Don’t shoot the messenger
I’ll never forget a call I once took from a product group at the company I worked for.
“We need a press release,” they said. “We need to drum up some client leads.”
“Great,” I said. “What news do you have to announce?”
“Oh, we don’t have anything new – we just need the exposure.”
This is an extreme case, but it’s not an uncommon thought process. So many companies regard their corporate communications function as a panacea for problems with strategy, products or reputational challenges. The old saying, ‘you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’, is very true of communications: if there’s a problem somewhere, communications alone can’t turn it around.
“So what’s the point of a comms department?” you may reasonably want to know. It’s a question many of us will be familiar with, in companies where comms is a cost centre whose contribution to the bottom line is difficult to see.
Leaving aside the need to measure and analyse our impact, the answer is something quite nuanced: a good, professional comms team that is able to advise on when and how to communicate good news and oversee responses to bad news will, over time, ensure the company’s reputation is built on a consistent cadence and tone in its public statements.
Bringing the comms people in early when there’s news to be managed is essential to presenting the best overall image of the company – and to getting the best out of your hardworking and expert comms team. And very often, it’s the exercise of drafting the press release (or its social media equivalent) that focuses stakeholders on what they really want to say.
It’s not unknown for the final details of a product or service to be decided when the media relations team start setting it out in unambiguous black-and-white on the page. And when it comes to publicising agreements between separate organisations, the sign-off process for the public announcement is often where the finer points are negotiated.
The comms team is experienced at assimilating complicated information and rendering it into easily understood language – but they are more than mere wordsmiths. Timing, positioning and channel mix all fall within their purview, and when combined into a comprehensive strategy, can ensure the optimal outcome for the resulting coverage.
Every now and then, a colleague in a business area who needed me to ‘fix’ some negative coverage, or a leak of strategic information, would tell me that they couldn’t read me into the issue any earlier because they had to preserve confidentiality. I had to reassure them that there’s no benefit to the comms team in letting the news slip prematurely – we work for the company and its information is our stock in trade. We want to leverage it to make our employer look good – so we aren’t likely to be the leakers.
Ultimately, if you come to your comms colleagues when the genie’s out of the bottle, there’s very little they can do to put it back. We’re best at helping you arrive at a strategic approach to communicating the news and executing on that strategy; fixing bad situations after the fact requires skills few mortals possess.
