IS COMMUNICATIONS ABOUT TELLING THE TRUTH

Every once in a while I get to be part of an interview where no amount of preparation makes you anticipate the direction the questioning will take. One which require rapid fire thinking all under the glare of camera lights and in front of a prime time morning audience. Last week, during a round of television appearances for the International Association of Business Communicators Trinidad and Tobago (IABC T& T), I had one such interview. Both Sue Barrat and I (Sue is a Communication lecturer at UWI) had gone on the set of Morning Edition to talk about IABC T&T and an upcoming seminar that both our organisations were co-hosting. Morgan Job, the gifted intellectual, who spouts both poetry and theory in the same breath, was the host and as we should have expected immediately put us in the firing line. "How can communicators speak the truth when truth is at best subjective ," pressed Job, "and what happens to the truth when the news you have to communicate is bad ?

See what I mean about thinking on your feet.

After the interview, we were told our answers shot like a dart to the heart of the matter but it was clear as IABC T&T members criss-crossed the various television shows that the role of communications is often misunderstood. It was therefore important to get beyond the 30 second sound-bite.

In the corporate world, when we talk about communications we really mean 'persuasion.' For example, in internal communications when we say we want to communicate to employees, what we mean is that we want to convince employees of something: that management knows what it's doing, that employees should be doing X or Y, that the new benefits package isn't really worse than the old one, that the share prices will rise again. We communicate in order to induce people to change their attitudes and, ultimately, their behavior. But here is the conundrum. Imparting information is just one part of the process. But does it motivate employees to change their behaviour? No.

Evangelising the message

In my communications training a critical success factor in the learning process is to get participants to actively engage in what is being taught. For instance, at a recent training session on press release writing I had my class comb the newspapers for different kinds of releases and then dissect them. I had them think like an editor and then give me three different ways to get just one message out. This kind engagement caused one seasoned participant to exclaim that for the first time in her 15-year career she was seeing message dissemination in a fresh and new way.

When comunicating with employees, it is the same. Just thinking about an issue can be a form of active engagement that can lead to significant, long-lasting attitude change as long as the individual is given sufficient time to reflect and a framework to guide his thinking in the desired direction. As I told Morgan Job, communications is about content and context.
That framework can be built through a variety of mediums and the best corporate communicators in the business know that the messenger is as critical as the message. Anna-Maria Garcia Brooks, GM of Marketing Communications at Republic Bank, drove this point home when she addressed members of the International Association of Business T&T. According Garcia-Brooks, sometimes the message is dismissed simply because of who is communicating it.
In such a case, evangelising the mesage through varied sources can work. Communicators can help a critical mass of influencers persuade themselves of the rightness of a particular position that needs to be communicated and then let the influencers pass that message on to the mass of people. The communicator's job would be to build strong relationships with the influencers and provide a framework the majority can use to reflect on and assimilate the new ideas.
Influencers can spread the message through informal chats, face to face meeting, conversations around the cooler. They can be trainers or presenters, the employee who staff looks up to. They can be visible and vocal spokespeople in staff meetings. Their role is to target the so-called "early majority," the third of the organisation who, while not leaders, are willing to pick up on new ideas championed by influencers.

A second strategy would be to use the appropriate collateral. Just be careful that the collateral never becomes the strategy and is viewed for the purpose its name suggests i.e. it should serve as the support for the message. The brochures, magazines, envelope stuffers etc. that we spend so much time on writing, designing and printing is valuable because they all brand the message, through color, design, language, and content, in a way that associates it with positive feelings and demonstrates its consistency with the organisation's mission. Still, the problem of course lies with the engagement. People need to interact with the message in the collateral so it should be balanced by the other techniques.

And what about the message?

I am not sure how I answered Morgan Job before the live cameras but whatever I said I hope I got across my belief that all messages no matter if they communicated face-to-face or through another source, they need to have one thing in common. They need to be credible i.e. consistent with the organisation's behavior. Do not say the pension policy is better than the previous one if it is not. Instead communicate the benefits of it and state how you will work on correcting any perceived flaws. Give a time frame.

Communications is not spin. People are not stupid and they know when what you say does not match how you act. It is at that point you can lose trust.

