Author: Steffen

Online engagement: Brussels audiences’ five standard questions

Here are five questions which I’m invariably asked when organisations are thinking about exploring online engagement but aren’t quite sure what they’re getting themselves into. They’re not the most interesting or strategic questions, but are understandable stumbling blocks which hold organisations back and need to be answered. Here goes.

1. Won’t we get attacked by the other side? What if they say things we really don’t want anyone to hear?

Maybe, but in any case, you can moderate, so if there’s something you really don’t want to expose, you don’t have to (read a recent post about angry commenting trolls here.) Having said that, don’t moderate too much. If you remove everything that isn’t rose-tinted, what’s the point of engaging? View it as an opportunity. There are people out there who dislike you no matter what. There are others who aren’t so sure about you, but if you actually respond to their concerns, you might even win them over.

2. OK so we can moderate, but aren’t we going to get inundated by thousands of hateful attacks every day? So much so that we’ll end up spending all our time moderating?

In my experience, nobody has ever been attacked in this way (don’t flatter yourselves: people have better ways of spending their time!) I’ve heard of instances of automated responses by angry pressure groups, but have never experienced it myself. In any case, these people had your email addresses before: were you “attacked” then?

3. We’re only a small team with a small budget: do we really have the resources to do this properly?

Sure, proper online engagement is time intensive, but so are conf calls, meetings and writing reports no one reads. View it as an opportunity, not something you could do on top of all your – supposedly – far more important tasks. This might actually be the most important thing you do (although this depends on the nature of your sector or organisation.) In any case, if you plan properly, it needn’t take up too much time. Have an editorial plan in place so you organise publication properly, and give yourself a timeslot for the actual work like you would for a regular meeting or whatever else, and you will find it just becomes part of your working day.

4. How do we target people in multiple languages?

The perennial comms nightmare in Europe. It depends on the nature of the organisation in question and what you’re trying to do. If your key target audience is French-speaking but your organisation primarily operates in English, it’d be hard to recommend against trying to communicate in both languages. As a starting point, I’d certainly recommend against overstretching i.e. trying to engage in multiple languages; but to what extent this is the case really depends. Conversations shouldn’t be translated, so I wouldn’t ever translate blog posts, tweets, forum entries and the like; but I would not recommend against a mixed basket approach where a few languages are in use on the same platforms (but not more than three….) For instance, a blog could have posts in different languages, each tagged by the language in question so that a user can select to view all posts written in any given language in one list. Again though, this is complex issue and there’s no right or wrong answer apart from don’t overstretch…!

5. How do we know if engagement works? How do we measure success?

Another perennial question, and one which I’d (controversially) say is relatively easy to answer, even though ROI calculations for engagement (and comms in general) are notoriously contentious. I’m not saying that it’s easy to guarantee success or that it’s easy to define very clear ROI measurements – it’s not at all – but there are so many things you can measure in quantitative terms online, that you can develop a very substantial set of KPIs which you can follow and improve on an ongoing basis. So when the question arises, your response can be: with press releases, you get clippings; online, you get viewing numbers, behavioural and trending figures, you’ll know who said what, when and where; and you’ll know how many of your key targets viewed your content. Plus you’ll have qualitative input which you’d ordinarily have needed polling to assess because you can measure word of mouse (as opposed to traditional word of mouth…) i.e. you’ll know what people think because they may comment about it. The bottom line of the sell is this: my professional opinion is that this will work, but don’t just take my word for it; with you, the client, we’ll develop a very detailed set of KPIs which will be exact indicators of success. Given that they’re so substantial, you’ll know very clearly whether the programme is a success or not; far more clearly that any of the other communications channels you use.

Are people totally won over? No, the novelty of engagement and the “loss of control” it entails is still a big leap; but at this point people tend to be willing to take their first baby steps.

