Professional Communication: project an image, don't be creepy

How to create an image? How to communicate professionalism? Are there standards which can help us enhance the communication strategy?

Study Case

The answers to those questions are correlated and almost impossible to find separately. However, there are quite a lot of companies out there trying to cut down the communication costs while making efforts to score high on image rankings. I have in mind a recent experience from a big international corporation operating in the office space renting business. The experience included both online company research and visiting the local office. The research phase showed non-existing CSR policy, non-existing employee benefits, accusations of careless behavior in connection to the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center a few years back, and company-produced marketing videos. The visit at the local office revealed a high rate of employee turnover, very unusual hiring policy (hiring only for lowest hierarchy positions with no requirements for education and experience, on minimal wage), and deceiving job descriptions.

When walking through the door you are greeted way too eagerly by the staff which makes you almost uncomfortable. What they pride themselves for is great flexibility in services and high level of professional customer service. The only customer feedback is available through the corporate marketing videos though.

Communicational no go

What was observed at that company is an absolute communicational no go. The non existing CSR policy and the lack of personnel benefits in a country as Denmark where CSR is becoming more than a standard and employees are treated with special care as assets is a sign of unprofessional management. The smile of the receptionist is not enough to make up for corporate mismanagement or irresponsible behavior. It also needs to be in line with services, surroundings, corporate culture and needs to be rooted in a thorough policy. Otherwise it comes across as insincere and creepy. Smiling while doing your job needs to be just as professionally distanced as your work style. Are you flirting with the customer or servicing them? Make it clear.

Image: communication standards and guidelines

Image management, even though there is such a discipline, sounds very wrong as image management is nothing but the tip of the iceberg. Hiring a professional to work on your image does not make a lot of sense if you have not clarified what the company stays for and how it wants to be regarded by your stakeholders. Stakeholders are all individuals and groups that are or can be affected by the operating of your business and/or have an interest in your business.

You need therefore to start from identifying your business’ core characteristics and analyzing the strategic stars for your brand. After clarifying what is desired and what is possible you need to get very practical and analyze in what ways your vision and mission can be embedded in your culture and business operations.

While you make considerations about communication practices, image building and communicating your values outside of and inside the company you need to get acquainted with the professional communication standards which will be your guarantee that your communication strategy is not going to backfire by earning you critics or even lawsuits in connection to unethical behavior.

 

After you manage to create a thorough and working communication strategy completely aligned with your business operations you might want to go one step further and consider CSR. There are countless studies showing that a CSR policy is considered a plus and sometimes a definitive criterion for choosing your company as a partner, provider or employer. For the policy to work though, you once again need to be consequent. Just as you need to make sure that you have implemented a communication policy that fits your business profile you also need to do the same when engaging in CSR. If you are not careful about this you might end up being accused of using CSR as a promotional tool instead of as a sincere expression of your concern for your stakeholders and the environment. You might for example decide to fund poor children in Africa but you have to explain why it is the poor children in Africa getting your support and not the local caner organization, for example.

After completing your communication strategy you need to make sure that it covers as a minimum mission, vision, development strategy, internal communication and employee management, HR policy and benefits, corporate culture, online and traditional marketing activities, branding, crisis communication, media relations, external stakeholder management, customer relations specifically, community care and involvement, and CSR.

When you are ready you will find yourself under a stack of thick guidebooks addressing the separate topics. You will have to always make sure that they are aligned with strategy and updated regularly. Among those guidebooks you will find the one describing how you need to treat customers in order to communicate the desired corporate image.

Do you now understand why smiling a lot is not professional but creepy?

 

DIDI

Communication strategy failure: Information overload

How do we know what is true and what is not? How do we define trustworthiness? How do we get rid of the communication overload? How should a responsible company/public figure communicate? 

The overload

 

There are many who argue that the freedom of expression which Internet and other media provide giving basically everyone the opportunity to speak up has led to a society where nothing can stay hidden forever and thus honesty and transparency should be everybody’s policy in order to avoid image crashes.  However, it might turn out that accepting a reality where information is freely accessible makes us naive and lazy. As we are “drowned” in democracy rhetoric we do not necessarily reflect over the possibility that somebody might be manipulating information to serve someone’s interests. We read news, posts, blogs, forum threads, etc. and sometimes we cannot even tell the difference between them which most of the time is not as clear as one might think. Thus, we take a comment in a forum as seriously as a news post. Furthermore, we do not have the time or the energy to check all referrals and sources of an article for example. Last but not least, we face the so called Clickworker workforce which basically are people hired to write reviews and other consumer content. How do we then separate trustworthy from what is not? On top of that we need to process much more information daily than we actually are capable of: around 5 000 to 30 000 advertising messages alone.

The result is a tired mind nonstop bombarded with information which is a perfect target for manipulation.

