Communications today is about relevance say Brodeur

A great blog from Andy Colville and our friends at Brodeur on the changing world of communications and how ‘relevance‘ now sits at the core of their agency’s mission. Brodeur is committed to helping clients become—and remain—relevant in an increasingly noisy and turbulent environment. Relevance moves people from passive to involved and actually gets them to act. As we know, simply shouting louder does not make you relevant. For communications to succeed in today’s rapidly changing communications world – campaigns have to be ‘relevant’. Here in Europe, onechocolate is doing something similar – listening to each client’s particular communications challenges and then delivering campaigns that have them joining the important conversations and getting them talked about in all the right places. Like the blog Andy and good luck with the new vision, it’s very exciting.

Yeo Valley Farm – a truly integrated and memorable campaign

It was no coincidence  that just before Christmas, I was reading an interesting editorial profile in the Sunday Times magazine on the family behind Yeo Valley Farm when their ad campaign was also breaking during the finals of the X-factor.   This editorial along with many other articles were appearing in conjunction with a TV ad campaign that’s edgy and also quickly became a youtube hit . The Yeo Valley campaign is one very recent example of a powerful PR campaign working alongside advertising and also integrated with social media.  The campaign  introduced Yeo’s digital presence encouraging viewers to access their new website. Very quickly, Yeo Valley has 19.3million tweet impressions, and 1.5 million youtube views. Great to see a campaign that had such a strong mix of marketing tools and working so well together.

New era, new job titles

I love Brian Solis – whenever you wonder whether your social media thoughts and experiences are going in the right direction– you can always count on Brian and his industry friends to put some perspective on it.

His latest piece is well worth a read as he talks about the ‘beginning of the end of business as usual and the socialization of business’. He argues that there is a new business  role model that is currently unwritten. This reminded me of something my son’s headmaster said at prize day recently, that our children are being educated for roles that don’t currently exist!

In Brian’s latest thought piece, he talks about the need for a corporate social media strategist who is neutral and can change the business and drive social media through every aspect of the organisation – without that – social media is all a bit tactical and piecemeal – a bit of blogging here, a bit of tweeting there but it’s not really making a real difference to the business and the way it performs long-term. 

This is definitely the beginning of an era of a new phase in business. Without someone driving it from the top – it just won’t happen in a way that will impact the performance of any business.

So in five years time will the job title of coporate social media strategist be in every organisation and not just the ones who have embraced social media as part of their business strategy’. What will their skills be made up of  – consultancy thinking, digital skills and marketing knowledge?

‘Viva Chile’

You could be forgiven for thinking that President Pinera had his teeth whitened especially for the media cameras – his smile shone out so bright.  However, there is so much more to him than just the smile and he has used PR to turn a potential major national disaster into Chile’s finest hour.

The communication around the last 68 days has been the total opposite to the BP crisis.  Communication has been open, consistent and regular and the President and Minster of Mining were involved right from the start.  Contrast this, to BP who had one insensitive, unskilled spokesperson (who ultimately had to resign) whilst his fellow directors hid behind boardroom doors (thankfully BP has now seen sense and is now recruiting a head of communications).

The Chilean government showed leadership and control and first class communications skills. They managed our expectations – warning that it could take until Christmas before the miners were out.

They embraced a range of communications tools from being physically present regularly at the mine to issuing statements to using social media for Flikr page photos.

Motivating lines like “We had strength, we had spirit, we wanted to fight”  “The country is not the same after this” were in abundance and littered throughout messages.

Even after the 33 miners were rescued, good communication has carried on as the government has been quick to announce that there will be a major change in law for the safety of miners.

With all this positive communications, we’ve almost forgotten to ask how and why did this happen, should the miners have been allowed to be in that situation in the first place.  The positivety in the PR campaign has deflected away from any negativity.  Of course, it’s not over yet and it will be interesting to see how the communication continues as they deal with the investigation into the disaster.

The national anthem was sung, flags were waved and thousands of Chileans partied into the night – watched and seen by millions globally.  And ultimately President Pinera has used the rescue as a major opportunity to build the brand of Chile.  ‘Viva Chile’ will ring out in our ears for some time to come.

Embracing social media – different paces abound

We have all embraced social media in a big way – particularly in PR where it is such a natural fit for us – it’s pretty much second nature after all, we are so used to having dialogues with journalists, sharing stories and having on-going conversations with all types of people.

So it’s easy to forget, perhaps, that social media is still evolving at a rapid rate and that businesses aren’t all embracing it at the same pace.

Just in the past few days, I’ve heard of two global brands who are way behind the curve. One has flatly refused to have anything to do with social media and the other, is ‘way behind’ in their social media conversations according to an inhouse marketeer.   For those kind of brands struggling to persuade directors to embrace social media  – here’s a useful post from an interesting US online publication, ‘the social media examiner’, ‘9 ways to sell social media to your boss’.

And then of course, there’s the other problem that businesses are online but don’t know what the guidelines are.  The rules are still evolving and changing, again at a pretty rapid rate.  Twitter is still largely unregulated and businesses are still learning and experimenting with it.  Here’s some latest guidelines that have come out of oatmeal.com.  They are not necessarily right, in fact I would question many on the list, but it’s interesting to see guidelines attempted to be set.

And then of course, there’s the fact that Facebook is only just starting to be used as a valuable marketing tool  for businesses. The largest social media tool on the planet provides a huge opportunity to businesses – the social media examiner has lots of ideas on how to maximise your Facebook profile to generate interest among customers and prospects as well as some great recent campaigns that have really worked for brands.

So as we all move at different paces, and standards and guidelines continue to evolve as time passes, once the revolution is over, it’ll be great to see what transpires.