Aligning Your Teams for Stronger Communication

Aligning your
teams for
stronger
communication
How to align your organization to maintain control of your brand and corporate reputation
www.mediavantage.comAre you aligned?Conditions that can make or break your brand reputation can spring out of nowhere. Social media enables news or online rumours about your organization to spread quickly and impact a wide range of your stakeholders. A compromised corporate reputation can affect every aspect of your business over time, from sales to marketing to investor relations.
But it's public relations professionals who are out on the front lines, dealing with reputation management every day. By tracking media coverage and managing social media, the PR team often knows what's being said, why, and how to respond.
That means the needs and concerns of the PR team are of huge importance to the rest of the company. But is your organization aligned when it comes to reputation management?
Here are four recommendations every PR professional should consider.
RECOMMENDATION #1: Align your plansPublic relations professionals can be most effective as part of their organization's team of chief executives (also known as the C-suite), helping to craft business plans, forecasts and influencing adjustments along the way based on intelligent observations of media coverage.
If you have a place at the executive table, you get first-hand insight into how the executive team is delivering on annual and three-year plans. This is critical to successful communications, marketing and public relations.
If your organization is not structured this way - and many are not - try to create another way to access the information you need. Set up a regular meeting with the most senior people in your department, and invite members of your executive team to be guest presenters. Ensure your meeting request is specific and don't take more of their time than requested. The goal is to gather required information in a professional setting to build trust with your executive team.
The most successful PR professionals align their communication plans with their organization's business plans, which may include separate plans for operations, technology, investor relations, sales, marketing, media relations and more. When all these plans are working in tandem, you can anticipate best and worst case scenarios and plan for how to respond.
Once communications plans are made, it's also important to share those scenarios with all the members of your team. When you share plans, everyone is accountable in a tangible way to the organization's business goals, short- and long-term communication objectives, and their specific role in helping to meet those objectives.
"Involve your employees in brainstorming how you can bring your brand's promise to life at each point of customer contact and how you can create new points of customer contact prior to the purchase, at the point of purchase, immediately after the purchase and on an ongoing basis during product/service usage and beyond. The brand's promise must come to life in more than just its identity and in its marketing communications." - Brad VanAuken, Chief Brand Strategist, Branding Strategy Insider
www.mediavantage.com 2Are your plans aligned?
The best PR professionals succeed because:. They have access to and contribute to their organization's business plans.. They work from a strategic communications plan that is aligned with company business planning.. They build in plenty of flexibility to adjust planning based on events, trends and media coverage.. They don't lose sight of core values and long-term goals.. They share plans and goals with their team.. Their team members know how their role contributes to the bottom line.
TIP: Creating and following plans are critical, but be prepared to continuously adjust and rework your plans to reflect volatile moments in the market, changes within your organization and other unexpected events.
RECOMMENDATION #2: Align your relationshipsIt's not enough to talk with the key players at your organization during strategy meetings. You need to cultivate strong, co-operative relationships with the leaders at your company on an ongoing basis.
It's a lot easier to manage a crisis when you can pick up the phone and talk to someone in manufacturing, or know a knock on the CEO's door will result in a constru... [download for more]