Can Corporate Communications survive in the digital age?

Corporate Communications faces a major crisis.

Classical formats such as business media become less important. The press office as a former core competency of Corporate Communications is losing its unique selling proposition. Employees become uncontrolled ambassadors of the company. Communications needs to be digital so that target groups can still be reached, efficiently. But what does “be digital” actually mean?

Digitalization is not a goal in itself. It is a way to achieve specific organizational objectives. Otherwise we do not transform but build parallel worlds as well as inefficiencies.

The range of objectives, even within one company, varies enormously. This is surprising at first glance, as the environment in which Corporate Communications operates is similar. Three change trends help in determining the objectives.

1. Automation and Networking of Communications

The value and supply chains of our companies are increasingly spread over the globe. Our target groups are connected inter-country and inter-platform. Local topics reach global attention and need to be coordinated respectively. We can no longer afford that parts of our organization do not know what happens elsewhere. This applies not only to Corporate Communications, but also nearby units such as HR, marketing and customer service.

The perfect generalized organization of Corporate Communications is not found. It also will never be, as Corporate Communications is company-specific, due to different target groups and the variance of nearby organizational units. This is probably also the reason for the variety of objectives. Our companies implement different organizational structures: channel-oriented, topic-oriented, business-oriented with various outsourcing approaches. Necessary alignment of team members across the reporting line is more or less institutionalized, e.g. in a Newsroom or another platform.

The enterprise social network and other collaboration tools complement the organization with time- and location-independent cooperation possibilities. Standardized processes are automated to be more efficient. This automation also includes the conversation with people, as seen in the current rise of bots. Here, we are only at the beginning of the development.

As there is no organizational blueprint and automation gets better every day, the ideal mix of hierarchy, alignment platforms, standardized processes and self-organizing networks needs to be actively optimized. In addition to a general willingness to change this requires employees with new skills: monitoring technical trends, being able to analyze requirements and design organizations, and to master project and change management.

2. Quantified Communications

The recipients of our communication, our users, generate an incredible amounts of usage data. We are able to evaluate this data with increasingly sophisticated analysis tools. Based on Google search behavior or on Twitter posts, we are for example able to identify trends in communication activities. They allow us to create highly relevant content that is more frequently consumed. These tools also provide us with an early warning system for potential crises.

Usage data have another impact on communications. Thanks to them, we come very close to a real effect measurement of individual communication activities. Through standardized measurement and evaluation we are able to identify dependencies and to understand patterns. This allows us to predict the effect of future communication activities. Being able to predict outcomes, the argumentation with internal sponsors can be lifted to another level.

Also this trend requires new interdisciplinary skills between data analysis, company-specific knowledge and communication planning.

3. Paid and Earned Communications

For quite a long time, we have established own digital channels (Owned Media) in the web and social media space. Thus, we have clearly moved closer to our users and know better how we can reach them. We adapt our content to the reduced attention span. This also requires that we obtain an “outside in” view when write our content to fit into the everyday reality of the target group. What sounds as easy as logically is a challenge in real life: Topics become increasingly complex and internal coordination partners increasingly specialized.

Additionally, our owned channels are less and less important for our users. Opinions of peers as well as multipliers in the field of interests (Influencers) become increasingly important. Beside journalists, our communication team needs to deal also with the influencers of their target groups. It is necessary to work with them on their messages in business topics (Earned Media). These influencers need to be identified first. Then a cooperation needs to be established. Facebook, LinkedIn et al. require advertisement spending to increase reach or specifically address interesting profiles (Paid Media).

Another set of needed skills get revealed, such as influencers identification and their management, target group analysis and design of online advertising and last but not least the efficient management of advertising budgets.

Conclusion

The digitalization of Corporate Communications is a long-term task, requiring a new set of skills and effecting each communicator. The future viability of our communication units ultimately depend on how quickly the organization is able to learn and to adapt to own insights.

But how to start such a change journey in the heterogeneous mixtures of different objectives, personal skills and last not least anxiety about the future concretely? ... more in the next article.