Internal communications - it's not rocket science

Admired companies - admired by who?

I’ve been looking through the latest results of management Today’s ‘Most Admired Company’ survey and it makes interesting reading.

Senior leaders in major companies are asked to vote on their peers and say who they regard highly.

Perhaps unsurprisingly Unilever tops the list – their work on CSR is particularly impressive, and client Serco comes in second.  Bronze medal goes to Shell and last year’s winners BSkyB come in fourth.

What I found most interesting though was the companies that have fallen from grace in the last year.

It’s probably not a shock that BP has dropped from 7^th to 113^th place but I was also interested to see defence businesses Cobham, BAE and QinetiQ tumble 49, 64 and 99 places respectively.

It doesn't seem to be that sectors move together – Ryanair climbs 99 places, easyJet drops 124 places.  It seems the Irish airline is rated highly for the quality of its management but strangely doesn't show in the special rankings for Quality of service, Ability to attract talent or Community responsibility.

However, what this list seems to show most of all is how the leaders of our companies think.

I wonder if the general public or employees would agree that Yell or Boots should be in the lower end of the scale while Ryanair  bounds upward in the esteem of the voters of this poll.

Liam

Do conference brochures annoy you?

OK so I'm a grumpy old man - that's official!

But I have reached the point where flyers for conferences have driven me nuts.  Let me give you my hit list of conference flyer sins.

1) Giving your conference a ridiculously long title with lots of big words in it

For example "Integrate Appropriate Channels Into Your PR Strategy For Optimum Impact & ROI"

Is there some secret rule that says you have to make an event sound awfully grand or no one will want to come.  Or do conference organisers just employ undergraduates who have swallowed a dictionary?  Perhaps their writers get beaten if they write words like 'use' when they could say 'utilise'?

2) Including every possible piece of information on the front page of the A4 flyer...

I'm looking at one flyer here that has 69 different facts screaming at you from page one - all in different colours.  There's no gentle seduction going on here - it's full-on wham bam thank you mam marketing.

3) Inserting the words 'strategic' or 'ROI' at random in the title or copy

Here's a flyer about a podcasting seminar which promises to show me how I can use podcasting 'strategically'.  It's a tactic for goodness sake - a useful tactic, but a tactic none the less.

A variation on this one is to claim that your expensive conference will help 'impact your bottom line'.  Right, I go into my boss and say "can I have £600 to go to this conference?  If I go I predict a two point increase in our gross margin next year as a result..."  Come on!

4) Pretending that the event is educational or leads to a qualification.

Let's not kid ourselves... sitting for two days listening to speaker after speaker deliver 45 minute pitches for their company or their next job is hardly leading edge teaching is it?  Conferences are useful and you can pick up a lot of ideas but most people would position them at the basic end of the personal development scale if you had to make an educational claim.

And remember kids it's not a 'Qualiftion' (as one conference company says it - OK I know bad spelling is one particular glasshouse I shouldn't start throwing stones in) just because they give you a certificate.  If that were true I'd start mentioning my recent Dog Training accreditation on my business card alongside the award I got for hitting a punch bag really hard on Blackpool Pleasure Beach back in 1987.

Universities or professional bodies give out qualifications after you've done some sort of test and when their standards have been verified.  Conference organisers don't do that because it would mean failing some of their paying punters and actually doing something to assure the quality of the product.

And sticking a little logo on the brochure of some official sounding body doesn't count either.  If it did I'd start up the 'Lard for Heath Certification Body' or 'Snakebite sensible drinking accreditation council' to prove that Britain is making strides forward in reforming national habits.

5) Forgetting to mention that some of their speakers have paid for the privilege of pitching at you ..

Yep, it's a real shocker but organisers make money from delegate subscriptions and from 'sponsors' who will often negotiate a speaking slot as part of the deal.  I'm not saying that these paying speakers don't have anything interesting to say but shouldn't we know that they've paid?

I was looking at the programme of one two day conference and I can only imagine that four of the presenters were there because they'd paid and also happened to be exhibitors.

6) Pretending that booking early gets you a discount...

Try this sometime.  Call up a conference organiser two days before their conference and say you'd like to come but you want to pay the early bird price.  I wonder what will happen?

OK we all know that good sales practice means you have to give a punter a reason for buying today.  But can we be a bit more mature about it?

Look, I've probably been guilty of variations of these offences and I'm sure that a conference organiser could run up a charge sheet as long as your arm when it comes to my blog or my marketing practices.  But I'd also like to be treated as a grown-up professional and have marketing targeted at me that flatters my intelligence a little.  Can't they be a bit more John Lewis and a little less Poundland?

Liam

Are awards worth it?

I'm back from Bulgaria where, among other things, I was a judge in the country's first ever communications awards.  There was a decent turn out - given the fact that the awards are new and the entries were of a suitably impressive standard.

Back home I found a mailer from the CiB inviting me to book a table at their awards dinner in late November.  And this morning I missed an IABC UK meeting when Ezri Carlebach was plugging the very prestigious Gold Quill Awards.

I've been a judge at a few industry awards in the past and have to admit to being slightly cynical about them all.  Often they seem to be dominated by agencies who want trophies for the reception area and the judging process sometimes could be described as at best random.

However, there are some awards that do actually make the entrants jump through some tough hoops and recently, bodies like the CIPR have got tough about things like conflicts of interest among the judges.

But what interests me most is the fact that industry awards often define what a profession sees as good practice.  The Bulgarians last week were keen to stress that the awards were a watermark in the development of communications - over time the standards should get higher and higher they said.  And what is considered to be ground-breaking practice will evolve.

So, do I think awards are worth it?  From the point of view of someone who has sat in the reception area of a few PR agencies over the years probably not.  If you look at the dates on the awards they normally all came in the same year or two year period - when the incumbent MD decided that they should enter everything in sight.  So by now, the team that won the awards has most likely dissolved and scattered.

But from the point of view of a profession, I think they do matter.  In any given year awards say to practitioners that there is standard of excellence and great practice.  Yet that is only possible when the awarding body occasionally decides that there is no one worthy to win the award this year.

Sadly, in a world when selling tables to tux-wearing managers is a big money-spinner I doubt this happens very often.

Liam

...and the winner is...

My recent silence has been due to the pressure of work. I've been fully occupied on a change programme in Scandinavia - explaining a new strategy to a workforce coming to terms with job cuts and a radical shift in thinking about what it means to be a global player in a world of high oil prices and economic slow down. One of the things we're been debating is how an awards programme fits into all this. On the face of it, glamourous presentations and posh frocks are probably not that compatable with a message set that includes 'driving out cost.' But there is a problem of showing people what behaviours are valued in the new world. I think the trick is going to be to come up with something simple - that allows managers to recognise the right performance. We're developing something based around the four core messages in the change but the biggest headache is finding a scheme that requires minimal administration. This will be no mean feat if we pull it off. I know from experience that schemes like the excellent Helios Awards at BP require a lot of energy. It's not just the paperwork in ensuring everything is open and above board. There's a good deal of politics involved as well. How do you avoid senior leaders fretting that the 'wrong' people might win? Once, on a scheme I worked on I had to explain to a director that none of his people had won anything because they hadn't entered. And then there is the challenge of keeping it going year after year. And keeping it fresh. Despite all that, I'm really enjoying it.... Liam