Eurozone crisis. The buzzword of November 2011, undeniably. The EU has been stuck in a crisis for months and most commentators have analysed the EU’s woes from a strictly economic angle. While the economic angle is the most obvious, I believe it’s worthwhile drawing communications lessons too, and look at the crisis with a pair of PR goggles on. Eurozone leaders indeed could have done with a few tips borrowed from PR crisis management techniques:

1. Make sure you get your story straight, across the board.

Surely, a public display of dissension never helps in a crisis situation. Yes, that’s you Mr Sarkozy telling your UK counterpart “We are sick of you criticising us and telling us what to do.” − and that’s just the polite part of the rant;

2. Act fast.

The quicker you react, the less likely your reputation is to be tarnished. While the EU has been criticised over the past few decades for its “democratic deficit”, the EU’s image has only gotten worse over the past few months (see Guardian/ICM POLL from 23 October on the EU referendum).

In addition, one can also only imagine the lasting damages the crisis will have on the EU’s foreign policy endeavours as a soft power.

3. Always have a crisis plan − especially if you know you’re not playing by the rules (the Maastricht criteria that is).

With most eurozone countries not respecting the deficit and sovereign debt targets set in the Maastricht Treaty for a while, it’s only surprising that they have been acting like the eurozone crisis was an unexpected scenario. A typical crisis communications plan would include different scenarios and the corresponding messages and response plans.

4. Address, address, address and remember that denial is never an option.

You’re more likely to be judged on how you’re perceived to have handled a crisis rather than the reality of how you’ve managed the crisis. Lack of communications or inappropriate reporting are likely to trigger frustration, in this very case the US’s frustration, with Barack Obama criticising “the EU’s propensity for prevarication”.

Keeping, motivating and informing the best people is key to any organisation’s success. So it’s no wonder that employee engagement is a more important topic than ever in the context of internal communications.  Increasingly, evidence is proving that engaged employees are simply more productive – which speaks for itself in terms of a company’s future success.

The big question is this – is the HR team best placed to manage the employee engagement process? Or is the marketing side of things better equipped to take control of it?

To some extent, marketing could be seen to have the dominant role to play. This function’s accustomed to conveying highly persuasive messages and communicating with a wide range of audiences – in addition, it’s quickly evolved in terms of digital media, and can generally deliver messages that are both efficient and impactful.

Having demonstrated its ability to attract, leverage and retain profitable customers, some wonder whether marketing shouldn’t also be entrusted with the employee engagement process. Meanwhile, the HR function can be seen to be more focused on information than persuasion – and is often less adept at harnessing the latest technology than the marketing team.

However there’s more of an overlap between the two areas of work than there may initially appear. Traditionally, HR has been involved in a lot of marketing-related activities – not only to promote services within organisations, but also to address potential job candidates. In the course of doing this, HR has often proved that they’re capable of being extremely innovative, and of thinking creatively to address a wide range of different audiences.

Furthermore, there’s a good argument to suggest that, essentially, employee engagement is an HR issue. When employees aren’t effectively engaged, it’s seen as an HR problem – so common sense would suggest that HR should take primary responsibility for their engagement. And in order to do this effectively, there’s far more than persuasion and technological flair needed.  First and foremost, it’s necessary to really understand the organisation itself – its challenges, strengths and weaknesses, and exactly what its employees are likely to be thinking. And nobody’s better placed to understand these things than the team in HR.

Of course – as in most cases – a team effort often pays dividends.  While the employee engagement process could be led most effectively by the HR team, harnessing the expertise of marketing colleagues could make all the difference in terms of success. By combining their very different skills, organisations can deliver employee engagement messages that have real meaning – that build and reinforce an emotional connection with employees, while simultaneously informing them and inspiring improved performance.

Santa Says "Buy More Stuff"

The holidays are, indeed, coming. Or so I’m told, whenever I’m hit with an ad-break, a mail-shot or an MPU. The endless feeding frenzy of notably-premature festive marketing has been unleashed for all to behold. Tell me this: When is it acceptable to let me know Santa’s poised, breathless and ruddy, atop my chimney, laden down with sumptuous treasures and itching for a nip of Croft Original and a mince pie?

