COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR the magazine for corporate communications and public relations
asia-paci fic issu e
Number 3/2015 www.communication-director.com
Pleased to meet you? Strange bedfellows
The strategic art of stakeholder engagement
Learning to manage super stakeholder groups
Getting traction, being believed Employee engagement – myth or must? On the search for a new form of employee empowerment
Building partnerships through corporate diplomacy
lisa WonG Director of Communications, Public Affairs & Sustainable Development
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celin huseBY
Senior Director Communications
Head of Corporate and Government Affairs
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Senior Vice President for Corporate Communications and Spokesperson
View all speakers and the whole program here:
www.communications - summit.asia
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sheila rasu
Tino FriTsch
donald KanaK
Tanuja Kehar
Associate Vice President Marketing & Communications
Head of Communications Asia Pacific
Chairman // Prudential Corporation Asia
Vice President of Corporate Communications
james r. WilKinson
amandeep s Kaur
Senior Vice President & Head of International Corporate Affairs
Head of Marketing & Communications
edWin shao Head Data Scientist
quip yourself with a new skill set as a communicator that is Vital in this era of digitalization. In keynotes, main sessions, panel discussions and expert sessions, more than 300 participants and 40 speakers will anticipate the innovations that will change our work and discuss disruptive forces in our industries. The following topics will be dealt with: brand & reputation management, 360° communications, CSR, employee communications, corporate culture, change communications, big data, digital communications, storytelling, campaigning, community management and public affairs. Join your peers and be ready for our profession’s future! You can do so here:
www.communications - summit.asia/register/
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR the magazine for corporate communications and public relations
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Communication Director Magazine • Helge Schlüter • +852 58010913 • helge.schlueter@communication-director.com www.communication-director.com
EDITORIAL
Welcome, Among the usual line-up of articles on all aspects of the communicator’s job portfolio, this issue of Communication Director looks at stakeholder engagement. It’s a popular buzzword, but what exactly is stakeholder engagement? We’ve defined it as the proactive integration of feedback from those impacted by your organisation’s operations. In other words, putting a human face on your business. The next time your company find itself in a stand-off with a hostile party, invite them to pull up a seat and talk it over. By emphasising the things we have in common rather than our differences and by acknowledging that no-one is perfect, we can step outside our preordained roles and work together to find common ground. Stakeholder engagement means working towards trust, even (especially?) among those with different views: Left and Right, corporations and NGOs, employees and management. It means reaching out before problems arise, rather than after, it means listening as much as talking, explaining with humility rather than boasting or finger-pointing. It’s not surprising that several of the companies most invested in stakeholder engagement operate in industries that directly impact the quality of life of so many people – a fact reflected in the line-up of authors that write about their direct experiences in this issue. I’m certain you will find that their insights prove that stakeholder engagement is more than just a buzzword: it’s an invitation for all of us to do business, better.
DAFYDD PHILLIPS
Photo Laurin Schmid
Editor in Chief
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 3/2015
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3/15 68
ISSUE FOCUS
Strange bedfellows Companies may not always agree with their stakeholders, but respectful engagement, guarantees mutual benefits
Stakeholder engagement 80
Employee engagement – myth or must?
72
Working together towards engagement It is easier than ever for groups to connect with you company
76
The key to corporate diplomacy
The new world of work demands new ways of empowering employees
Listening to the demands of different audiences can be frustrating – but vitally important
8 • BRAND
18 • CRISIS
26 • CAREER
Cracking the techie code
Communicating calm after the storm
Building soft skills in a flat world
Recruit future employees by appealing to them as individuals, not as demographics
The evolution of Japanese corporate communications
In a connected world, soft skills are all-important differentiators
22 • ADVOCACY
30 • EVALUATION
Opening new windows
The stories that protect
Weighing up the evidence
The unstoppable spread of mobile in Asia Pacific creates new opportunities for communicators
Advocacy campaigns are a role-model for great storytelling
Evaluation research in Malaysian corporations show some surprising results
12 • DIGITAL
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CONTENT
42 • INTERNAL
Inspire, engage, motivate Can internal communication drive business? 84
Building partnerships, building trust Empowering local communities to become dialogue partners proves your commitment to sustainability
48 • SKILLS
58 • HR
Putting gender on the IT agenda Breaking down the barriers between women and the IT industry
Relax – the future’s visual Cutting edge tools bring a whole new dimension to presentations
52 • SUSTAINABILITY 88
So what’s the deal with data? More than just a strategic asset, data can help drive engagement
Creating a brighter future for all Communicators can and should fight for sustainable development 62 • INTERVIEW 56 • WRITING & EDITING
Expensive errors The hidden business costs of poorly-written English
Jim Wilkinson Head of international corporate affairs at Alibaba Group on the Chinese giant’s global ambitions
Photos www.alibabagroup.com; Thomas Schultz / Wikimedia Commons
34 • INNOVATION 92 • ASSOCIATION
The sixth sense
APACD
To craft messages that engage all the senses, communicators must first step outside the ordinary
The latest developments in the Asia-Pacific Association of Communication Directors
38 • RISK 98 • QUESTIONS TO
Risk and reputation
Working towards serendipity
In an age of disruption, businesses are faced with new reputational risks
Minari Shah on communications, Mumbai and the motor industry
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 3/2015
7
BRAND
Cracking the techie code When it comes to recruiting future employees, remember to appeal to the audience as individuals, not as demographics. BY VA I S H A K H I B H A R U C H A
I
n India, the term “techies” is viewed with a mixture of delight, respect and curiosity. And it’s a label worn with pride by those who own it. Unlike elsewhere, “techie” is not something you’d be ashamed of. It represents a combination of nerdiness, geekiness and a sense of slightly superior intelligence, a notch above the average person. These are the youngsters that populate, and heavily at that, Indian IT organisations; bringing with them
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multiple post-graduate degrees, a young mind eager to conquer the world and yet strong roots that take them back to the small home town or village they come from. Coupled with their high intelligence, their ability to code (or crack the code) and their penchant for hard work, is the fact that they are young, naïve and yet to discover the complexities of life. This is the chief reason why most organisations find the typical IT guy a tricky asset worth investing in. At Capgemini it has been no different. And if we’ve managed significant numbers and high levels of internal and external engagement, it has largely been because we’ve cracked the code for engagement of the elusive techie.