Get rid of it

To help ourselves get rid of the overload and thus concentrate on what is really important we need to shut off all distracters. A distracter is a source or a type of information which either is not trustworthy or is not important. It is furthermore what affects our concentration, uses up our processing resources and prevents us from focusing on what is really important. To be more effective and function better both at work and in our private lives we need to learn to prioritize. We need to accept the fact that our brains have limits and we need to use them for what makes most sense.

What to trust?

When we talk about information overload vs. trustworthiness the prioritizing we need to do includes some drastic measures. However, according to your own needs, you might adjust them.

Rule nr. 1 would be to turn all electronics off. Sit down and think what is important to you. Is it really important personally to you that the Greek economic is going down? Do you have some personal investment in the war in Iraq? Do you really care to look through the pictures of a friend of a friend on Facebook or you simply do it automatically? Do you care that that and that public figure in some country had an affair?

Rule nr. 2: Turn off for everything that you are not interested in. If you watch the news because you are bored, that is not a good reason to put your brain through yet another informational attack. If you are interested in sport, watch sports. If you are into politics, follow politics. Especially nowadays it is more than easy to find the perfect source for your needs as there are countless sources and media variations.

Rule nr. 3 comes in connection to trustworthiness. After you have managed to filter the incoming information you should have the time and the energy to separate reliable from unreliable sources. You do that by checking credentials, sources, image, and disclaimers. Normally you will only need to do that once as serious companies value their image and will not allow it to be destroyed by publishing false information. However, a cross-referencing with other publications or following 2-3, maybe more if you have the time, sources provides always a better guarantee that you are being properly informed.

Rule nr. 4 is mostly for those who like reading forums, blogs, reviews. Do not forget that the people writing there are most of the time simply users who come up with some commentary based either on something they somehow have learned or on their own thoughts/experience. Sometimes they also might be people hired to write what they wrote. Trusting them fully is never a good idea without doing some research on your own.

For companies

Even though most consumers do not follow the described steps and often are easy to manipulate by putting images and ideas in their heads it is not recommended taking advantage. Merely from an image point of view you are going to risk destroying your image if your manipulation tactics are ever revealed. Unfortunately for you there are opinion leaders and a bit crazy conspiracy theorists that are always on a lookout for something like that.

There have been many companies through time who have got away with manipulation and even more politicians and public figures who have mastered the art of getting what they want. This does not mean that you will succeed. It is about time companies realize that success may but should not rest on deceiving consumers. Business is always more productive and successful in the long term when you cooperate with your stakeholders and are honest with them.

Instead of taking advantage of the informational clutter, try to stand out with 100 % professionalism and responsibility. Having a clear policy and a clear message will guarantee you a strong position on the market. Imagine being the trustworthy source conscious consumers are choosing. Becoming the trusted partner of your stakeholder brings more value than leaching of them. The time of synergy between companies and consumers has come.

 

DIDI

Misusing CSR

CSR as we know it and CSR of the future

 

The concept of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is not new. Some link its birth to the middle of the 20^th century and the attempt of tobacco corporations to remedy their public images and to shift the focus of attention from the harm they cause to the good they claim they do. However, the concept has been developing all through the past years and has come to mean incorporating philanthropy and responsibility towards stakeholders and community at large. A definition of it could sound as “doing business by doing more good and trying to avoid harm”.

The way CSR is been practiced also differs greatly from country to country (explicit and directly marketed in many countries and implicit and promoted by earning recognition of third parties in other countries). For this reason any generalization about the concept cannot be feasible.

However, it cannot be denied that many companies use the CSR flag as a marketing tool. Dorfman, Cheyne, Friedman, Wadud and Gottlieb give a great example of that in their article “Soda and Tobacco Industry Corporate Social Responsibility Campaigns: How Do They Compare?” (www.plosmedicine.org). They be a few CSR campaigns run by soda corporations. Pepsi’s RefreshProject turns out to be the perfect example of misusing CSR.

The problem about doing that is not only ethical. What happens is that corporations use the consumers’ desire to do business with responsible companies to turn them into loyal users of their products. The biggest question here is about the consequences of such an act when we talk about companies which produce health endangering products as sweets, fast food, soda, alcohol, tobacco and medicines.

This issue is highlighted further by the ever greater use of social media in consumer relationship building. Using social media allows for constructing consumer realities and boosting consumer brand involvement by participation in causes, games, initiatives. When CSR activities as a part of marketing become viral through social networks the motive behind, thus the real goal of the campaign gets blurred into the mass excitement. In campaigns as the Pepsi Refresh Project results are expected to be more sells and not so much philanthropic projects, confirmed by a Pepsi official, cited by the authors.

Even though business of business is business and this will never change, with the appearance of greater tools for managing (not to say manipulating) consumer behavior it is necessary that companies take the responsibility accompanying such great power.

Many researchers argue that regulation agencies are too slow in following progress in technology. Thus the consumer is left at the mercy of companies employing ingenious marketing campaigns designed to shape behavior. Therefore something more is necessary. That could be the next CSR direction which would allow companies to master responsibility in close consumer contact.