Why digital is killing traditional advertising (in one paragraph)

Volumes could be written about this, but at its basest, the argument is this. In pre-digital, the only way to reach considerable numbers of people direct was via advertising. Positioning and branding were heavily reliant on advertising; if you wanted to showcase the real you, be fun, be smart, use visuals etc. you would advertise. Now, in the digital age, you can reach your target direct; you can do all of the above without buying media space. What’s more, you can do so while engaging: hearing what people have to say and building relationships with people who matter. Is advertising obsolete? Of course not, but it’s not all-dominant and can’t stand alone anymore: it needs to be intertwined with relationship building. And that’s where traditional advertisers are struggling in the digital age (and incidentally, where smart PR companies are thriving.) Their age-old love it and leave it approach to campaigns hasn’t yet developed into one in which advertising and PR/stakeholder relations are integrated. That needs to happen if they’re to ensure long-term survival.

The importance of keeping your issue off the left-right axis

One of the worst things that can happen to your issue is that it becomes politicised i.e. one political side decides to take a stand on it and the other side takes the opposite position in response.

Plenty of issues don’t actually neatly fit the right-left divide. Frankly, they’re too complex to be easily compartmentalised (I’ve had a rant about this before here) and as such political parties or groups don’t have a clear position on them. But that doesn’t matter to cheeky politicians: when they’ve decided that they can score a win with their constituents, they’ll take a stand on an issue. They may then carry the rest of their party with them and make it very hard for you as a campaigner to get your point across, no matter how solid your arguments may be, because positions have been entrenched on the left-right axis. You’ve lost control: your issue may now fall prey to the whims of political skirmishes rather than develop through a process governed by reality and logic.

So what do you do? Hope for the best (!) and monitor very carefully so you know when and how politicisation might happen before it actually does. And make sure you have a contingency plan.

Plus don’t accelerate the process yourself. If you’re a key player on your issue, don’t tick off one side or the other if you can avoid it. How? Approach your issue from both liberal (in the American sense of the word) and conservative angles; gratify the values of both your centre-right and centre-left audiences. Sounds odd, but it actually works on a wide range of issues e.g. your manufacturing process might both be great for profit margins and will employ people in a marginalised community; your new product might have been invented by an entrepreneur who benefited from a tax break and have a low carbon footprint.

And if your issue still becomes politicised? Then the contingency plan mentioned above may become easier to implement because your relatively neutral position so far may ensure more balanced treatment than you might otherwise expect.

Unwinding in Provence

I just spent four days in the village of Lourmarin (pictured) in Provence. Utterly idyllic. As was the unadulterated loveliness that was the B&B I stayed in. An atypical post no doubt. Normal service will resume once I’ve switched on again.

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Thou shalt not speak funny… Instead, write like Bono and you’ll be fine

I met Kattebel at the recent Web2EU event and she remarked on my recent post in which I state that communicators tend to write in an “over-the-top, pompous, formulaic manner.” A real no-go on the web in particular.

She (rightly!) said that I should perhaps have given some pointers on how to best write for the web rather than merely criticise others for being dull. Instead of producing a list I’ll do so by pointing to a post I found amongst long-lost items I have saved on Delicious: click here to read it. It’s a dazzling tribute to how to best write for the web (although it probably wasn’t really written for the web specifically, but never mind.) Love it: personal, from the heart, direct and honest (and by Bono no less.) OK sure, most people would get the boot if they were to adopt his style on their company blogs, but you get the gist.

p.s. Looking through some of my own posts, I found a few in which I touch upon best practice for producing content for the web. Not quite Bono-like but hopefully helpful to someone out there:

Avoiding fluffy CSR

However much the C-Suite wants it to, fluffy CSR doesn’t work in PR. If you send a press release about your organisation’s new initiative to save a whale or help local school kids cross the road, it’ll get binned. .

In the digital age, organisations can communicate directly to their audiences. Unfortunately, plenty of communicators are squandering the opportunity by adopting the same approach that doesn’t work with media. They talk about their fluffy initiative (aforementioned whale, kids etc.) and leave it at that. Media doesn’t cover it for a reason: their readers don’t care. They won’t care now that they can access the content directly online.

When might they care?

When tangible effects and benefits are highlighted. So you’ve trained someone? Given something away for free? That’s not the story. The story is what happens next. Proving that the freebie or the training has had an impact.