BRAND
firmly entrenched as the employers of choice for the country’s young techies. In terms of engagement we featured in the top 10, but it was not a significant place. It was important therefore to position Capgemini in the right manner to become the preferred employer. With an already global position of being an expert in the field, Capgemini India sought to establish this platform for the younger target audience in a gamified way. However, there are multiple challenges. The media is fragmented, social media even more so. Firewalls exist in most IT organisations to maintain data security. There is also a hugely diverse target group that one has to reach. On one hand are the fresh graduates and on the other are the highly experienced technology professionals. Against this complicated background, one also has to maintain the key positioning of the brand as an expert.
Three simple but important rules 1 Shun analysis paralysis. There’s enough numbers and spreadsheets in the coder’s life. The trick is to engage him outside these two dominant realms of his life.
2 Be a consumer, not a marketer. Once again, the perspective has to be that of the one consuming the content. It’s about ‘you’ not ‘me’.
3 Be human. Most of us are not advertisers, leaders or vice presidents, or even coders, we are human. We are people, husbands, fathers, mothers, children and friends. People with everyday problems, with everyday issues. Not only must one engage on a human level but also entertain (a simple fact that we forget quite often!). Here are three examples of where our success came from in engaging with the techies of India. Although well established in Europe, Capgemini has been a late entrant in India. The Indian Pure Players were more
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Appealing to the intellect The Capgemini Super Techies Show was devised as a means to engage with the young and restless, without alienating the mature and experienced. The Super Techies Show had a unique format, one of the first of its kind in the world of technology. The Show invited participation from young IT professionals who were given real-life challenges from technology leaders of large organisations. These challenges involved solving a business problem and required expertise in various aspects of IT. The first season was a success but what made the subsequent seasons even more engaging was the fact that we picked up cues and
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Opening new windows The unstoppable spread of mobile in Asia Pacific creates a whole new set of opportunities for communicators. BY P E KO WA N
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DIGITAL
Picture www.opte.org / Barrett Lyon / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
This image shows a map of the internet in 2015 created by The Opte Project. It is the first major release of the internet map since 2010. Asia Pacific is represented by the colour red, is North America by blue, Europe by green, Latin America by purple, Africa by orange and "Backbone" (highly connected networks) is white. See www.opte.org/ the-internet
B
elieve it or not, people are spending more time on consuming content on social network apps or sites than we think. According to Opera’s State of Mobile Web report, 6 out of 10 pages that Opera Mini users visit are social network sites. Opera Mini is our mobile browser app and more than 250 million people in the world use it every month. We found that most content discovery happens when visiting social network sites or apps, whether through read-
ASIA, AN EMERGING MARKET IN MOBILE ADVERTISING Last year, smartphone adoption rates across 29 Asia Pacific countries spiked from 48 per cent to reach 60 per cent according to data gathered from users of the Opera Mini browser. Throughout 2014, the region’s impression market share continued to grow and it finished the fourth quarter at 26.1 per cent — nearly triple the 10 per cent it had three years ago. Asia overtook Europe to become the second-highest generator of mobile ad impressions on the Opera Mediaworks mobile ad platform at the end of 2013. Mobile broadband adoption has been consistently rising in the Asia Pacific region as consumers upgrade to better phones, wi-fi is rolled out on a large scale and carriers move to 3G and 4G networks. In 2015, the number of broadband connections in Asia is expected to reach 1.1 billion, according to research from the GSM Association. Source: Opera.com
COMMUNICATION DIRECTOR 3/2015
ing news stories shared by their friends, published by media outlets or published by brands. Our users find news items on social networks and click the links from there if they want to read more. For most online publishers, more than 50 per cent of web traffic to their sites are from social networks. In mobile-first countries, such as the ones in South East Asia, the traffic from social networks is more than 80 per cent. This strengthens the recent finding from Pew Research Centre that news use on Facebook and Twitter is on the rise. For today’s brand communicators, getting the news out through social networks creates more impact than ever before. This impact includes generating not only more engagement on the brand's social media pages than on other channels but also securing more media coverage. Creating engaging content through social networks can help build a brand's awareness and its reputation. It even leads to people trying out its products. Making our social network channels impactful has today become the top priority for my communication team. It requires dedicated resources anwd efforts. We have allocated more manpower to look after these channels, creating meaningful, engaging content on a regular basis. We also reply to followers’ comments there. More engagement on social media makes the brand more visible to the people who interact with you the most.
Post the content that your followers care about To gain more engagement, your content needs to be relevant to your followers. Once a week, we hold editorial meetings to ensure that the content we produce is interesting. In these meetings, we review the best performing posts across different social media channels by calculating the engagement rate. People from different countries share what they’ve learnt and the posts that attract the most engagement. We also experiment with develop-
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CAMPAIGN BY A COMPANY CAMPAIGN BY AN ASSOCIATION CAMPAIGN BY A GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTION CAMPAIGN BY A NGO INTERNAL AND CHANGE COMMUNICATION CRISIS COMMUNICATION SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY PUBLIC AFFAIRS EVALUATION AND MEASUREMENT REPUTATION MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATIONS TEAM OF THE YEAR YOUNG COMMUNICATOR OF THE YEAR.
