Changeworksblog.com

EVERY ONE of today’s major industries had to emerge and evolve.  However, some have stopped growing.  Others have the shadow of decline looming menacingly.  Wherever growth is threatened, slowed or stopped it is not because the market is saturated.  Probably, it is because there has been a failure in customer relations and understanding: failure from the top.

   It is nigh on impossible to select a single major business category of today that did not go through a burgeoning era of being a so-called growth industry.  In each case, its assumed strength was attributed to apparently unchallenged superiority, with, it seemed, no feasible alternative available.  Yet one after another of such celebrated industries have retreated into decline.  More will follow, ad infinitum.

   In fact, there is no such thing as a growth industry.  Those that assume themselves to be riding an automatic growth stallion invariably fall off.  The history of the dying and dead shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay.  It shows a disregard, or ignorance, of the need to mount markets and hold on tightly through innovation, change, choice and captured customer loyalty.

   Management, reaching out, must provide the customer-creating drive and customer-retention added value.  It must push this tightly focused awareness and action into every nook and cranny, exciting and stimulating colleagues each step of the way, rather than running a ‘bandwagon’ business.

   The organisation must think of itself not as one which produces goods or services, but as a conduit for developing customers – and doing those things that will make people want to continue to buy, remembering the fickleness in every marketplace.  Relationship management is all about making it easy for customers to stay, difficult to go.  The whole operation, top to bottom and back to the top, must be enthusiastically aware of the corporate style, direction, objectives, plus the needs of existing and potential customers.  If they do not know where they are going, they will never find the road to take them there. 

   Even with attitude and aptitude in place, there are dangers.  It is too easy to become obsessively responsive to fleeting customer whims and media-whipped fads; so often, there is a lack of risk-reduction market research and attitudinal surveying; sometimes, the back-office support provides insufficient ammunition for the front line troops; and within service industries in particular, there can be a tendency to reach ahead of the market, making offerings that are too complex or over sophisticated, trying to sell electronic shovels before people are familiar with using spades.

   Little in business is straightforward.  But to grow and sustain growth, managements must turn around to face their customers. 

   Professional marketing communications are crucial.  And yet saying so won’t make it so.  Products and services are selected by purchasers’ overall perceptions of the supplier, not merely by clever headlines, compelling imagery or high-sounding mission statements.  Successful marketing puts customers’ needs at the centre of every stage, every process, every activity of the business machine and its output – then presents to the outside world with unified, clear and consistent messages designed to persuade customers that they will be the beneficiaries.  (Out of sight is out of mind, is out of business.)

   This requires a totally integrated and rigorously implemented all-company approach, explained via skilled communications.  Nothing less will work.

OF COURSE you could have written that.  Everyone in business is expert at stringing words together on screen and paper, or so they think, if only they could find the time.  They know they can’t design the cover for the company’s sales brochure, update the logo, or build a new website.  These are mystical, creative vocations best left to experts.  But: writing?  Anybody can do that.

   Writing is the most undervalued of all communications skills.  It is the one to which least attention is paid – yet it is the most important.

   Believe it or not, professional writers have been trained.  Yes, they have latent talent.  In the case of yours truly, an English graduate, the preparation was in the hard-knocks arena of Fleet Street and then as a copywriter in exacting advertising agencies.  The process in the latter role would be to take a brief, research the subject and its objectives, come up with a string of headlines, narrow them down and then write the body copy.  The agency demand was for compression, precision, clarity, simplicity, rhythm and appropriate corporate style – grammatically potent, although not necessarily purist.

   This is starkly different from the writing that emerges from general business.  “I’d write it myself, but I’m far too busy,” and “Surely we have someone in-house who can write this, instead of paying for it?” are familiar-sounding remarks.  Undoubtedly, business managers spend chunks of their working days assembling words in the form of memos, reports and letters.  Secretly, they are likely to be proud of their prose and would be starkly horrified at any suggestion that their output might be written badly.  Nonetheless, to the professional eye, it is usually poor in terms of the assemblage of ideas and worse still in clarity of expression.