The Winter sales in the UK seem to start in August nowadays preceded by the Oxford Street lights getting fired up mid-July and bouts of snow in late May. What started as a religious holiday has now become a three-month long eulogy to a retail industry in need of a significant shot in the arm.

Still, whilst some things are clearly in need of a significant change, this time of year offers us all the chance to revel in some marketing permanence. And I’m not just talking about Hellmans’ ‘12 Days of Christmas’ spot that has run (seemingly) unchanged since I was a tender age.

Coca-Cola has recently hit us with its stalwart festive advertising blitz, airing the first classic ‘Holidays are Coming’ ad of 2011 during Saturday night’s X Factor. It’s truly remarkable how the brand has become so synonymous with the season. And, despite a gentle update, what’s most impressive is how the visual and verbal language of this campaign puts consistency at the heart of the idea.

Coke’s claim on ‘the unofficial countdown to Christmas’ isn’t far off the mark. Believe me, no-one knows Santa like Coca-Cola; its role in shaping the iconography of Mr Claus dates back to the campaigns of Thomas Nast in the late 1800’s.

Of course, those stalwart identities are never given the credit they deserve. Consistency has become a bit of a dirty word in branding. Consistency doesn’t connect. Consistency lacks humanity. We prefer thrilling affairs with ‘new’ and the ‘next’.

Recently, I sat through an enlightening presentation about how the brand book was breathing its last and that the industry needed new tools to tackle the alarming array of visual and verbal platforms that brands have to perform upon. They were probably right. “I love you because you’re sooooo consistent” is an unlikely sweet nothing. ‘Coherent inconsistency’ seems to be the conversation starter, nowadays.

But there’s something fascinating about brands that stay true to an idea for generations.

I’m convinced that some things are worth hanging onto in our increasingly disposable world. Refreshing an identity, rather than radical overhaul, often makes the most amount of sense. Getting people from unprompted awareness to genuine familiarity takes time and money, so it’s important to know when to stick, and when to twist. MTV’s gentle overhaul last year was an exercise in quiet evolution, and even managed to take into account the trend for ‘logo-as-receptacle-for-content’, joining the ranks of AOL and the 2012 Olympic Scribble, without feeling derivative or fleeting.

Shell’s infamous pecten is a study in the restrained and reductive. You can count nine iterations over 90 years, including an incomparable refresh in 1971 by Raymond Loewy. But a belief in consistency and bold simplicity has preserved an icon that over four generations will immediately recognise. So much so that the company name was dropped last year. Apple, Starbucks and Merrill Lynch have done the same.

BMW, or Bayerische Motoren Werke AG for purists, has similarly retained its iconic brandmark for a century and is all the more memorable for it. Though not for its original manufacturing operation – supplying planes to the German army in the first world war. The alternating blue and white gradients are the only legacy of propellers against a clear sky.

Interestingly, car manufacturers often feature in most studies of brand consistency. VW, Mercedes, Ford and Audi have resisted all but polite augmentation in their visual identities.

Technology companies are less inclined to stick to the plan. But there are notable exceptions. Paul Rand’s IBM logotype has remained unchanged since the day it was drawn, coincidentally, the year i was born. I’ve only ever known those inkjet stripes, intended to depict speed and dynamism.

Of course, some brands don’t know what they’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Google slipped out a snazzy new logo for Chrome earlier this year, only to replace it with the old one a week or so later. And let’s not even mention Gap, those troublesome British Airways tail-fins or ‘the people’s’ Post Office, after ‘the people’ held Consignia to be truly second-class.

There’s no shame in sticking with good tradition if it provides a brand with a desirable, durable and more memorable future, is there? So, when you’re thinking about your identity and it’s graphic legacy, consider this. Brands should be for life. And, certainly, for Christmas.

Of late, I have been reading a lot of articles and blog posts predicting the end of the press release. Broadly speaking these articles fell under two categories. Rather disappointingly, the first category uses the “death of the press release?” as nothing more than a rhetorical question, only to call for its death on the basis that it amounts to a pre-assembled pile of marketing speak. More interestingly, the second category uses the question as a stepstone to discuss the increasing space storytelling is occupying in the PR world.