IN-HOUSE COMMUNICATIONS WORK
judged by leading in-house communicators and public affairs professionals to celebrate the excellence of our peer community in Asia-Pacific. HOSTED BY:
For all information, please visit: www.communications-summit.asia/award
PIERRE GOAD
KARUN BUDHRAJA
RACHAEL BYLYKBASHI
CLAUDIA CHAN
Group Head of HR and Communications HSBC Holdings
Vice President Communications and Marketing Amadeus IT Group SA Asia
Head Of Communications Roche Diagnostics Asia Pacific
Head of Government Relations, Asia Pacific and Japan Seagate Technology
MICHAEL CHAPNICK
SUMEET CHATERJEE
SHRAVANI DANG
SUNNY GUGLANI
Director of Communications and Public Affairs Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation
Vice President, Head of Communications & Digital RPG Enterprises
Vice President & Group Head Corporate Communications Avantha Group
Head Of Communications Airbus Group India
ZOE HIBBERT
TESS HUMPHREYS
RON JABAL
JASON KENDY
VP of Communications for Asia Pacific Visa
Communications and Marketing Officer University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Country Media Relations & and Internal Communications Manager Shell
Head of Corporate Communications UBS Japan
KAREN KHAW
DAVID KIU
RAJESH MANIK
RAJAN MOSES
Director of Corporate Communications, Asia Pacific BNY Mellon
Vice President, Communications and Sustainability, Global MarketsUnilever Singapore
Executive Vice President and Head of Human Resources and Communications ING Investment Management
Senior General Manager PRSapura Group
AMY OVALLE
ROGER PUA
DEEPA SAPATNEKAR
JOHN SAUNDERS
Chief Communications Officer The Asia Foundation
Director Communications APAC LinkedIn Singapore
Head of Communications - India, Korea & Hong Kong LinkedIn India
Director, Communications Asia New Zealand Foundation
CHRISTIAN SCHUBERT
MINARI SHAH
PENNY SHONE
ROB STEWART
Vice President Corporate Affairs Asia Pacific BASF East Asia
Head of Corporate Communications Tata Motors
Head of Public Affairs and Communication Global Growth and Operations GE Tower
Chief Communication Officer - APAC UBS
AZMAR SUKANDAR
CLARE WILLIAMS
LEIGH WONG
JANICE WONG
Director of Communications Asia Pacific The Nature Conservancy
Director, Head of Citizenship Asia Pacific Barclays Bank PLC
Head of Media Relations and Issues Management Shell Malaysia
Head of Internal Communications - Marine Rolls-Royce Singapore
HELEN WONG
GREGG YAN
BILL YUE
HANI ZAINAL
Assistant Director of Communications The University of Hong Kong
Communications Manager World Wide Fund for Nature
Director of Communications Texas Instruments
Communication Manager BASF East Asia
CRISIS
Communicating calm after the storm Japan is upping its communications game: a series of crises have led to better communication strategies and greater use of professionals.
Picture Wikimedia Commons / Unknown Japanese copyists after Katsushika Hokusai
BY JASON KEN DY
W
esterners give Japan a lot of heat for its perceived inability to change. I would, however, argue that Japan has changed more over the past 20 years than, say, America has over the past 50. While change comes slowly here, it is constant and considerable over time. One notable ongoing transformation is in the world of corporate communications. The once maligned in-house corporate communications department – far from decision making and influence – is rising within the Japanese corporate structure as boardrooms learn from failed attempts to independently manage crises. So what does Japanese communications look like in an old-school Japanese firm?
Orbiting the sun For decades, one of the least influential and rarely tapped resources within the traditional Japanese company has been the communications team. I like to imagine the typical Japanese corporate structure as something like the solar system. At the center is the all-powerful sun – huge, warm, life giving. This is the president’s office, or shacho shitsu, and boy it burns bright. Though we hear a lot about flat structures and consensus building in Japanese society, don’t take that too literally. The sun makes decisions, crafts messages, chooses directions, and commands everyone. (He – and yes it is almost always a he – goes around later building consensus that certifies his original decisions.)
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Orbiting very close to the sun are frighteningly powerful departments like human resources, corporate planning, administration and sales. These people are in on everything and if you want to live you never cross them. Where does corporate communications sit in this structure? Imagine Pluto. Far, in the cold outer reaches of the galaxy, is a small rock that does what it is told. It is staffed by company men and women largely on three- or four-year weigh station assignments until they move on to any number of other postings along their generalist career paths. For instance, you often find people in the “PR department” who have worked in unrelated positions in legal, the Osaka Branch, the manufacturing facility, or any other posting you can name. (Example: I once was asked to visit a newly appointed head of communications at a major Japanese bank to talk to him about the public relations industry. Fresh from his latest assignment running a small branch in Kagoshima, he began by asking me, “what is PR?”).
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Above: Biodegradable candles mark Eath Hour Below: Children show off their new solar panels at the island of Beton in the Philippines. WWF's Gift of Light Project was able to generate USD3055 from 59 supporters.
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ADVOCACY
The stories that protect Advocacy communication campaigns in the Asia-Pacific region are a role-model for great storytelling. B Y G R E G G YA N
Photos: Gregg Yan / WWF (2)
A
s new causes spring up all the time, advocacy communication campaigns are becoming increasingly significant. At the heart of every advocacy campaign lies a story with an unwritten ending. A good story offers readers lessons – but a great story empowers them to determine just how the story should end. I’ve been writing about Asia’s ecological and anthropological issues for a decade – traveling to troubled places to be with fishers, farmers, tribesfolk, rangers and rebels. Their tales are often difficult to tell, but it is precisely these types of stories which need to be told. Allow me the honour of sharing some tips and quips learned in this evolving journey.
The story setting The Asia-Pacific region hosts some of the planet’s most breathtaking land and seascapes – from the primeval forests of Malaysian Borneo, where plants jostle for space and sunlight, to the coral-coated atolls of the Philippines’ Tubbataha Reef, where tiger and hammerhead sharks await the unwary. Many indigenous cultures have endured to the present. At the fringes of society for example are the Badjao, resilient sea-dwellers who teeter on the edge of change, but are reluctant to jump in.