   Facets of writing professionally include being able to absorb – and to question – a brief, to define the most appropriate communications strategy, to create the concept, then to execute it in a tone which is compelling, precise, economical and true to the client’s corporate culture. 

   Always, the writer must transpose into the position of his or her readers, and to seem to be speaking their language.  Effective writing concentrates on those who buy the product or service, not those who make or sell it.

   This applies whether the writer is working on a total communications package or a single item.  Most certainly, it is not a task for part-timers, nor for those whose heads are filled with a plethora of other concerns.  It is not a job for the great untrained.

   You will not get through to an audience that is bored or restless.  Corporate communications programmes will never work at full power, nor deliver value for money, unless they are implemented by craftspeople who understand your corporate objectives and can help achieve them for you through the use of energetic, clear and digestible language.  Communications are not only about pretty pictures.

Part Three – Setting up your video shoot:

With a rapid increase in the popularity of online video, how can you get your message heard above all others?

Part three of this blog series, offers useful tips on how to shoot your video so that it looks and sounds more professional. There is an extensive amount of production tips and advice out there. I am highlighting just some of the main ‘tips and tricks’ to give you an overview of the broad spectrum.

With the advances in mobile phones and digital cameras, video making has become widely accessible. Anyone can pick up a camera, shoot some footage, string it together using a basic video editing software, but the finished result (more likely than not) will not utilise the professionalism needed to make a marketing video stand out.

Setting up your shoot:

• Steadiness Techniques: Get as close to your subject as you can without causing them distress. This will enable you to work at the wider angle end of your lens thus avoiding the instability caused when working on full zoom. However, avoid full wide angle as this is likely to distort your subject.

• Shot Sizes and Angles: When setting up your shot, keep in mind which shots will be edited together; two images shot from the same angle with the same sized subject, will cause a problem with visual continuity.

• Lighting: Video recording systems tend to have a weakness in their inability to cope with contrast and backlighting. A good test to apply for all shooting situations is the “squint test”. Screw your eyes up until they are just slits and you can just about see the subject. Look into the shadow areas. If you can still see detail in the shadow areas then all is OK. If not, you can use reflectors to reflect light back into the shadow areas.

• Sound: Get the microphone as close to the subject as possible. This could entail moving the camera closer to the subject. If this becomes a problem, look to using external microphones that can plug into your camera mic socket and monitor the sound with headphones.

• White balance: To get a more accurate white balance, best way to do this is to set your camera’s white balance to a manual setting. You can then place a white card/board in front of the camera, zoom in so it fills the viewfinder and press the white balance button to adjust the colour cast of the light.

Viral ChangeTM: Leadership zen?

Continuing my series on Viral ChangeTM, I wanted to consider the role of leadership in the process of such a cultural change programme.

The Leadership Paradigm
Firstly we need to unpick our paradigms of leadership. When you hear the word – leadership –what immediately comes into your mind? What do you see, hear or feel?  For most of us, if we are honest, we see person(s) in some position of authority who are directing, controlling and guiding the organisation. If we are Gen-Xers rather than baby-boomers (and I do recognise that I am guilty of generalising here) we perhaps see these people as ‘enablers’ too.

So what is leadership? It is a word that has become a generalisation or rather, a nominalisation. This means that what is actually a process word, which implies movement and doing, has been turned into a fixed form of a noun. This is a lazy way for our brains to give a label to what is actually a complex process.  But in so doing, our language forms our reality and this means that we over simplify and miss the deeper meaning of ‘leadership’ or rather the process of leading.

Who’s the Leader?

How many of those lucky people designated as ‘leaders’ are now rallying for more example of leadership from the ranks? How many claim that ‘everyone is a leader’. Yet as Mike Cook says in his recent blog post; how many of them actually mean that they want to see more ‘do as I want you to-ship’.