Second, the message must be clear. Recently, at global meeting of business communicators in San Diego when the Association's new tagline was unveiled the VP of IABC T&T, Maria Mc Millan, wisely asked if anyone from the brand development team translated the new tagine into different languages to make sure that the meaning was the same for commnicators in France, Thailand and Nigeria. It was a critical point. Don't make the mistake of believing that the meaning of words is the same for everyone or that a sentence that appears absolutely unambiguous to you will be understood the same way by everyone in your audience.
Finally whatever message that we as communicators send out, it cannot stand alone. To be conducive to change the corporate culture must be one in which people are rewarded for communicating, even when the message they deliver may be unwelcome. " As marketing communicaons professionals, whether we function at executive level or not, we must be the champion and the voice of stakeholders and ensure that their needs are understood and met, and that the right decisions are made -consistently," declared Garcia -Brooks.

So you see Mr. Job, good comunication is about truth telling.

IABC Trinidad and Tobago takes communications centre stage

The Trinidad and Tobago Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators will host the breakfast meeting, Taking communications centre stage: Forging new paradigms for the profession on March 29, 2007 from 7.00 a.m. to 9.30 a.m. at the Tourism Development Company, which is located at Maritime Plaza, Barataria (Trinidad).

Taking communications from the periphery to the inner circle of decision-making is a huge achievement. Ask Anna-Maria Garcia-Brooks, General Manager – Group Marketing and Communications at Republic Bank Limited, who has made the envied step from middle management to executive management. As one of the event’s feature speakers, Garcia-Brooks will discuss how communicators can give their function that quantum leap. Joining her for this discussion will be Dr Godfrey Steele, academic pioneer and lecturer at the University of the West Indies (UWI), who successfully established UWI’s bachelor’s in communications programme, and is responsible for training future communicators.

Book your space, and learn:
· how to become more visible
· techniques to make the communication discipline more strategic
· how to make communications matter to your CEO/ senior executives
· the applicability of academia to practice
· intellectual foundations for communications.
·
The attendance fee for IABC Members is TT$300, and TT$350 for non-members. To register, call Jane Sadaphal at 621-3830 or email iabctt@gmail.com.

Cultivating the Creative Class. Dismissing those who think outside the box may be the worst thing you can do for your company. Judette Coward-Puglisi

Being creative on demand is dammed work. It can cause you to over eat or not eat at all. It can churn your stomach in knots and cause you to have sleepless nights. Still, any member of the creative class worth his i Pod will tell you that the pay off beats the price. It comes in the brainstorming session (preferably over a large pizza with everything on it) and it gets better still when the idea begins to take shape on paper. But best yet is when the idea flies, when that tiny nugget of information you had in your head one week or one year before adds significantly to your company's bottom line. The sense of satisfaction is sweeter than any frosted chocolate cake.

That's why fostering creativity in your organisation is critical. A unique business idea can come from anywhere: the business logic, the accounting process, the culture. But what it really boils down to is the people. Being different is the key. Creativity is about seeing things differently. Little happens in the innovation department when a group of fifty-something-year-old males from the same culture and background get together to make a decision about bringing a product to market. Chances are however, if you take that group and added a mix of cultures, gender, backgrounds and different way of thinking you will generate a plethora of ideas and a ton load of energy.

That's why firms need to hire and depend on those who can come up with unique ideas. The ones who are a little different. But this is where the trouble starts, because uniqueness and difference are often the preserve of people, who judged against the average corporate citizen, often seem a little strange. They break the rules. They question norms. They are prepared to take risks, sometimes leaving the organisation which entraps them to set up a company of their own. Does this serve the firm any good? My answer would be an emphatic no! Sameness is a direct route to nowhere. If we are all willing to follow conventions, to think like all the rest, we will see the same things, hear the same things, hire the same people and develop identical products and services. We will create a sea of normality and drown in it. In 2007, Sameness Inc. is bankrupt.

But cultivating the creative types takes a special leader who is willing to see things differently. Firstly, creative work is not automated, and definitely not linear. It stops and it starts. I remember 5 years ago at the E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year conference, one speaker said that one of his software developers after creating and bringing to market an innovative software would often disappear from the company for weeks on end, virtually unreachable by phone to a remote part of India, the country from which he came. The speaker expressed his frustration at first until he recognised his developer's weird habit was one stream of his company's immense wealth. After a while he thought that instead of working against his talent he'd work with him and proceeded to give him 6 weeks off after a particularly grueling period of innovation.