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But times are changing. For the next 50 years, the Asia-Pacific region shall be at the forefront of global expansion. The dragons of development are forever transforming its cultural and economic horizons. Asia’s forests are in full retreat, assailed by plantations of soy and oil palm. Quaint beaches are being transformed into resort-towns. Commercial ocean trawlers are scooping up whole fish schools, juveniles and all. Tribesfolk are trooping to cities to look for jobs. And climate change – the greatest challenge of our time – is rearing its ugly head. Rummaging through the rubble of Tacloban a month after Typhoon Haiyan smashed the Philippines, I realised how horrifying climate effects can be – and how Haiyan was but a harbinger of what’s to come. Published every two years, the WWF’s Living Planet Report is a barometer of the Earth’s ability to regenerate resources. Its 2014 edition states that from 1970 to 2007, global biodiversity plunged by 30 per cent, even while humanity consumes 50 per cent more resources than what the planet can generate. By 2030, humans might need the equivalent of two planet Earths. Is this doom-and-gloom denouement the story ending we want? Obviously not. At the World Wide Fund for Nature (known as the World Wildlife Fund in the United States and Canada), we craft solutions to some of the most critical challenges facing humanity. Climate change, overpopulation, deforestation, resource depletion and unfettered development are severely straining the Earth’s capacity to sustain life. In over 100 offices globally, we’re working to write a happier ending by sharing science-based solutions to the
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CAREER
Building soft skills in a flat world
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CAREER
In our new world of connectedness, every company employee is a potential spokesperson – so why not equip them to do that job? BY MARK SHEEHAN
Photo www.thinkstock.com
H
ow can we build communication to achieve strategic outcomes and what is the role of the public relations practitioner in making sure our communication matches our intentions? For a long time we held the view that if you had a particular skill – such as accountancy, trades, engineering, IT, management – all you needed to make a success of life was to learn some “soft skills”. These soft skills included communication, presenting and speaking and team building For example, a belief that we are all much the same and are all connected can increase your confidence and effectiveness when presenting to others. Awareness of constant change makes your communication flexible and adaptable. Understanding how we all depend on each other transforms your leadership style. Expecting obstacles means you are ready to find solutions while others are still resisting the change. Out of India came the expression “flat world”, the new world of IT where we are all connected and opportunities to cooperate and thrive abound. In this flat world investment brokers in Mumbai can be pitching an initial public offering to Sydney-based clients while
another broker in Singapore is exploring the market potential for the same product with support from London-based lawyers. Skills and technology are increasingly global – so today’s point of difference has to be “people”. The author of The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman, says in the conclusion of that book: “You can flourish in this flat world, but it does take the right imagination and the right motivation.” Soft skills can help us all flourish, but only if
“The flat world means that everybody is in communication. If you cannot communicate, you miss out on providing content, context, connection and community.”
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they are supported by imagination, motivation and the best attitude. In 2012 author and public relations practitioner Steve Manallack recognised the confluence of these two cultural strengths; a combination of India and the west created the ingredient for success in the new world – soft skills for a flat world. It was Manallack who recognised the different approach taken by successful Indian business leaders who, through their ability to give top priority to their attitude to life and their best attitude to people, created real energy and direction for soft skills.
Winning through content With the arrival of the internet age driven faster each day by mobile technologies, it has become essential to develop content, provide it in context, allow creation of connections and finally to build opportunities for customers and prospects to join your community. This is good news for those who are in the communication business – you win in this flat world through content. For so long we recognised the cliché that “content is king” but we overlooked the depth contained in that statement. Content
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E VA LUAT ION
Weighing up the evidence Evaluation research among public relations practitioners in Malaysian corporations show some surprising results. B Y PA U L I N E L E O N G P O O I Y I N , C AT H E R I N E L E E C H E N G E A N AND KUMUTHAM KRISHNAN
T
oday’s increasingly competitive business and social environment pressurises public relations managers to demonstrate in measurable terms how public relations programmes benefit the organisations they serve. Thus, it is critical for them to understand and apply public relations planning, research and programme evaluation practices that ensure success and accountability. Research-based public relations practices enable managers to solve complex problems, set and achieve or exceed goals and objectives, track opinions and beliefs of key publics and employ programme strategies to achieve intended results. Thus, research is necessary for public relations practitioners in the information age.
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Evaluation research is necessary to establish the effectiveness of public relations programmes and their contribution to organisational effectiveness. Management demands hard facts, not intuition or guesswork; and public relations practitioners must demonstrate their ability to add value in producing a product or service. The evaluation of the effectiveness of public relations programmes and activities is of critical importance to practitioners and scholars. The drive towards accountability means practitioners must show that public relations activities help their organisation or clients to achieve meaningful goals.
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As public relations professionals have traditionally been doers rather than researchers, they often assume that others see the value of their function. However, others may not share similar sentiments, and when economic conditions are down, public relations practitioners are the first ones to be dismissed. Public relations practitioners claim that they contribute towards a better understanding between publics and organisations, but they do not present tangible evidence of this contribution. Hence, evaluation of public relations activities and programmes is important in order for public relations practitioners to speak with authority when asked to prove their value to the organisation. Public relations practitioners should measure the effects of their
E VA LUAT ION
programmes, provide sound forecasts of future needs, and account for the resources they consume; documenting measurable results and returns from public relations programmes compared with costs can demonstrate return on investment. Management evaluates public relations practitioners by how much it contributes to advancing the organisation’s mission and achieving organisational goals. Despite the importance of evaluation research in public relations, studies of successful measures of public relations efforts against actual achievement are still lacking. This raises several questions as to how Malaysian public relations practitioners perceive the importance of evaluation research. There is also very little information on the evaluation methods used by Malaysian public relations practitioners and the extent of such use. As such, this research consists of the following objectives: 1) to examine the perception and practice of evaluation research by Malaysian public relations practitioners; and 2) to investigate the criteria and methods of evaluation research by Malaysian corporations.
“Evaluation research is necessary to establish the effectiveness of public relations programmes and their contribution to organisational effectiveness. Management demands hard facts, not intuition.”