Now, you already know that Viral ChangeTM is not linear, mechanistic, top down change but organic and spread through peer to peer networks. Of course, different challenges and contexts require different processes for leading but at its very heart leadership is done through example: being the change you want to see (to quote Gandhi). And, as Warren Bennis says “Letting the self emerge is the essential task of leaders”.

Do you notice two key words here:
• Being
And
• Letting (or allowing)

How many of us do you think truly understand, yet alone embody, the concept of leadership as ‘being’ as opposed to ‘doing’ and ‘allowing’ rather than ‘directing/controlling’?

And this is exactly why Viral ChangeTM is the process of leadership in action! And it is also why many leaders are actually VERY uncomfortable with the whole idea of Viral ChangeTM and certainly what presents itself as the main challenge for leaders undertaking a Viral ChangeTM project.

The true leaders in Viral ChangeTM are the employees ‘chosen’ to be the change catalysts. As leaders they need to be ‘allowed’ to influence change in their peer networks, to challenge the status quo and to rally action. Essentially they become the change that you want to see in your organisation.

So what do the ‘traditional’ leadership (senior management, CEO etc)have to do to ‘allow’ this to happen:

• They need to live and breathe the non-negotiable behaviours – they are examplars and it will all flounder if they don’t ‘walk the talk’
•  They need to learn to feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable 
•  They need to put mechanisms in place to allow the new leaders – certainly at first this means overt support mechanisms to nurture and support the change catalysts
•  They need to be seen to be supporting them
•  They need to proactively reap the fruits of the change that the new leaders achieve – for example have ways of solidifying and reinforcing new processes and ideas

In short, they need to let go and notice how, in such letting go, how change is allowed to happen!

Further reading
1. HBR, How Gen X Leads: http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2009/12/how-gen-x-leads.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HarvardBusiness.org%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Other posts you might enjoy:

• Viral Change means letting go
• How to implement Viral Change TM
• Interview with Dr Leandro Herrero             about Viral Change TM
• Cultural Change is behavioural change
• When it’s not working – go Viral ChangeTM

Many organisations are unsure about whether online social media is an appropriate way for them to build their brand. As I mentioned in my previous blog, social media is not right for every brand and finding the right type of social media is critical to developing your brand successfully.  If you’re interested in developing your brand using interactive online ‘conversations’, then social media is right for you.

There are many benefits for using social media to develop brands online:

1. Low cost – Social media marketing is very appealing to organisations due to its low cost investment. The majority of social media sites are free to join so it only costs your time to build your brand effectively online.
2. Wide audience – Social media sites can reach a large audience, especially the major sites such as Facebook.  Social media is increasingly being used, with the majority of internet users becoming a member of a social media site. For example, Facebook now has over 200,000,000 active users (http://thefuturebuzz.com/2009/01/12/social-media-web-20-internet-numbers-stats/). Social media sites used to be associated with the student community but it has now attracted a wide range of ages with different demographics. Niche social media sites have a huge potential due to their diverse audience.
3. Loyalty – Building a strong brand community online is likely to encourage brand loyalty among members due to the relationship building advantage. Consumers often affiliate with the brand and become part of the brand so they are more likely to trust the brand and recommend the brand to others.
4. Increased traffic – By developing online relationships with social media users, they are more likely to visit your website and increase the traffic to your website.
5. Immediate – Social media has the ability to share information almost instantly so consumers are always up to date with the latest news. Social media can help monitor any negative comments online, such as by using Google Alerts, in order to quickly respond and avoid the brand’s reputation from being tarnished. Social media helps to manage the reputation of your brand online to make sure the desired image is being created.
6. Increased awareness – Due to the increased popularity and reach of social media, consumers are increasingly becoming aware of brands and are using social media as an alternative to find out more about your brand compared to traditional methods.
7. Market Research – Social media can be used as a great way for collecting market research due to its potential to monitor a large audience in one place.