The fact is if you let creative types make the rules, within limits - you don't want utter confusion- if you allow them time for blue sky thinking, protect them from idea killers and add liberal doses of fun to your hopefully non-cubicle environment, and maybe pizza after long meetings, you'll be creating streams of revenues that may allow you to overlook personal idiosyncrasies.

So go ahead and cultivate the creative class. The alternative is nightmarish. A company doomed to produce ideas that everyone else has already seen.

Judette Coward-Puglisi is the managing director of Mango Media Caribbean

( www.mangomediacaribbean.com ), a strategic PR and brand development firm. She is the founder & current president of the International Association of Business Communicators, Trinidad & Tobago.

Stop the stories. Corporate communications is about serious measurement. Judette Coward-Puglisi

Check any corporate communications department in any part of the world and you will find that they all have one thing in common. They are led by some of the brightest, most enthusiastic professionals in the organisation. The trouble though is that at the seat of power, that cherry red, high-gloss mahogany table with a photograph of the organisation's founder smiling benignly over, the voice of communicators is either never heard or given the final 15 minutes on the agenda.

Responsibility may come from within. For decades, professionals have polished their skills, built their relationships and returned to school to add an impressive array of letters to their name. But while they have been honing the communications aspect of their craft, they have done so at the expense of their corporate business goals. It's the bottom line baby! And communicators have simply not positioned themselves to be measured against what really matters to the CEO: revenue and profit.

Just look at some of the tools practitioners use: press clip books chock full of the latest releases, ad equivalency rates and anecdotes. None of it measures the link between communications and the corporate business goals. Check out though the other senior managers. In the board room, finance, operations and sales executives walk the talk. Armed with the visualisation tools, intelligence, profit and loss statements, they stride into the board room prepared to defend every last dollar spent, and demonstrate how they add value. They walk out with increases in their budget.

Communication professionals need a similar set of cojones. Not possessing the metrics, not knowing how to link the value of communications to the business goals, and not knowing how your PR spend adds value simply does not cut it and does absolutely no service to the profession. According to writer Julie Mc Namara, writing in the International Association of Business Communicators publications, Communications World: "Measuring the effectiveness of PR is critical to moving PR from a tactical function to a strategic component of your company's plan for success. But the old ways of counting clips just aren't good enough to convince today's management executives that their investment in PR and overall communications is paying off."

So how do you begin to add value to the business discussion? Firstly, there is need for alignment. Business, no matter what the size, is concerned either about retaining or growing their customer base. Understanding how this is to be achieved is critical. Does your CEO want to grow business in the region by 20 per cent? Then that goal is to be your goal. Does he or she want to increase customer purchase of product X by 50 per cent? Then that goal is your goal. Does he or she want to generate web-based sales by 40 per cent? Then... well, you get the picture.

With clear business objectives in mind, you can build your communications plan with very specific strategies. For example, if your CEO wanted to increase Product X's sales in Jamaica by 40 per cent, you might develop a strategy of becoming better known and more visible among influential bloggers on the island who write about products within your category. Suppose you got 75 per cent of Jamaican bloggers (your target was 70 per cent) to mention your company's name and product X, and your sales team was able to meet its target directly because of these strategies, you can joyously claim your contribution to your company's success.

Of course measuring communications intelligence can go far beyond that. Visualisation and media intelligence tools from firms such as Factiva and Delahaye offer custom-configured research that perform impressive media monitoring services while offering comparative metrics across time, space and other variables. By efficiently monitoring communications programmes and media, and linking the results of these programmes to company objectives, corporate communications professionals become more valuable to their organisation.

However you decide to measure, forget the anecdotes about your success and apply the rigour. You'll find that the respect that you deserve is only one invitation to the inner circle away.

Judette Coward -Puglisi is the Managing Director of Mango Media Caribbean www.mangomediacaribbean.com, a firm that uses powerful metrics to measure the impact of corporate communications and public relations. She is the founder and president of the International Association of Business Communicators, Trinidad and Tobago.