Methodology This study employed intensive interview as its qualitative research method. Face-to-face structured interviews were conducted with five public relations practitioners in various Malaysian public-listed companies. The respondents were asked 14 open-ended questions which touched on their perception of the importance of evaluation in public relations, as well as the purpose and frequency of such activities. They were also asked about the budget and techniques of data collection as well as the use and analysis of the findings. Due to confidentiality, the identity of the respondents’ companies could not be revealed and they were identified via the industry in which they operated, namely bank, oil and gas, car manufacturer, property development and airline.
Findings All respondents agreed that public relations evaluation is important and should be done .The bank respondent said that management perceives public relations and corporate communications as a cost and not profit-making centre; thus evaluation is important for budgeting purposes. Evaluation is also important to assess if the campaign’s process and strategies are producing results in terms of beneficial exposure to the company. The oil and gas respondent said that evaluation helps public relations practitioners review campaign elements that contributed towards meeting the company’s objectives.
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Another function of evaluation is to “educate” business owners, chief executive officers or managing directors who might not be media savvy, said the respondent from property development. Evaluation research educates management on the importance of empowering and listening to public relations practitioners and empowers them to speak to management with authority, based on facts and figures, said one respondent. Malaysian companies mostly utilise content analysis through media monitoring reports that are outsourced to external public relations agencies . Other than their own informal in-house monitoring, the bank has external agencies that conduct daily media monitoring in Malaysia and ASEAN countries. The bank’s media monitoring reports are very detailed, for example, analysing and comparing the bank’s news coverage vis-à-vis its competitors or focusing on specific sectors. Such evaluation data helps her plan for public relations outreach programmes. The property development company also engages an external company for media monitoring reports – sound bites and media output in print, offline and online. She added that tonality reports or sentiment analysis are useful in assessing the positive or negative impact of news reports, although the company has yet to purchase it. The return in investment of news coverage is usually assessed based on public relations and advertising value. For event post-mortems, there is a checklist – informally for smaller events and formally for larger events. The airline company also subscribes to a daily media monitoring service by an external agency that covers print and broadcast news reports, locally and regionally, but the report is less extensive. The airline company also relies on informal research such as personal daily monitoring of online media – blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Google alerts. Their feedback comes mainly from informal social media channels rather than formal media.
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I N NOVAT ION
Sound
Sight
The sixth sense Forget the one-dimensional paradigm that says public relations should only be done in conventional channels: the arts – music, dance, visual – are a communication tool that can transcend datelines and cultures. BY RICH KYLBERG
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I N NOVAT ION
Touch
Taste
?
Smell
prices and support the job satisfaction, retention and recruitment of employees. That’s important. In order to be noticed, outbound messages need to trigger the physiological sensors that can detect them. Aristotle reflected that people have five of these: sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste. To be effective, why wouldn’t modern communicators send various signals to any and all of these receptors? That’s basically what we do at Arrow Electronics, a global company that, at $24 billion in annual revenue, is one of the largest companies headquartered in the United States.
Sight
Picture Thomas Schultz / Wikimedia Commons
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eading this publication means that you are one of the most powerful and significant beings in the world. “God said ‘Let there be light:’ and there was light,” so the first recorded action in the universe was creation through communication. And equally important, that literally creative act was documented and distributed. So, in this tradition, our world is born out of speech (that we wouldn’t know about it if it hadn’t been recorded and distributed). By extension, marketing, advertising, communications, and public relations professionals are both creators of worlds… and the message distribution life-blood that is required for these worlds to survive. That’s pretty cool. As professional communicators, we are expected to create communications that will be noticed, recorded and distributed. In business, we do this in order to positively impact purchase decisions, accelerate sales, offer the business an enhanced level of recession proofing, positively impact company valuations/stock
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The majority of corporate messages utilise sight in one way or another, so it won’t come as any surprise that Arrow focuses here as well. Our company logo provides the simplest example. When people see our logo, we work to make that visual connection elicit a favorable response. Think of what happens when we see an animated heart; we think “love.” When we see a Nike “swoosh,” or an Apple logo, or a drawing of Mickey Mouse, we have immediate impressions that transcend just seeing an image. The possibility for people to prefer one image over another simply on the basis of visual stimulation is central to the way that we look at the Arrow logo. We constantly explain and reinforce that we’re a company that guides innovation forward, a company that balances between practicality and possibility, and a company that is constantly thinking “Five Years Out.” This way, when people come into visual contact with our logo, a positive psychological reaction occurs that constructively helps us to move toward our objectives. We regularly promote our logo with clever creative and tier-one distribution channels in order to provoke this intentional response.
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RISK
Risk and reputation
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usinesses are exposed to an increasing number of disruptive scenarios stemming from today’s interconnected corporate environment. Although traditional industrial perils, including natural catastrophes and fire, continue to head this year’s Allianz Risk Barometer rankings, businesses are also concerned about the increasing impact of a number of non-property damage risks – such as cyber and political risks which can impair both balance sheet and reputation, the risk barometer shows. Collaboration and communication have a vital role to play in improving mitigation and risk management of these corporate risks. The Allianz Risk Barometer is an annual survey that quizzes over 500 risk managers and corporate insurance experts from more than 40 countries. In the 2015 barometer – and for the third year in succession – business interruption and supply chain risk ranks as
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In an age of disruption, businesses are faced with a whole new array of risks to their reputation. Communication can help manage these risks. BY GREG DOBIE AND HEIDI POLKE
the top peril with almost half (46 per cent) of the responses rating this as the most important risk for companies, up 3 per cent year-on-year. Natural catastrophes (30 per cent) and fire/explosion (27 per cent) rank second and third and are also the major causes of business interruption companies fear most. Cyber (17 per cent) and political risks (11 per cent) are the most significant movers in this year’s barometer. Yet although awareness increases – with accounts of cyber attacks seemingly in
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the headlines every day – cyber still ranks as the top peril underestimated by many companies, the risk barometer shows. Political risk is also a much bigger concern for businesses. More and more countries are experiencing political situations which pose a huge challenge for companies’ people and assets. Country risk levels change more often and more frequently than they did in the past, which makes risk assessment more volatile and businesses more vulnerable.