Falling under the latter category is this article in the September issue of CorpComms. In this insightful piece we learn how Nissan recently hired a former Reuters correspondent as its new editor-in-chief while simultaneously mooting plans to ‘get into the business of killing press releases and writing stories’. Simon Sproule, the company’s head of marketing and communications, heralded the endeavour as a ‘rival to the media’.

No matter the angle, I was struck by the fact that the question mark was usually nothing more than a formality. The proper assessment of the function press releases (still) play in PR was always eluded. It was either a case of preaching for press releases’ death or talking about a rising phenomenon.

Don’t get me wrong, the reason I believe the question deserves a proper assessment has nothing to do with me being a fervent advocate of the press release or an enemy of storytelling and virtual newsrooms. I genuinely believe storytelling should be an aspirational goal for PR teams. Still, the lack of proper assessment of the press release’s role in the new media age means one fails to cast light on an interesting phenomenon — PR teams’ accessibility to a new type of audience, and how this redefines the frontiers of PR.

Rather than thinking in terms of format (press release versus virtual newsrooms), let’s think in terms of audiences for a minute. More than just a format, the press release was always a way to communicate with a very specific audience – journalists. The reason why storytelling is one of the angles through which the death of the press release question is analysed is that there’s a new audience available to PR teams — and indeed new formats such as videos seem more appropriate than press releases to communicate with that new audience.

But why jump to the conclusion that the rise of storytelling and virtual newsrooms makes press releases irrelevant to journalists? The majority of the articles I read failed to acknowledge that press releases still act as a relevant and prevalent format in PR teams’ interaction with journalists. While journalists have undoubtedly been receptive to the diversification of channels through which PR material is put out, most of them seem to remain fervent advocates of the press release as a first port-of-call for story development.

From conversations I’ve had with journalists, it seems very few consider Twitter or videos posted on virtual newsrooms as a reliable source, let alone a first port of call. And it’s not to deny the importance of storytelling with the new audience PR teams have started to interact with in the new media age.

Sticking to an analysis in terms of audiences has another virtue. Differentiating between the old and new audiences PR teams interact with illustrates how an audience that was traditionally at the receiving end of more straightforward marketing is now available to PR teams. This mere fact speaks volumes about the increasingly blurry barriers between PR and marketing, and by extension how integrated these functions need to be to ensure optimal and coherent audience targeting.

"All of the people, all of the time..."

Here’s a question for you – What’s happened to the confidence brands use to have in their marketing and design teams? Has it disappeared alongside our confidence in leaders, banks and that bloke that looks after Blackberry’s servers in Slough? Time was, the Head of Brand Marketing, a role notable for its balance of creative fulfilment with dogged resilience and 24/7 governance, was always willing to bleed on the flag rather than allow any disruption to an organisations visual or verbal perrogatives. And people listened. This guy or gal knows what’s best for us. That’s what we pay for. Keep up the good work.

But things seem to have changed. No longer do we look to a lead or team of specialists with demonstrable experience and a genuine reason to define, deliver and uphold the truth that shines forth from somebody’s bright corporate idea. We ask punters on Facebook what they think. As many as possible, ideally. Decent research used to mean controlled, joined-up qualitative thinking, in conjunction with business ideals, that professionals used to uncover the new territory a brand should sail into. It’s succumbed to something altogether less impressive. A quantitative, crowd-sourced noise that fails to assimilate the driving business principles that should define how an organisation iterates its competitive advantage. I’m reminded of the adage “Look around the parks of England; you will find no statues of Committees”.

Crowdsourcing design is an interesting and nascent model. I did some rooting around and there are a bunch of organizations that can crowd-source a brandmark for you, with minimum bids at around £150. The idea is that lots of talented designers around the globe that may or may not ‘do this thing for a living’ tinker away on their macs with no brief. And, in true Monkeys/Typewriters/Time/Shakespeare fashion, something workable may appear.

Of course, turning to the crowd for design assistance is one thing. But opinion on ‘what’s right’ for a brand is entirely different. Take Gap.