That could be done for example by engaging in social marketing and reshaping businesses to reflect the needs of society. That is of course idealistic, the realistic approach would be to either focus marketing efforts on adults only, to increase the amount of health information freely available to users or to avoid creating unhealthy habits by using social media involvement of consumers.

Even though there is no active reaction by the public concerning social media and CSR efforts of companies at the moment it is certain that with mounting research on the topic public awareness will soon be raised and the issue will be faced. That is why it is a good investment to rethink your CSR strategies and social media appearance so that they reflect the values your company stays for. This is the surest way to avoid a crisis and go ahead of competition when many are going to face the anger of the public.

 

DIDI

Exclusive Business Style

When talking about business style it becomes clear that different companies and different managers understand that term and what it is supposed to symbolize differently. Style is about presentation, about standards, about image, about who you really are. Style encompasses almost every aspect of everyday life. The image we create includes and is defined by our style.

Therefore our business style should be carefully formed and developed to perfection. Unlike many other things style cannot be faked. If we pretend to be an honest and socially responsible company while we steal from our customers and pollute the environment, it is stealing and irresponsibility that define our business style. Of course, some companies use a lot of money on public relations in an effort to cover their indiscretions and create a stable pretend-image. Money bad spent.

Another wrong interpretation of business style is that exclusivity is achieved by being different. I have seen the results of exaggerated focus on being the only one. They included mail labels which did not follow the generally accepted norms about labeling a letter, business cards which confused customers by providing unclear contact information, and last but not least 4 slogans on the back of the business cards promoting corporate responsibility and progressive innovation, while the company still did not account for any of them. That is what one can call an outside-in style, that is, a style created outside of the company, not aligned with the its values and forced onto it in the hope of becoming true.

Style is indeed a great commodity and it is understandable why companies strive to be perceived as working with great style. It is a great commodity though, only because it is a reflection of our behavior in the minds of our stakeholders, a reflection of our hard work on becoming who we are. That cannot be faked. Just think about corporations as Maersk. One can argue that it is different small things that build up their image and the perception of great style. The truth is though that their style cannot really be tracked to any of the small details in particular as all about them adds to who they are in our minds, thus creates the idea of business style.

In that sense trying to fake a business style is a condemned mission. First, it will take a lot of resources and time. Second, it will add to the stress in the company as employees will perceive the attempts to present the business in one way while working in another as schizophrenic. Last but not least, we live in an information society and truth always surfaces sooner or later. Therefore save your business the chocking impact with reality and avoid becoming a schizophrenic company. In fact the stakeholders have often a more positive attitude towards innocent-sins companies than such which pretended to be saints and turned out to be sinners. Do not forget – image is hard to build and easy to destroy, the same is valid for business style.

That is why most successful businesses demonstrate that they have understood the importance of genuine identity. Genuine identity refers to such an identity build from inside out, following the business strategy and practice. It is not a mask, product of an outside PR agency, forced onto the company’s face. Producing slogans and offering them to stakeholders, as mentioned above, is simply pure waste of resources and on top of that is dangerous.

Another common mistake regarding style development is attempting to be unique. Being unique is in fact something, everyone dreams about but there are good reasons for some equity to be established among us. The given example with the one-of-the-kind mail labels shows why. The post office got confused about who the sender was and whom they needed to deliver to. Was that a good way to differentiate the company? Following established standards is necessary in order to function in a society. Developments, innovation and revolutions are carried out in such a way that they do not bring confusion. That means that consensus should be achieved on them. Otherwise they are either dismissed or ridiculed by the conservative society.

If not that way, how do we establish an exclusive business style? Well, the simplest answer is just be exclusive in everything you do. We live in a society which values quality, simplicity, high standards, excellent services, transparency, responsible businesses, welfare, environment, care, etc. Being exclusive means that you fulfill as many as possible of the requirements of your stakeholders AND you do a bit more than required. Furthermore, it almost does not need mentioning, you have to be a reliable partner, honest and ethical and open to your local communities, perfect in legal and economic perspective, bold enough to be a leader.

After working hard enough on becoming the great company you wish to be perceived as, you can focus on the other details – presentation, communicating – directly and indirectly – your social leadership, sustaining your position. You need to accept though that it takes time and resources and the end result is often unpredictable as it depends on many internal and external factors.

What is guaranteed though is that you will gain a lot in the form of enhanced image and stakeholder trust and support. Exclusive business style today stretches beyond business and transforms companies into socio-business institutions with responsibilities for welfare, healthcare, safety, ecology, etc. No company, no matter how strong it is at carrying out business operations, will be perceived as a high-standard company as long as it does not take ownership of social issues as well.

That is why what you need to remember is: do not spend money on style attributes or image creation. Follow the highest standards of business, respect and include your stakeholders, act socially responsible and always go a bit further than required. Instead of talking too much how great you are, let others talk about you. Do not forget that every detail of your behavior talks, be thorough in developing and sustaining your public image.

DIDI