RISK
Business interruption impact outweighs physical damage Business interruption and supply chain risk ranks as the top peril in all three regions surveyed for the 2015 risk barometer: Asia Pacific, Americas and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). This topic will naturally concern communications professionals who are only too aware of the reputational damage arising from a major service disruption. It is interesting to note that the impact of the subsequent disruption potentially affecting a company, its suppliers and customers often outweighs that of the physical damage. At $1.36 million, the average business interruption insurance claim is 32 per cent higher than the average direct property damage claim ($1.03 million), Allianz research shows. Such business interruption claims do not include the cost of reputational damage – a growing concern for risk managers. In recent years, insurers have responded with an increasingly sophisticated approach to reputational insurance, including for the impact of cyber attacks, yet best practice suggests that a combination of pre-loss risk management plus post-loss insurance coverage and loss mitigation remains essential. According to responses natural catastrophes (58 per cent), changes to the political environment (53 per cent) and the impact of globalisation, including increasingly specialised global suppliers, (41 per cent) are the main risks that can lead to supply chain disruption, with these also identified as the top trends that will increase the threat of business interruption in future. However, the increasing impact of digitalisation, including internet-based supply chain management, is identified as an emerging risk in both of these categories.
“Asia Pacific companies are more concerned about the trading environment than 12 months ago.” More severe implications Adequate mitigation of contingent business interruption – which is when a business is unable to operate because of an event that damages one of its suppliers – and business continuity management remains a gap in many multinational companies’ supply chain risk management programmes. Interdependencies between suppliers are often a big unknown. Many businesses still do not have alternate suppliers. At the same time the greater interconnectivity of the global economy is manifesting itself in increasingly more complex production processes with higher economic values resulting in possibly more severe business interruption implications. Therefore businesses need to better analyse their production processes accordingly. Collaboration between different areas of the company – such as purchasing, logistics, product development and finance – is necessary in order to develop robust processes which identify break points in the supply chain. Supply chain performance management analysis can enable early warning systems to be created. Many of the major causes of business interruption identified in the risk barometer relate to the rising impact of non-physical damage events such as the impact of a product quality incident (24 per cent), a cyber attack (17 per cent), civil unrest (11 per cent), loss of talent (7 per cent) and particularly the impact of failure in service delivery by a supplier (35 per cent, ranked
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third), reflecting the added complexity of business interruption risks. Non-damage business interruption is becoming a much bigger issue as companies look to protect against a range of different exposures, such as strikes, a government authority closing down an area linked to an outbreak of disease, or civil commotion and/or riots.
Loss of reputation main cost in event of cyber attack Cyber attacks are increasing, both in number and sophistication. One recent study estimates cybercrime now costs the global economy in excess of $400 billion a year. Therefore it is unsurprising that cyber risks is the most significant mover in the top 10 global business risks, moving up three positions year-on-year, ensuring it enters the top five risks for the first time. In 2014 it ranked eighth and in 2013 just 15th in the risk barometer. All industries surveyed found cyber risks to be a greater concern than last year. The financial services, manufacturing, power and utilities and engineering sectors were the most influential in ranking cyber risks higher. According to responses, loss of reputation (61 per cent) is the main cause of economic loss followed by business interruption (49 per cent) and damages paid due to loss of customer data (45 per cent). The almost automatic blow to a company’s reputation following a cyber attack can have a dramatic impact on balance sheets. According to the Edelman Privacy Risk Index 71 per cent of customers say they would leave an organization after a data breach. Companies must be aware of such potential reputational risks and analyse them, making sure they assign values to the possible scenarios to minimize and assess the residual risk. Meanwhile, data theft and manipulation (64 per cent), reputational loss (48 per cent) and increased threat of persistent hacking (44 per cent) are the scenarios businesses fear most.
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INTERNAL
Inspire, engage, motivate Can internal communication drive business? An overview of its strategic values – as well as some practical tips – gives a clear answer. BY STELLA NGA-CH I CH IU
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have to admit that there was a time when I did not think that internal communication was as important as external communication. Not until I started working at my current company, a Fortune 500 company headquartered
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in the US and specialising in industrial automation, did I know the power and strategic value internal communication can bring to a company. In Asia Pacific, internal communication has taken off much slower than external communication. Most companies
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believe that external communication, like marketing and public relations, generates more value than internal communication, and they tend to pay more attention and resources to those external functions. This is part of the reason why the development of external communication is far
INTERNAL
ahead of that of internal communication. However, as time goes by, companies started to realise the importance of engagement and leadership, and how internal communication can play a critical role in these aspects. Gradually, internal communication has started to take the stage in the corporate communication field and affirm its strategic importance. But what are the strategic roles of internal communication? In the following, I’ve listed what I believe are its major responsibilities.
Communicate corporate strategy to help employees create a line of sight Though one may think that every company should have a clear corporate strategy, in reality, many companies fail to achieve this. In a large corporation, an employee may hear a number of initiatives, several priorities, and tens of slogans floating around the company, and they may become confused about what the most important company-wide priorities are. Take my current company as an example. A few years ago, employees were confused about our company’s direction and top priorities. The main reason was that all departments and teams had their own strategy. Employees felt that the company was not very engaging; they did not know where their company was heading. When our global internal communication director came onboard to work with our senior vice president of HR, a significant change started to take place in the company. Together, they worked closely to develop a framework, what we called Strategic Framework for strategy communication, which started to gain popularity among senior leaders and, later, business unit and functional unit heads.
