5 learnings from StratComm
StratComm turned out to be a wonderful opportunity for corp comm and PR professionals to mingle, share learnings and talk shop. The two-day event, held earlier this month at Holiday Inn Mumbai, was organised by Inventicon Business Intelligence. StratComm can be summed up in one line – great insights, great networking, great bunch of people.
Here are 5 observations from the conference.
THE WORLD OF CORP COMM IS GOING DIGITAL
Most corp comm heads are exploring all the nuances of communicating in a digital world – digital PR releases, visual content, targeted social media platforms, corporate blogs, etc. which implies a huge shift away from plain text press releases to rich media (hashtags and all), videos, and phygital and experiential campaigns. We live in interesting times!
Employee communication is a different ball game
All communication should ideally be a two-way engagement, but this holds especially true in the case of employee engagement. Here the metrics for measuring success in communication are completely HR-related — not page views, impressions or likes, but employee satisfaction scores and attrition rates. It’s a different ball game altogether and the only rule is ‘Get creative to keep employees happy’!
CORPORATE BRAND REPUTATION CALLS FOR LATERAL THINKING
The toughest challenge for a corp comm professional is to rebuild a corporate brand that has had bad press. StratComm gave us two case studies – in one, the entire brand identity was changed and a new story crafted to tell the company story; in another, the company leadership was slowly repositioned as thought leaders and influencers in the media.
M&A communication needs an invisibility cloak
It’s the most secretive and confidential of communication tasks, with not more than a handful of people in the know about an impending merger. Yet, there’s a great deal of crucial messaging that needs to be crafted and told, in a precise sequence of events, to a selected set of audiences. It’s a huge responsibility for a corp comm person and typically, the burden falls on only one set of shoulders.
What’s common to all communication – story-telling!
StratComm gave us great insights shared by some of the top professionals in the industry today – the cases included PepsiCo, Godrej, Amazon, Vodafone, Dell, PwC, Vedanta, and many more. The messages were many, but there was one common thread that ran through the conference – communication is about engaging with the audience and this is done best by great story-telling!