Last year, Gap’s longstanding graphic identity needed a shot in the arm. Badly. It needed to respond to the trends in brand design for simplicity, in the face of overwhelming channel options. Crucially, it need to kick-start some bigger, more far-reaching business goals beyond it’s US routes. It’s clear that the story behind the graphic shift would have helped debate. But, instead, the organization caved in to overwhelming whinging from ‘die-hard’ fans on Facebook. Sensing a story, Adage said that it was ‘something that a child could have designed using clip art’. I suspect that was the whole point. Reductive, simple, non-exclusive, of no fixed global abode. An embarrassing about-turn and a statement from the top explaingin that ‘This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing.’ You got that right. But when is?

Henry Ford was an enthusiastic champion of the customer. But never at the expense of innovation. When asked why he didn’t take his lead from customers, he simply stated “If I’d asked them what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.”

There’s something really interesting about love-hate relationship that the general public has with big brand thinking. The fear of manipulation through the hands of marketeers that is so palpable, particularly in the UK. Through British Airways tailfins to the 2012 logo, us brits love an uproar over visual identity. But that’s just theatre. You see, I’m nowhere near being convinced that asking a million people for their thoughts on your brand with no commercial context. Just because, nowadays, you can. Instead, you’ve got to have faith in the specialist hands of your brand team and their partners. Don’t cave in because someone hashtags your new launch with #brandfail. Step up. Explain your thinking. Fight for your actions.

It’s a reasonable bet that no-one in the western world missed the passing of Steve Jobs. News bulletins, front pages and (seemingly) every online forum in the universe eulogised the man who must be the most respected business leader of his time. As engagement afficionados, we can’t help but look on and ask: what is the value of such a titan to organisations internally, and can such people actually be manufactured?

The answers probably are: immeasurable, and no. There isn’t a training regime on earth that turns staid bean-counters into charismatic game-changers. But there are plenty of things we can do to improve the leadership assets we have – without turning our bosses into glassy-eyed automata.

Is it important? Hugely. Leadership is an infinitely greater influencer of employee behaviour than any other factor. Because, hey, ultimately we all work for people. So what can we do to leverage a leadership asset for engagement?

1. Train the boss. As Bill Quirke put it, there are four key qualities a leader needs to display to fulfill their engagement remit. He calls it the FAME model: FOCUS (concentrating on the issues and stories that matter), ARTICULATION (finding a good way to encapsulate the strategy), MODELLING (behaving as s/he would have others behave) and EMPATHY (recognising that not everyone in the organisation shares his/her way of seeing the world.) Get your leader drilled in these four, and you’re halfway there.

2. Refine the boss’s messages. Now, does the leader have an elevator speech? Is his/her blog engaging (or even intelligible)? Do they tweet or Yammer? Even if techno satisfaction cuts little ice over at your place, think about the content going into the old school approaches of speeches, telecons or town halls. We wouldn’t suggest over-polishing leadership messages, but they should always be edited in such a way that they are relevant, engaging, and not infringing any major international laws.

3. Choose the communication media carefully. What are the best channels through which the leader should communicate? If they write well, a blog might be the best idea. If they’re stronger with the spoken word, then video updates are cheaper and easier to deliver than they’ve ever been. Could you create a strategy movie that’s so impactful people want to forward it to colleagues? Increasingly, employees expect leadership communications to be two-way. Is it best to do this in a live Q&A, where the leader thinks on their feet, or online, where both questions and answers can be moderated?

Anyway, that’s what we think. Succeed in these three areas and your leaders might not be Steve Jobs, but they won’t be nut-jobs or jobsworths either. And of course, you know where to come when you need help with that message or media creation.

Time was when we used to work in HR, or Internal Communications. Not any longer. Now, the people who make the laws have decreed we’re all Engagement Facilitators.

Type ‘engagement’ into Google and you’ll get nearly a third of a billion results. Them’s a lot of words. Many are pretty good – look at the magisterial CIPD report or this aspirational Harvard Business Review post – but there’s also a lot of flim-flammery written by consultants desperately trying to create their own unique spin in a crowded market.