• Create a framework for company-wide use: Our company’s Strategic Framework has four key pillars summarizing the key themes of the company’s strategy. After the launch of the Framework, leaders and employees had a common language to describe the company’s priorities. Through continuous promotion of the Framework, including endorsement by the CEO, the Strategic Framework will soon become an integral part of the company’s systems and practices. As the Framework is increasingly used to develop team goals, the alignment of individual, team and company goals becomes much clearer and easier. For each level in the Framework, there are two columns. The column on the left is the higher-level strategy, while the one on the right is the strategy of the next level down. For example, the left hand side is the CEO’s strategy, and then on the right, it could be the strategy of a global business unit or functional unit. If the right hand side is the goals for ‘global’ HR, then the right hand side should be the ‘regional’ HR’s goals. Each level should develop its own strategy from the level above, and this process continues down the line. This cascading process should go right down to the individual employees, who develop their respective individual goals. If all business and functional units can disciplinarily follow the cascade process, all individual goals should have a connection to the company’s overall goals. With such a backdrop, every employee should know what role their individual efforts play in the company’s overall direction. When employees know how their roles contribute to the company’s main objective, they start to see the value of their work. As a result, they will feel more engaged and are more willing to go an extra mile to give their best to the company. This phenomenon was proved through our company’s employee engagement survey, which was conducted three years after the launch of the Strategic Framework. The scores from the
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“Internal communication has started to take the stage in the corporate communication.” questions relating to ‘understanding the company’s direction’ had risen compared to the previous employee engagement survey done three years ago along with the overall engagement score. • Convince senior leaders to take ownership: It is very important to have the CEO and senior leaders take ownership of communicating the company’s strategy. Words coming from higher positions usually add a lot of weight to a message. Employees will be more convinced and engaged when senior leaders paint a bigger picture of how they want to lead the company and the ultimate goals they want to achieve. • Use captivating visuals to communicate complex ideas: It is important to make employees interested in the company strategy. Instead of writing a long passage to explain what the strategy is, I chose to use an infographical approach, which is to conceptualise the information using graphics. From my experience, readers pay twice as much attention to graphics as they do to words alone. The fact that my company’s strategy was presented in an infographical way helped to create hype in the company. Many employees put the infographic posters up on their cubicle walls. A number of leaders came to me to get the images to use in their team strategy.
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The visual on the left shows talented law students a metaphor for their possible career; the visual below is taken from a press conference introducing the renewed San Fransisco Museum of Modern Arts.
Relax – the future’s visual A brief prediction for the near future of corporate presentations. BY PIETER BOSSCHAART
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report titled Fast Forward 2030: The Future of Work and the Workplace by realty consulting firm CBRE and China-based Genesis provides us with an interesting insight. About 50 per cent of all occupations we know today will no longer exist by the time we raise our glass to celebrate the arrival of the year 2025. It’s a no-brainer that the pale computer hacking boy who used to live next door is who you should blame and artificial intelligence is what you should blame. As a communications professional, do you need to worry about this? Not per se. “New jobs will require creative intelligence, social and emotional intelligence and ability to leverage artificial intelli-
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gence. Those jobs will be immensely more fulfilling than today‘s jobs,“ the report says. This means that communications professionals are safe as long as both sender and receiver are made of human DNA and as long as the occupation does not just involve a single way of transmitting information.
Visual storytelling After letting these results sink in and projecting them onto today’s communications, we must admit the trend of storytelling is here to stay. Future communications will be about sending and receiving emotions, which requires social and emotional intelligence. We all know that visuals, film
SKILLS
footage and audio are the best carriers of stories and thus messages and emotions. At this point we are all stuck in-between a generation that grew up with books, radio and television and a generation growing up with the internet. In a short while, it will be just the “internet-only” generation running the show, demanding a far greater amount of visual communication. Therefore, is visual storytelling the language of the future? You might consider the popularity of media like infographics, Instagram and YouTube as the first indicators of what it takes to captivate the next generation. This internet generation, the generation Z, doesn’t really care about grammar, doesn’t really care about what app to use today (or tomorrow) and they do not care about information other than the actual message, emotion and social status they receive. This doesn’t make them, our future communication professionals, less eager or smart. In fact, this trend might allow them to get even smarter and more efficient when it come to processing and sharing information.
From the classroom to the boardroom A revolution is happening in education and it all comes down to more visuals and the access and individualisation of information. A lot of tech visionaries are aware of this evolution. They are developing intuitive and strongly visual tools to help students collect, process and share information and ideas. Learning in the future means making sure to avoid an information overload by using technology as your personal bouncer. Educators either embrace or ignore new technologies and communication principles, but in the end all their students will adopt innovation. Just like they will continue to take innovation and new ideas along with them through colleges and universities, straight into their cubicles and boardrooms. That’s when fundamental change occurs.
metaphor is often the road to simplicity and strong visuals. Next, try to make use of your resources when it comes to the execution. Find tools that might help you or ask a designer to create the visuals for you. In all cases, mind the quality of the execution: a messy visual is very distracting and it might hold your audience back from sharing or even understanding your message. If necessary, ask various groups of people for feedback. The following shortlist of trends and tools might help you see how versatile, limitless and easy your solutions can be, now and in the near future. From small helpful tools to big disruptive trends - A shortlist of visual game changers that should be on your radar.
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A police officer’s gear is visualised as well as all elements within an officers life we can track and store inside the cloud. All images by Mr.Prezident
So what does it take to engage people visually? You can usually tell whether or not a visual is well thought through. The complexity of information doesn’t necessarily affect the level of skills needed to come up with the actual creative concept. It’s about taking a step back and trying to figure out how you can explain the main message to a random outsider. Writing down your first visual story and the main structure of your story is the key to generating your first ideas. Skipping the details and/or coming up with a
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All things VR and augmented. Sitting in a Brooklyn sports bar, drinking a couple of beers with a former MIT-pioneer, left me dizzy for days and it wasn’t the beer. Sceptical as I was regarding virtual and augmented reality, this guy made me see the added value of visual information projected onto our daily lives. “Google Glass was a great way to prepare the masses for what is about to come,” my drinking partner said, “but it didn’t raise the bar technologically neither did it show us the future.” Recently Microsoft showed us the Hololens. It didn’t solve the Glass problem, but the promos did show everybody the impact virtual, augmented and holographic reality might have on our professions and households. Imagine what it would be like for kids to stand next to a knight in shining armour during history classes.
