Is it worth the effort of 100 publications about a service aimed at SMEs if none of them is published in the media that SMEs read? Wouldn’t it be better to have an exclusive interview in the media most read by SMEs? Going back to the basics that every corporate communicator must always keep in mind is mandatory: our work must contribute to the company’s objectives.
The art of managing communication
The art of managing communication oscillates between when to speak and when to remain silent, but always thinking about what our organization needs and from whom it needs it. In other words, one communicates because it contributes to an objective, otherwise the chatter is just pure noise. In a book from more than twenty years ago about a conference in Lima, Peru, the Spanish writer Rosa Montero recalled an Arab proverb: “never say anything that is not more beautiful than silence”. I dare to paraphrase it in a crude way -and without beauty- for the profession: “Never communicate anything that is not more beautiful than achieving an objective”. The basis of a communication plan starts with a purpose to aim at: the necessary what for? Setting the communication machine in motion without objectives is as absurd as hunting butterflies at night.
Defining objectives
To define the objective, we must draw on two inputs: the business needs and the key audiences we want to influence in order to contribute to those needs. Banks, employees, authorities, competitors, opinion leaders, customers or the stock market, among others, the relevance of each audience for an organization changes over time and in line with what the company is looking for: to be attractive for investment, to improve the working environment or to achieve greater visibility among certain customers, and so on and so forth. After identifying our stakeholders and knowing what we want to achieve with each one, we move on to the content they should receive, either to improve the interest of investors, promote a specific work culture or pave the way for a new solution or product to be launched, among other cases. We close with the most tactical part, where we define channels, spokespersons and communication methods. The creative temptation seduces us to start with this section, a crass mistake that leads us to be only narrators of isolated micro-stories and not scriptwriters of a feature film with a purpose.
I repeat: communication must always have a purpose. It is not about talking for the sake of talking. Sometimes, those of us who work in corporate communications receive requests to manage an interview on a certain page of the newspaper for no real reason, or that something that in reality would be better published in a specialized media, aimed at a very specific segment of readers, should be published in all the media. Therefore, he often responds to these requests with a question I keep coming back to: what for? The team at Ideo, a design consultancy involved in the creation of Apple’s first mouse, proposes that to get to the real purpose or background of something you have to ask why up to five times. According to their theory -which I have tested on more than one occasion- the five questions should be enough to do a mining drilling job and thus find the real reason for embarking on something. In the case of corporate communication, if the fifth answer does not relate to a goal that contributes to the business, silence is more beautiful.