Reputation management for independents

Craft your reputation and watch your business grow. Judette Coward Puglisi

Call yourself a free agent? Then you identify with a group of people who have shown their finger to the corporate world. You celebrate your freedom. You no longer respond to the whims of an unreasonable boss, the vicissitudes of corporate strategising and the politics around the water cooler. You can pack up your talent and take it elsewhere. You have choices. Or do you?

After 4 years of flying solo and 3 years of growing a successful strategic PR firm, I know all too well that freedom you seek can be constrained, not by an intemperate boss, but by things more ominous. Cuts in the corporate budget, a client’s revised strategy, a negative turn in the economy all serve to curtail growth. This, I know, can be terrifying because in the pursuit of freedom what you really crave is security. The thought is not at all oxymoronic, not when you consider that end-of-month financial commitments don’t ebb and flow. The question then is how do you create stability in your career as a free lancer which in itself is governed by an ability to move quickly and be flexible? I believe the answer lies in how you decide to carve your reputation.

Your free lance reputation is built the first day at work on the job, whether that space is in your bedroom, garage or well appointed office. It develops with every phone call you make, with every ally, and in every negotiation. Columnist Margaret Hefferman writing in the business magazine Fast Company Inc. says that, “every detail of every relationship combines to form one big reputation. Whether good or bad, each exchange you have at work, about work, says something about you. And while the business world may be a big place, your industry and your company are surprisingly parochial.”

The truth is through word of mouth, everyone knows whether the goods or services you sell are good, if you are reliable, if your fees are commensurate with your products and whether or not you deliver when you say you will.

“Reputation,” Shakespeare once said, “is the immediate jewel of your soul.” He was right. More important I have found it is the one thing, as a free lancer, that sticks with you and if negative can have an earthquake impact on your career. Consider the case of Michael, a free lance designer I started to work with when I started out on my own seven years ago. Michael was brilliant, one of those artistic types who you can hire by just looking at his portfolio. Sadly, I did just that and while his genius could never be questioned, Michael should never have struck out on his own. Lazy and defensive, he constantly missed deadlines and landed me in trouble with one of my clients because he failed to deliver a design that complimented a script. A background check on Michael revealed a past that was littered with similar behaviour, he had created a negative impression that would soon become a permanent part of his career.

As a free agent projects will come and go but clients will stay with you once you deliver; they will also spread the good news about you as your reputation for service builds up over time. Having never had the time for social networking a colleague, Jane, spent most of her free time not in bars or water holes but coming up with mind expanding programmes for her work in volunteer organisations. As a project leader her ideas were successfully executed and she developed a reputation for being a strong strategist with an uncanny ability to harness the energy of teams. 5 years of working at it consistently, she found that her ideas were more readily accepted and that she could easily get resources committed to her ideas from her group’s senior executives/ board members. Her reputation had made her job a whole lot easier.

Crafting your reputation requires some soul searching. You’ve got to understand your values and take stock of who you are now and what you’d like to stand for in the future. Don’t expect it to be easy. It requires honesty. There's no point trying to build up a reputation as a team player if you're a loner, or a brainstormer if you love tactical work. But when you can define what you'd like your reputation to be, you're effectively defining your career narrative as a free lancer. That will help you make choices. It will draw you the right staff and keep you focused on accepting the projects that are consistent with how you want to grow. More importantly, as you continue to build your good name you will see that no matter what the vagaries of business, clients will continue to work with you.

Judette Coward-Puglisi is the managing director of Mango Media Caribbean (www.mangomediacaribbean.com), a strategic PR and brand development firm. She is the founder & current president of the International Association of Business Communicators, Trinidad & Tobago

Judy large size pic

Is the information overload driving you crazy?

posted by Judette Coward-Puglisi, President of IABC T&T

It was a conscious choice not to become a "crackberrian." Among my friends that makes me an anomaly. I am aware of course, of the life advantages of the little black box, clutched in your hand in the same tenacious way a baby does an umbilical cord. The Blackberry keeps you connected. Switched-on. Clued-in. But, I swore a long time ago never to become one those people.