When you treat people like grown-ups and admit you have a stake in your own CSR. Initiatives like Pepsi Refresh are criticised because they are mere gestures unrelated to the business itself. We live in cynical times: only action that benefits the community as well as the organisation responsible for it will be deemed truly authentic.

Stupid and illogical left-right splits

Population growth and 10% economic growth in fast-developing countries will result in billions more people consuming at the rate of rich-world baby-boomers within a few decades. We’ll have to change our eating habits in the long-run, but until then, how on earth are we going to produce enough food to feed a billion middle class Indians and Chinese who have suddenly developed a taste for hamburger? Meanwhile, a complex concoction of trade regimes, population growth, urbanisation and increasing temperatures mean that food security is an ever growing threat in Africa; but in this case not because the new middle classes are demanding hamburger, but because hunger is still real (more on all of this at Citizen Renaissance here.) So what can we do about it? We can further develop smart methods of farming to increase yields perhaps. And yet if you’re a left-winger, you’ll think GMOs or other farming technologies are Satan’s spawn. That doesn’t make sense. Surely if you’re a left-winger, you want to feed people in developing countries.

If the worst predictions come true, we’ll experience a 5-6ºC temperature increase by the end of the century, putting vast swaths of the world under water and destroying ecosystems and possibly the nature pyramid to god knows what effect. But climate-change scepticism has become a standard bearing right-wing issue: if you’re right-wing, you’ll claim it’s all a load of tosh. That doesn’t make sense. Surely if you’re right-wing you should be just as worried as a left-winger if there’s even a slight possibility that even the most rosy scenario regarding climate change may come true.

Immigration rates in Europe aren’t really out of control as the populist press tend to claim. Three other trends are however. Declining birth rates, people reaching retirement age and Europe’s pathetic economic competitiveness. Right-wingers claim to be pro-business, pro-growth and pro-wealth. And yet right-wingers tend to be, if not always hostile, at least very wary of immigration. Again, that doesn’t make sense. Who is going to buy and build things? Where is the next generation of innovators going to come from if half our population is retired?

I’m fully aware that all three issues – and many others like them – are spuriously ideological in some way i.e. a right-winger will make a political argument for why they are anti-immigrant or a climate-change sceptic; while a left-winger can just as easily frame their hostility towards GMOs in genuinely left-wing terms.

The point I’m trying to make is that most issues are far too important and complex to fit neat political demarcations. And yet politicians and the media who support them are all too ready to politicise them to score an easy win. They’re taking advantage of the age-old human instinct whereby people are comforted by thinking that everything can be defined by us or them / right or wrong; so if the opposition has taken a stand on an issue, the response is to take the opposite view, rather than debating or perhaps even – shock, horror – agreeing with it.

It’s not all bad though. At European level, the strongly consensus-based political model makes complete polarisation difficult. Meanwhile, year after year, voters throughout Europe are increasingly struggling to tell the difference between parties (which I happen to think is a good thing) while age-old political affiliations based purely on family or geography are dying out. But given that the left-right divide can still characterise epoch-defining issues like food security, immigration and climate change, we still have some way to go.

What to do about angry commenting trolls: ignore them

“Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism.”  Written in 1920 by F. Scott Fitzgerald about literary critics (a million apologies for the snooty literary reference.) How would the great man have felt about trolls who seem to spend their lives visiting websites and blogs that don’t moderate to write irate and often irrational comments? They’re everywhere. My favourite news-site – http://www.guardian.co.uk – has a great section for non-affiliated bloggers called Comment is Free, but you’ll be hard pressed to find smart back-and-forth between informed readers in the comments following any article about politics, global warming or what have you. Instead, you’ll largely find angry right-wingers spouting bile rather than offering constructive remarks. Even my own humble blog got the works last year in response to a rather innocuous post about the quality of Nespresso coffee: highly recommended for a laugh (the comments, not the post.)

In my line of work, this issue props up all the time. We’re always talking about the value of two-way conversations and how it has revolutionised the world of comms and the nature of how organisations and politicians are expected to engage; but then clients rightly ask questions along the lines of… Are trolls not compromising conversation? Are moderates in search of conversation getting crowded out? And most of all… Do negative comments by angry sociopaths not reflect badly on our organisation?

