The Golden Rolodex Meets the Golden Algorithm - 8 Things for Communications Pros to Consider

Relationships – The Golden Rolodex, back in the day, akin to Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket. If you have it, you’re in and successful. That’s what is nostalgically referred to as the good old days. If communicators are doing their jobs the exact same way as they did five years ago, all of us are literally decades behind. Today, communicators still need relationships, but in order to be successful, we need to have both the Golden Rolodex and the Golden Algorithm. Here are 8 things to consider on the subject.

·      Investor Relations: When it comes to protecting your company, it’s not enough to have a bulletproof anti-raid strategy, coordinated with a mammoth Wall Street firm, on the shelf-poised and ready. These plans often identified a number of the most likely potential activists, allowing you to follow their rhetoric in the traditional media, keeping tabs on changes or upticks. Raiders have become much more sophisticated and companies and communicators must keep up.  Yes, you need to keep those relationships with the Wall Street firms, but those aren’t the only relationships you must have to be successful. Today, you also need the services of a “cyber sleuthing” firm on the West Coast, who can tell you which top activists, and their agents, are pinging your website, creating interesting cookies and waiting to strike, to serve as a key line of defense. 

·      Employee Communications: The goal is still to change hearts and minds and create engagement leading to satisfaction and top performance. The question is: how could it have worked in the past without the current brain mapping data making it possible for you to feed content in a way that changes behavior? Today, we have so much information on how the human brain processes information and how it may or may not impact changes in behavior that it is frightening. Perhaps efforts of the past resulted in success, but now we know exactly how to do it, not necessarily through our relationships with the people being influenced, but through the science of influence. 

·      Public Relations: The Washington Post has a bot that files over 1,000 stories a year. This is one “journalist” it’s impossible to old school pitch because no one can pick up the phone and call a machine.  It’s also impossible to chat a bot through a request for a correction. To ensure success, self-created content must be pristine, and key messages must be, at a minimum, search engine optimized, meaning the algorithm must be such that it creates a relationship with artificial intelligence. 

·      Government Relations/Crisis Communications: In years’ past, this would have been two separate line items. Between polarization, placation and the political rhetoric often enabled by social media, it’s not that the rules have changed, it seems that today, there aren’t any rules. The basics still apply: don’t speculate, pause (briefly) before responding and own the narrative. However, the channels and the rhetoric have changed, becoming so varied and extreme that there are days that feel like it’s impossible to prepare and drill for everything.  However, there is no substitute for preparation. Today, it’s best to have a crisis plan, most likely resembling a doorstop, containing solutions to the most obtuse possible scenarios, allowing you to mobilize relationships with key stakeholders faster and unlike ever before so that no one else is in a position to own the narrative. 

·      Activism: The sit in has made it to the proxy. While at Aflac, the duck has a right wing and a left wing, and almost everyone can agree that donating over $130 million to the research and treatment of pediatric cancer is a good thing, some companies are being forced into investor votes that can deeply change the way business is done. Amazon is a great example. Just view their current proxy. Their shareholders are being asked to vote on everything from food waste to climate change topics to the impact of government use of certain technologies. Such requests, if adopted, undoubtedly will have a financial impact on returns. How you use data to target and influence activists through relationships before matters make it to the proxy can have a substantial impact on your businesses’ bottom line.

·      Brand: Markets constantly change as do consumer and stakeholder expectations. All are more complex than ever before. It’s no longer about the 4 Ps of Marketing – product, placement, price and promotion; it’s all about the 4 Es – environment, experience, exchange and engagement.  The counterintuitive message in all of this is that in this new world of communications: it’s not enough to create an environment that drives engagement through an experience leading to an exchange. In order to facilitate authentic relationships, in many cases it must be done through means that are artificial (intelligence) and augmented (reality).

·      The Surveillance Economy: Otherwise known as cyberstalking at its most refined. This reflects one of the creepiest versions of relationship building there is and the smallest section of this article because it’s something everyone is familiar with, so get ready for that article of clothing accidentally clicked on a random social site to appear on every page viewed for the next 7-10 days, or however long it takes the unsuspecting target to realize that resistance is futile and purchase is inevitable.

·      CSR to ESG: This reflects a seismic shift in the profession going forward. Its structure and material consequences will have an incredible impact, perhaps not as much as technology, but for public companies, a close second. The days of doing good for the sake of doing good, or in some cases for the sake of public relations, are over.  Corporate Social Responsibility isn’t enough anymore. Cultures of sustainable business decision making based on rigorous reporting of environmental, social and governance activities are the future of determining everything from how capital is raised to how investors place their bets, which has interesting implications for the quarterly grind and long term success. Stakeholders vote with their wallets and want to invest in sustainable businesses that develop, define, measure and report on material matters beyond far money and representing the most aligned relationships of all.  

It’s critical to gain share of wallet, voice and market, but in spite of technology, or perhaps because of it, gaining share of heart is still an imperative. How data and technology play into the relationship debate is evolving and it’s all subject to discussion. What do you think?