You know who they are. They are the ones who take their cell phone to church and put it on vibrate. They are your friends who are in a conversation with you, but, as you're obviously not holding their interest, they take the call from the phone that's ringing Rhianna's latest hit and continue to talk to whoever's on the other end. They are the people who are sitting in a restaurant and checking voice-mail every 15 minutes. They are the business persons who take another call during a face-to-face meeting with you. They are people who are not in the moment but always looking to see, "what's next" and "what else" should they be doing.

Most of my resistance to being constantly plugged in came after I took stock of my work day. When I get in at 5:00 am , I wade through 25 to 30 e-mail messages. I move onto voice-mail, which is limited, thankfully, to accepting only 2 messages since I last checked it. Afterwards, I check a handful of web sites, mail, and other paper-based notices from my assistants which also need my daily review. I do all this within a 2 hour time-frame, which would be perfect, if only for the fact that I have to repeat this process several times during the day, and also deal with a continuously ringing cell phone which is supposed to keep me in touch.

I am not alone. In a global survey of over 1,700 business communications professionals (conducted by the International Association of Business Communicators of which there is a T&T Chapter) an overwhelming majority of respondents (85%) said that e-mail overload was taking over their lives and having a negative effect on their productivity. The negative effect was even higher (93%) for users of Blackberry devices and other Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). 62% of respondents said they received too much e-mail, with 81 % saying that their e-mail was always left open, implying that they were continuously wired to a virtual mode of communication.

At some point, all the information from so many sources becomes too much to handle. For me, professionally being constantly connected in the workplace, while very useful, robbed me of the necessary silent time needed to reflect on my business, its current situation and where it was going. Personally, with a daily to-do-list a mile longer than Wendy Fitzwilliam's legs coupled with constant deadlines, it became easier and easier to move away from my centre and subscribe to the mistaken belief that busyness authenticated my presence in the world.

Of course there are many ways to take back control. Information filters can help with the volumes of data, screening out less-than-critical messages. Deleting your name from list servers is another way to limit the influx of e-mail. And sleeping in bed without the Blackberry on the pillow next to you (I swear a business associate told me he does this) will definitely be helpful.

But for me, the most important solution has been to continue the human, face -to -face connection with important relationships, whether business or personal. After all, these relationships are the very things that provide the energy in my life. I've found that you can never stray too far from what is really meaningful before losing connection with yourself, everybody else and the things that really matter. And if you've lost that, neither b-mobile nor the best Digicel hookup can bring it back.

Judette Coward Puglisi is the Managing Director of Mango Media Caribbean (www.mangomediacaribbean.com). She is the founder, and current President of the International Association of Business Communicators, Trinidad and Tobago .

Crime and its effect on brand T&T

posted by Judette Coward-Puglisis - President of IABC T&T

Just this morning at our staff briefing, I told Mango Media Caribbean's communications intern, Jane Sadaphal, that we should blog about the issue of taking crime off the front pages of the newspapers.

The issue was raised at the IABC T&T's first quarterly session, "Communicators meet the Business Press", and was in direct response to the Tourism Development Company's (TDC) corporate communications manager, Nicole Du Boulet, who said that the local newspapers' preoccupation with crime was having a negative impact on the Trinidad and Tobago brand and the country's tourism product.

I posed the question to Nadine Johnson, Marketing Specialist at TDC, whether visitors' arrival to T&T is affected when crime is covered on the front pages of the local print media, and how does the TDC measure the value of Brand T&T in relation to the amount of coverage crime gets.

In the interim, Karel Mc Intosh, a Caribbean PR researcher posted this response to my query about whether TDC's plea was in fact a request for the media to censor what was placed on their front pages of their newspapers.

"I understand the challenges facing practitioners in the tourism industry, especially since crime is always on or in the country's media houses' headlines. However, the journalists are reporting actual events. Yes, it might be more tourism friendly to not have those stories published. However, the reporters are doing their jobs. Some may argue that crime occurs everyday and has been going on for a quite a while. That's true, but one must also consider the fact that journalists are also historians in a sense, and right now they're documenting a dark period in the country's social history."

(Read Mc Intosh's other insightful comments on www.caribbeanpr.blogspot.com)

Maria Rivas Mc Millan, Executive Vice President of IABC T&T, is in agreement with curtailing the amount of coverage crime gets.