Now this may not be entirely de-rigeur but my recommendation tends to be that organisations should be quite selective in terms of moderation. Plenty of social media “experts” will claim that you need to be completely open and let everything through because it’s transparent and democratic; what’s more, it’s supposedly a reflection of public opinion and so organisations should just accept it. I totally disagree. Take Comment is Free. I’d say at least 70% of the comments are angry and written by staunch right-wingers. That doesn’t reflect public opinion anywhere! The angry and the slightly dysfunctional are always going to make more noise and letting them all through the door will kill debate.

So what’d I do? Frankly, what most smart organisations have chosen to do: “moderate in moderation.” Have a strict code of conduct that clearly states what you will and will not permit but do allow for plenty of criticism as long as it’s in full sentences and constructive. In that case an organisation has a chance to hear about real concerns and perhaps even do something about them; and they’ll be able to respond with their side of the story and build relationships with supporters and critics alike without being crowded out by trolls. The essence of online engagement.

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Contrasting storylines on and offline

I’ve been conducting some research over the last week to compare an issue in traditional media and online. Three key observations as follows.

First, the traditional news-cycle is obviously shorter than the online story cycle, but it’s always surprising to see just by how much that is the case on most storylines. A story can have traction online over the space of months while it dies after a couple of days in the papers: testament to the word of mouth (and mouse.) Sometime it’s ongoing discussion of an issue but other times it’s someone “breaking” the story for the umpteenth time: in the online age, a risk-factor remains a risk-factor for far longer than you’d want.

Second, although the stories hitting the newsstands and the online space are usually aligned (albeit with timing disparities as described above,) some stories that are huge with the press hardly make headway online (and vice-versa). Confirmation that the media isn’t the sounding board of public opinion as much as one might expect (but also that online buzz doesn’t necessarily bother journalists that much – but more on this below.)

Third, the media always came first. Although we keep hearing about stories being broken on Twitter while the presscorps has been utterly oblivious – a trend which is definitely on the up – it’s fair to say traditional media is still likely to break a story first on the majority of issues. However, this does not detract from the importance of the web in the way stories come about or spread. Besides the actual breaking of news, I think the main trend (although I didn’t come across it in this case) will be dormant issues brought back to life by the press once they’ve spread like wildfire online.

A key to comms success: accepting the personal/professional grey area

Open, honest, humble and transparent communication is the order of the day. Organisations need to abide by this mantra or risk losing the goodwill of customers, constituents and regulators alike; just look at the Toyota debacle, in which their poor PR response has taken more of a bashing than the faulty cars at the root of the issue.

A big part of my job lies in helping organisations harness their internal expertise in a manner which resonates with their audiences. Meaning, get them to communicate themselves rather than doing it for them or trying to coax others into doing so (i.e. media.) But what is as important as the actual substance of their expertise is to abide by the “medium is the message” maxim, meaning that how they communicate is as important as what they’re actually imparting.

For this to really work however, people who communicate on behalf of organisations must accept the personal/professional grey area: the two must not be mutually exclusive anymore. Given that audiences expect open, honest and humble output, a highly structured and corporate style of communication will not usually be effective, whatever the message. Communicators need to offer at least a glimpse of the personal if they are to be credible. And no, this doesn’t mean that CEOs should be showing their holiday snaps to clients; rather, output should have a name on it, and that name should showcase a personality that is more akin to what it might be like in private than any archaic set of rules governing corporate communications in a bygone age.

In short, be yourself. Sounds easy, right? It’s not. Many people feel uncomfortable showcasing their personality in a professional setting, while many, many others can’t get their head around it even if they’d love to let go. If speaking on behalf of an organisation, they believe that they need to “speak funny” to be credible.

Fret not however: we are gradually seeing a change, and the dynamics of it are very interesting. Seeing the damage that solely sticking to the old-school model is causing, people on top of the food chain are appreciating the value of a more open, personal and informal manner of communicating. Meanwhile, younger people who have practically grown up with the web and view the personal/professional grey area as a reality are increasingly making the grade within organisations. Last up, the dullards in the middle. Wake up!