So here, to put your aching head at rest, is what I consider to be the ten most important points of an engagement strategy. Basic? Maybe. Right? I hope so.

1. Discover the meaning behind the work. People rarely work for shareholders. They work for people (see below) and for a cause. Know what you stand for besides making profit. Foster an understanding of how, even in a small way, you’re making the world a better place.

2. Engage people with strategy. Strategies are best shared. Establish a clear line of sight between all job roles and your  strategic goals. Remember that internal communications primarily exist to explain, explore and update strategy.

3. Lead well. Easier said than done. But every truly engaging workplace has some senior hero or heroes that exemplify all that’s good. Chances are that these leaders utilise the the four key leadership communication techniques of Focus, Articulation, Modelling and Empathy.

4. Give your people a voice. Let them speak their brains. Listen and give timely, respectful feedback. If they’re right, do what they say and give them the credit. As a general rule, talk to your people as peers.

5. Give your people a stake. Whether through share options, shares or performance bonuses, find a way sharing the largesse with those who are actually generating it. It you don’t generate largesse – say, you’re a charity – find another way to drive and celebrate success, such as a phenomenal recognition programme.

6. Recognise personal aspirations. Work is a common way in which individuals seek to achieve self-actualisation. Remember that training and development is about the accomplishment of individual goals as well as organisational ones.

7. Work on the workplace. Invest in it. Make it a place where people want to hang out. Make it safe, warm, pleasant. If you can, make it inspirational in a way that’s right for you. Environment management is not a matter for middle management, but for senior leadership.

8. Ensure the right people are in the right jobs. Change people and jobs as required. Performance reviews, succession plans and good internal career marketplaces all help to ensure person/job matches are sound ones.

9. Be different. You need to stand out to retain key talent. As soon as your people perceive no meaningful difference between you and your competitors, you’re going to have to raise your salaries, and even that may not be enough to keep them.

10. Management matters most. This is the big one. You can get all the rest right and still lose the engagement battle if your managers are poor. Do what you can to only appoint good ones, and once they’re in, spend all the time and money you can on making them even better.

So that’s my big ten. But what have I forgotten? Let’s hear your Eleventh Commandment below.

Like a field crammed to bursting with corn, we’re all ears.

The HRD put down his second cup of coffee and wiped his brow. ‘I agree that we need to talk to our people about how this change is going,’ he said. ‘But there’s talking, and then there’s talking.

‘What we don’t need now is some glossy internal comms intervention. We want our managers to talk to their people honestly, openly, one human to another.’

He was right. He’d nailed a truth that sometimes we all forget. As IC people we can get too caught up in being on-message, satisfying brand tonal directives, putting the logo in exactly the right place. Sometimes we need to realise that our quality-control processes can work to the detriment of authenticity, actually damaging the engagement they’re seeking to inspire.

Analogy corner: all too often the internal comms we push onto our people is Dairylea, when it might be better being a slightly crumbly and unpasteurised Stilton.

A scenario. You’re delivering the latest strategy. You’ve got a great motion graphics presentation. All the senior managers have been briefed and know exactly what language to use. A moderated forum is in place on the company intranet. Great.

But shouldn’t it all be qualified with a bit of humanity? People don’t fall in love with strategies. But they might like them more if the guy talking about them is just a tiny bit nervous and inarticulate. More still if he makes a point of listening to feedback and repeating it back, echoing his interlocutor’s own words.

My best friends aren’t the smooth snake-oily ones who never make mistakes. They’re the human ones who stutter, repeat themselves, say the wrong thing sometimes and then have to hide in the toilet to get over it.

So go on. Maybe be a bit more professional by being a bit less professional sometimes?

It’s funny how the branding business loves to cloak itself in the fashion of other trades. You always get the feeling it’s uncomfortable in its own skin. The grass is always greener. For starters, the advertising era brought us creatives that actually wanted to be lawyers. Agencies favoured a portmanteau of exotic surnames, and snaffled words like ‘partner’ and ‘brief’ from their legal counterparts. It suggested a stoic respectability. It fostered trust.