She referred to the dumbing down (my words and not hers) of our population. According to Mc. Millan, the regular diet that Trinbogonians are being fed about criminal activities means that it is all we ever talk about i.e. who killed who, who comitted suicide, who drank poison and the bandit that entered the house and shot the man etc. etc. "We are becoming a country of illiterates."

I am not sure whether we can point accusatory, scrooge like fingers at the media and accuse their coverage as a cause of illiteracy but I think the comments from this fantastically experienced corporate communicator points to the issue of balance i.e. why is crime constantly on our front pages.


Is the media truly being a mirror, reflecting what is going on in society or is the amount of crime coverage a reflection of the internal working of the local newsrooms. Let's face it. Crime is the easiest kind of story to cover and in the ever revolving doors that comprise the various newsrooms, there are too few experienced reporters and journalists who are willing, or even able to do the more in depth kind of new gathering or investigation that leads to other kinds of lead stories.

Journalist Sandra Chouthi raised an important point at IABC T&T's panel discussion. According to the Guardian associate business editor, citizens need to hold legislators accountable. Are government policies on crime working? Obviously not. And citizens can assess only when they are informed.

Media Theory 101 states that citizens have outcome preferences. Outcome preferences are attitudes about the desirability of specific ends, such as safe communities, clean air or even protection from foreign interests deemed undesirable. And their preference can only be shaped through several sources, a primary one being the media. In any given year these outcomes preferences are critical, but in an election year, even more so.

Should crime be featured less on the front pages of the Newsday, Guardian and the Express? And how did the savvy, experienced editors in Jamaica and Barbados agree to decrease crime reporting on their newspapers' lead pages?

As President of IABC T&T I am determined to get some concrete answers.

Building the bridge between media and communicators

Judette Coward-Puglisi (IABC T&T President)

Fourty-four corporate communicators met with some of the country's most senior journalists today (December 7). It was the IABC T&T's first meeting with its external public and consequently a really critical one. Here's my take on some of the issues discussed. When corporate communications is done properly, an item of information is disseminated to media gatekeepers, who then decide to report the information either directly or indirectly. Reportage is done, research is accumulated, interviews are performed. Eventually the information item becomes a media report, and it is at that moment that the public relations professional can no longer control it entirely.

Media outlets - particularly the most desirable, most credible ones - operate autonomously, reporting the information they deem necessary or interesting and excluding all else. Time constraints, space limitations, and the realities of economics play as prominent a role in the decision-making process as the newsworthiness of the information being considered.

I was particularly intrigued by the comments form the tourism team who asked why crime was finding its way so frequently on the front pages of the country's newspapers. The argument being that when it does, it has a direct, negative impact on the country's brand.

IABC Seminar - Communicators meet the Business Press

On Thursday December 7, the International Association of Business Communicators Trinidad and Tobago Chapter will host the seminar - Communicators meet the Business Press - where business communicators will have the opportunity to meet editors from the print and broadcast media. The event will be hosted at Angostura House (Eastern Main Road, Laventille) from 7.30 am to 10.00 am.

In a moderated panel discussion, senior editors /journalists will speak on issues ranging from Alcoa and media ethics to forming a new relationship paradigm between communicators and journalists.

The panellists are:
1. Anthony Wilson – Business Editor and Acting Editor, Trinidad Guardian.
2. Sandra Chouthi – Associate Business Editor, Trinidad Guardian.
3. Julian Rogers – Media Consultant and Head of News, CNMG.
4. Nigel Cumberbatch – Business Editor, Trinidad Express.
5. Rory Rostant – Business Editor, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.

The panel will explore the following themes:
· Business Journalism – Can communicators become a source and still maintain integrity?
· Understanding the faces of Business Journalism and putting the paper to bed.
· Identity and Image: a journalist’s perception of a communicator.
· Shaping a new relationship paradigm between communicators and journalists.
· Alcoa – the good, the bad and the ugly! The disconnect between journalists and the corporate entity.

The seminar fee for IABC members is TT$200. The fee for non-members is TT$250. Breakfast is included. For reservations, please call Jane Sadaphal at 621-3830 or email iabctt@gmail.com.

Registration closes on December 5 at 2 pm.