Building and managing a CommTech system begins with content: content is king and listening yields insights.
50% of CCOs are at the Professional stage of CommTech.*
* 2019 Page Global Survey
“We used to use social to influence traditional media to write. Now it can be used to influence millions of people.”
Paul Michon, Corporate Communications Director, Kering
What You Do
- Create and distribute content.
- Develop compelling digital content in all forms – video, photography, long- and short-form editorial, infographics, animation, webinars – and make it available to stakeholders directly, on your own and through third-party digital channels and platforms.
- “There is no ‘external’ and ‘internal’, no more ‘press officers.’ Now we have ‘information managers.’ They are responsible for 360-degree dissemination of information.” Bertrand Blaise, VP of Corporate Communications and CSR, Groupe PSA
- Since you are developing content to be shared, not just consumed, tailor content for what works best for each platform and channel (e.g., Snap is not Medium is not Pinterest).
- Develop systems and processes that enable employees to share content.
- Example: Siemens developed a social tool for employees called Ingenuity. Says CCO Clarissa Haller, “The tool encourages people to write their own blog posts, makes it easier for them to publish and easier to find. It proposes topics, hashtags and simpler terms to help them write the content. It’s open for contributions from external people and allows commenting. It is a move away from ‘what we want to tell the world.’ It invites conversation.”
- Adopt standards to ensure that your content is trusted.
- This will be of increasing importance, and potentially a differentiator, as misinformation, fake news and deepfakes proliferate.
- Monitor social platforms.
- Listen by keywords/terms (brand, products, CEO, issues, competitors); track notable influencers; analyze tone and sentiment; be alert for uses of fake news, viral memes and deepfakes, and call them to the attention of C-Suite colleagues and the company’s cybersecurity teams.
- Determine audiences by platform and channel (e.g. people who follow the company on Twitter, visitors to websites, employees using intranet).
“We went from telling employees, ‘Don’t you dare’ to realizing that employees are active on social. Now we are entering the zone, ‘Now we want you to do it!’ – and we see excellent results.”
Rainer Ohler, CCO, Airbus
“The entire communications function at HSBC is a newsroom. I’m a former Wall Street Journal reporter and I imposed journalism ethics when HSBC introduced the newsroom approach. The bank is producing sound, fact-checked material every week. Companies must find a way to convince people that what they publish is correct, accurate, trustworthy, that it came directly from the company and not from someone else.”
Pierre Goad, Former CCO, HSBC
What You Need
- A full range of editorial and content creation
- Social media management
- Basic analytics (Siemens’ Haller established an analytics team. They quickly discovered that 77% of Siemens’ external and internal websites were never clicked on.)
- Teams modeled after newsrooms and studios, as well as social listening “mission control” rooms
What You Measure
- Focus on content engagement: traffic, views, downloads, likes, shares.
- For social monitoring, typical KPIs include word clouds, share of voice, tone, sentiment.
