power A/S Sabine Lunau, Media relations & PR Manager, Europäisches Patentamt/ European Patent Office

Zrinka Makovac, PR and Citizenship Lead, Microsoft Croatia Bárbara Manrique de Lara, Communication Director, Grupo Prisa Claude Michaux, Head of Marketing & Communications, caceis Investor Services Kathrin Mück-Puelacher, Staff member Communication, FEEI Management Service GmbH Saskia Nuijten, Communication Manager, DSM Food Specialities N.V. Shane O’Riordain, Communications Director, Lloyds Banking Group Limited Teddy Østerlin Koch, Communications Director, The Danish Chambre of Commerce José María Palomares, Communication and Relational Marketing Manager, Telefónica AS Sabine Parisse, Head of Unit Media Relations, European Investment Bank Kate Philipps, Communications Director, Valeo Patricia Potts, Global Communications Manager, Innovia Films Limited Andreas Priefler, Director Communications & Government Relations, Wintershall Corina Ramers-Verhoeven, CA Manager Communications European Midsized Countries (EMS), Eli Lilly Frank Renggli, Head External Corporate Communications / Geneva, Pictet & Cie Banquiers Colin Roberts, Vice President Group Technical Press, SKF B.V. Mark Roberts, Head of Investor Relations, SES S.A. Oliver Schwartz, Leiter Unternehmenskommunikation, Netviewer AG Euan Sellar, Head of Public Relations, Swift Emma Silva, Associate Director Marketing & Publications, American School of Paris Valérie Siniamin-Finn, Head of Communications, Société Générale Securities Services Caroline Smith, Communication Expert, Inland Navigation Europe Ward Snijders, Director Corporate Communications, LeasePlan Corporation N.V. Gunilla Stenfors, Vice President Communication, Nordkalk Corporation Roger Strandahl, Director Business Affairs, E.ON Energy Trading SE Bogdan Tataru, Central Marketing Group Lead, Microsoft România Claudia Thyme, VP Marketing & Communications, International P&C, XL Insurance Switzerland Frédérique Tissandier, Senior Associate, Media Relations, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition Sobha Varghese, nternal Communications Manager, Tata Consultancy Services Belgium S.A./N.V. Valoree Vargo, Head of Communications, International Post Corporation Sonia Villarreal-Stevenson, Head of Marketing and Communications, British AirLine Pilots’ Association (BALPA) Fiona Wilkinson, Senior Vice President Corporate Communications, Visa International Frederik Wittock, Senior Director R&D Communications, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D, a division of Janssen Erik Zsiga, Media Relations Manager, AB Electrolux Franciska Zsigmond, Director of Public Relations and Communications, E.ON România S.R.L.

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QUESTIONS TO...

The personal side of communication directors

CLAUS SONBERG Executive Vice President, Corporate Communications and IR, Scandinavian Airlines What personal objects decorate your desk?

Four small children’s paintings of the SAS logo, blue sky with cotton clouds and a very cute airplane. I got them for Christmas from my three girls.

Who are your present-day heroes?

Without doubt the frontline personnel in SAS who delivers world class punctuality and service despite the fact that most of the airports we operate are covered in snow and ice four to five months of the year. I truly believe that change theory will have to be rewritten based on the SAS case history. Our people have managed to dramatically increase our quality and customer satisfaction in a decade of endless cost cuts, turn around processes and negative publicity.

What book do you have on your bedside table?

Right now, John Irving’s A Widow For One Year. I just love his style!

What has been the most emotional moment in your career?

August 20 2009. I walked down the stairs of the relief flight at Madrid airport. We could still smell the jet fuel and smoke. I cried thinking of all the passengers who were injured or dead in one of the worst airline accidents in Europe (Spanair Flight 5022).

What is utter happiness for you?

Many things: the feeling I get as a solution to a major problem emerges from within; hearing my clos-

est employees giggle and laugh around the meeting or lunch table; preparing a great meal for good friends; or entirely by myself, cross country skiing in beautiful Norwegian nature.

Would you ever have liked to belong to another nation? If yes, why?

My family lives in Oslo, Norway, but I work in Stockholm from Monday through Thursday. I have become very fond of Stockholm and Sweden.

Of course, the change from Norway is not huge, but there still are cultural and social differences. If I were to choose a bigger change, it must be Australia. I lived there 20 years ago and simply love the continent and their people. They are fun, friendly, sincere and outgoing. I still have great friends there, but have not been back since 1987.

Claus Sonberg Executive Vice President, Corporate Communications and IR, Scandinavian Airlines

Claus Sonberg was appointed the executive vice president, corporate communications and investor relations of the SAS Group and a member of SAS Group Management in 2007. Before that, he was based in Oslo as the Nordic Regional CEO at BursonMarsteller. He has held several other different positions at Burson-Marsteller, including as president of Norwegian operations between 2000 and 2005. Prior to that, he worked as a journalist and press officer at TV2 in Norway.

Sonberg, who is Norwegian, has qualifications in political science from Oslo University, and journalism and international politics from Indiana University.

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Editor-in-Chief: Marc-Oliver Voigt Editors: Dafydd Phillips, Richard Morgan, Neil Cranswick, Grit Fiedler Graphical Concept: Steffi Butter, Franziska Söhner Layout: Steffi Butter, Melanie Schröder Illustrations: Burkhard Piller Photo Editors: Moritz Vennemann, Stephan Baumann Advertising: Norman Wittig (norman.wittig@helios-media.com)

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