In the 80s, it was about pinstripes and private equity. Global concerns realised that distinctive and desirable brands multiplied shareholder value exponentially. And, in RHM’s case, protected you from hostile takeovers. The suits worked hard to make it tangibly tally on the balance sheet, but eventually lost all interest in all this gross inflation.

The brand police rocked up shortly afterwards. Guardians of visual identity par excellence; creative agencies that were given the unconventional task of spending their entire time saying ‘no’ to their clients. And getting paid for it. Thankfully, most exponents of heavy handed brand management are all now safely behind bars, or more likely propping them up.

The last ten years in the brand building industry have been shaped by men in white coats. Brand scientists tied brands down to charts, graphs, league tables and proprietary metrics. Brand valuation experts probed the innermost workings of cherished brands with mystic thermometers that produce magic numbers. And extraordinary fees. Superbrands, uber-super-duper brands and ‘no, wait, these ones really ARE bloomin’ marv, honest’ brands lined up to be listed in this survey or that hotlist. Today, that all looks mighty foolish.

What’s exciting about right now is that the branding business seems to be wrestling with itself. It’s desperately trying to work out what it’s next big career move is. Should it be a technologist? Maybe. Multichannel thinking requires transmedia branding. Brands have become molecular; particles of a promise bouncing around the digital world in a brand Brownian Motion. It requires a nimble mind and a fourteen-year-old boy’s thirst for tech. Plenty of brand agencies are reinventing themselves to become digital wizards, to the shagrin of anyone in their buildings over 27. It’s probably not the answer. Public relations, then? In an increasingly conversational world, brands thoroughly engaged in meaningful dialogue are becoming the admired model. It’s not the answer for everyone, though. Ever met one of your heroes? And felt a little disappointed? Brand royalty sometimes needs to remain behind closed doors to stay seductive and desirable.

The real answer here is that brand leadership probably needs to be a little bit of everything right now. Consistently about positive commercial thinking, always about distinctive communications, often about technology, regularly about breathtaking design and increasingly about tangible results. Business advisors, by any other name, tapping in to every aspect of their clients’ commercial operations. The jack of all trades is here. But will it be master, bar none?

Arguably, social media initially spread as an output tool, a way to share one’s thoughts. As social media leaped from the personal sphere to the business sphere, however, it also became an incredibly powerful tool for monitoring and reputation management. In this respect, the findings from Ipsos MORI’s Reputation Council Insight and Ideas report from May did not come as a shock. Around three-quarters of the Reputation Council members – around 50 senior communicators from leading companies – reported that they are now reviewing social media on a daily basis, which represents a significant step change from the 44% who reported doing so in the Autumn of 2009.

Interestingly, the increase in detailed and continuous monitoring of social media is more marked in consumer-facing companies. Is it that B2B companies take criticism in social media channels less seriously then? Not necessarily. According to the same Ipsos MORI report, it would seem that B2B organisations feel they are less likely to be mentioned or discussed in social media channels than their consumer-facing counterparts.

This finding points to what seems to be an ongoing challenge for B2B companies: how and when to use social media channels effectively? Not only do I think B2B companies ought to take social media more seriously, I would also like to suggest three ways in which they can effectively explore their link with social media channels:

Reputation management
You’d be surprised how involved your clients can be with social media channels. They are not afraid to express criticism, praise your work or compare your performance with your competitors. A host of affordable monitoring tools and techniques can help you keep tabs on your online reputation.

Competitor analysis
Social media monitoring tools are of great help when it comes to measuring your share of voice and share of positive mentions compared with your competitors. In that sense, social media monitoring can easily be turned into key performance indicators.

Thought Leadership
Last but not least, if consumer-facing companies quickly jumped on the opportunity to interact with customers via community managers to stimulate positive feelings towards a brand, why not do the same with your clients by engaging with them on a thought leadership level? Social media channels provide a unique opportunity to show your leadership in a specific industry/sector and show your grasp of the challenges facing these industries/sectors. By taking clients and prospect clients beyond the realm of the actual services or products you can provide them with, you will be able to drive awareness,  familiarity and preference for your brand.