2 Design-it-yourself tools. ‘Everybody can be a graphic designer’ seems to be the proposition that convinced Silicon Valley-legend Guy Kawaski to help a start-up called Canva take things to the next level. By providing its users with a user-friendly
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Creating a brighter future for all As the eyes and ears of their organisations, communicators are well placed to fight for sustainable development. BY DAV I D K I U
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SUSTAINABILITY
impact of climate change on people and ecosystems. While we are waking up late to the game, we at least are getting one big wake-up call.
No time for arguing
Photo www.thinkstock.com
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t the end of November this year, governments of the world will come together in Paris for what is perhaps the most important inter-governmental meeting there since the Peace Conference at the end of the first world war. Put simply, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (or COP21 for short) will see governments commit to binding CO2 emissions reductions that aim to stall the two degree rise in surface temperatures that scientists predict will happen over the next few decades. I say “stall” because that is indeed the best outcome we can hope for from the talks. We are waking up a little late to the game. The age-old argument of the climate skeptic camp – that there is insufficient scientific basis for climate change – has proven to be the great fallacy. The science is now incontrovertible but the window for action is closing fast. This is not just my view. It is the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is the world scientific body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change. The latest IPCC report was put together by more than 800 of the world’s leading scientists, working with more than 1000 contributors and another 1000 expert reviewers. It is in essence mankind’s accumulated knowledge on the impact of our existence on planet Earth. Their findings are sobering. To quote one example, the report states that we are on a path towards “severe, pervasive and irreversible”
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It is an interesting coincidence that the COP21 will take place in Paris. Leaders of the allied powers met then in France after the first world war to decide the fate of the post-war world. The fate of the world. That is also what hangs in the balance now. The Paris Peace Conference was a one-sided meeting and here is where we hope the parallels stop. The result then, dictated by the victors to secure their own interests, was an imperfect peace that sowed the seeds of the second world war. Much has been said about how the recent rounds of climate negotiations have been inherently one-sided – unfair to developing nations such as those in Asia. Developed nations have attained their state of development by plundering our collective natural resources and these talks now seek to penalise developing nations if they do the same. Or so the argument goes. To me, it is akin to arm-wrestling on the deck of the Titanic. We can wrestle all we want but in the end, will it really matter who wins? Regardless of where you stand on this, there is one truth from which we cannot escape. If we do not, as a collective human civilization, address this challenge, we will all sink together.
Reasons to be positive There are early signs that we will not go the way of the Paris Peace Conference. With so much at stake, it seems difficult to imagine that the world’s leaders would not make the necessary decisions for the sake of the greater good. Indeed, all signs currently suggest that we will probably see the most ambitious deal in
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HUMAN RESOURCES
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HUMAN RESOURCES
Putting gender on the IT agenda A new four-step recruitment communication model could help information technology firms finally crack the code to attracting more women. BY LAURA EARLE
Picture www.flickr.com / The U.S. National Archives / CC BY 2.0
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n ageing workforce and an insufficient number of graduates studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are fuelling a labour shortage in the information technology (IT) sector. Given that women and minorities are underrepresented in the field, many experts have proposed increasing the participation of these groups as a solution to this skills crisis. Despite many attempts to attract more women into the technology world (for example, Apple and Facebook are offering to freeze eggs for their female employees, and Cisco invites girls into its offices to give them hands-on exposure to its latest technology), Silicon Valley’s tech giants are still struggling, as the graph on page 48 shows.
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A synthesis of the academic literature on women in IT and recruitment communication suggests that the under-representation of females in IT is a communication challenge. Over the past four decades, the roles in IT organisations have predominantly been filled by men and, as these companies have traditionally sold to male customers and have not been obliged to publically disclose their diversity numbers, facilitating dialogue with females to encourage them to enter the industry has not been a priority for them. As a result, women have come to understand the industry as one in which you need to study STEM-related subjects at all stages of education to enter a male-dominated and engineering industry that is “chilly” towards women. Drawing on James A. Anderson’s definition of communication, the under-representation of females in IT is a communication challenge because technology companies have not prioritised “understand[ing]” women. The IT landscape is currently witnessing an unprecedented transformation due to three major market disruptive events: the collapse of the global economy, the popularity of cloud computing and the release of Apple’s iPhone. As a result, business users are taking control and starting to make their own IT decisions, asking IT firms to deliver business outcomes. Today’s technology companies don’t just need STEM talent; they also need increasing business skills to enable them to make this transition. This is a fantastic opportunity for technology companies to attract more women, given that women form around 48 per cent of employees in developed countries and more women are heading to business schools than ever before. Technology companies need to take a number of steps to address this communication challenge. The first step is to define their employer branding: who they are as an organisation, the values they stand for and the “package of psychological, economic and functional benefits” they will provide to their employees (to quote Ralf Wilden, Siegfried P. Gudergan and Ian
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INTERVIEW
Celebrations for Alibaba Group’s 10th anniversary in 2009
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INTERVIEW
“A chance to test some of that new international ambition.” Jim Wilkinson, senior vice president, head of international corporate affairs at e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, explains why the Group has a front-row seat on China’s vital changes and how he is helping Alibaba achieve its global goals.
Photos www.alibabagroup.com (2)
INTERVIEW BY DAFYDD PHILLIPS
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Stakeholder engagement 68
Strange bedfellows Companies may not always agree with their stakeholders, but respectful engagement, guarantees mutual benefits By Sally Susman
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Working together towards engagement In a hyperconnected world it is easier for internal and external groups to connect with your company By Yolando Crisanto
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The key to corporate diplomacy Listening to the demands of different audience can be frustrating– but is absolutely worth it By Richard Morgan
Building partnerships, building trust Empowering local communities to become dialogue partners proves your commitment to sustainability By Meenakshi Sharma
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Employee engagement – myth or must? The new world of work demands new ways of empowering employees By Karen Khaw
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So what’s the deal with data? More than just a strategic asset, data can help drive engagement and impact the bottom line By Stephane Pere
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