Simon Says...the musings of a comms man

Bill Deedes 1913 - 2007

I suspect a lot of people hadn't heard of Bill Deedes until earlier this week and I can hold my hand on my heart and say neither had I. But what an interesting life this man had.

For those of you who haven't heard of Bill, he was a fleet street journalist, MP, minister, editor and then back to journalist. At the time of his death last week, he was 94 and still writing his column for his paper, the Daily Telegraph.

He was there to report on King Edward's abdication, Chamberlain's "peace in our time" and was one of the ministers who failed to elicit the truth from John Profumo in 1963 - not to mention reporting on Bosnia, Zimbabwe and Iraq. So all in all, a pretty amazing life!

But what particularly interested me was his time as a minister under Harold Macmillan. As a minister without portfolio, he was given the job of educating the public about the EEC.

What a job!

A communications campaign on the biggest scale - but at a time when they didn't have any fancy social media, internet and mass consumer TV advertising

It would be fascinating to find out exactly how he did it and equally fascintating to see what lessons the present government (and come to that, the rest of us) could learn on back-to-basics communications.

It's also interesting to just stop for a moment and remember that communicators have been around for many, many years - and perhaps there is something we can all take from the older generations.

Why doesn't anyone love Dave anymore?

What an interesting few weeks it has been in the political landscape.

One minute the Tory party is the flavour of the month and Gordon Brown is the most unpopular leader of modern times, and the next, Labour is flying high and the Conservatives are, seemingly, in all sorts of a muddle.

So how comes David Cameron has suddenly lost his lovability amongst both his party and the public?  I imagine it is for lots of reasons which I couldn't possibly understand (!), but it strikes me that he is losing his focus and direction, and people, both internally and externally, are starting to question just what he is all about.  Suddenly confusion is starting to reign.  His message is getting lost and the unity of the party is starting to crumble.

Interestingly, this story doesn't seem that different to the picture in many large organisations.  How many times have we seen this sort of thing happening in business?  All of a sudden, the CEO appears distant to his people, strategy appears confused, people start muttering and suddenly the ship has lost its way.  Getting it back on track is not such an easy business, and it is made even more difficult when another, bigger ship is doing all it can to disrupt any chance of returning to calmer seas...

Anyway, enough of my rubbish metaphors.  My point is simply this.  Perhaps Mr Cameron should start looking at his own party a little more like a CEO looks at his business.  Naturally, there are many factors at play, but communication sits at the core.  The party needs to fully understand what their goal is and to be committed to it.  The leadership team needs to agree a strategy which they all completely sign up to and then roll it out to all the members of the party, who in turn must agree to march to the beat of this drum. 

Pretty basic stuff which I guess they might say they are already doing.  But, to my simple eye, it doesn't quite look that way. 

Internal communication is not the reserve of the large corporate, but is something that I'm sure wouldn't do Dave much harm thinking about in the coming weeks...

It's my turn now

I know everyone has given their fourpenneth about the new Olympic logo, but I simply can't resist my own little soap box moment.

Over my time, I have spent a number of years in the great world of marketing, branding and design. In fact, up until a year ago, I used to run a branding company which had some pretty major clients. So after years of explaining to companies that their logo is the public face of their brand, a visual depiction of their organisation's personality, I thought I'd have a go at analysing the wonderous new pink offer from Wolff Olins.

For me, the games are about bringing together countries and people from all over the world in a spectacular competition. Now, taking a look at the great pink wonder, it looks all the world to me as though it is pieces of a jigsaw that don't quite fit together - not really a great visualisation of the coming together of the world...

But moving on, what about the colour? Well, wasn't London selected on its strength of cultural diversity? So, have we got a logo made up of all colours? No. It's pink. Hmm.

And then there's the video. What on earth is that about??

The news reports say that Wolffy should have tested it for epilepsy. I bet they never even gave it a second thought. Doubt very much they gave it a first thought. But had they created something that wasn't entirely rubbish in the first instance, then I guess they wouldn't have needed to anyway.

And (for my final rant) what about the community piece? I read a letter earlier in the week questioning why the Olympic Committee didn't host a competition across the UK in all the schools giving all our kids the opportunity to design the logo. How great would that be? And I'm fairly sure they wouldn't have done a worse job.

Anyway, there we are. Rant over. I feel better now. Yes, I'm completely in the pink...

Ideas come from the strangest places

Over the weekend I came across a promotional DVD from Shell. Being a little bored, I popped it into the drive and sat back and watched what Shell had to say about things.

I have to admit at not being entirely sure why this DVD had been produced as it was a fairly comprehensive set of films and interactive material, but the quality was extremely impressive and must have cost a lot of money.

Anyway, I digress, the main film was about a chief engineer based in some exotic location explaining to a journalist the challenges of trying to extract oil from difficult places to get to. He basically couldn't think of anyway of doing this. Oh and he also had a teenage son ringing him every five minutes from his home in Holland being all moody.

The young journalist, wise beyond her years, suggested he gets a change of scene to clear his mind, so off he pops back home to his disruptive son.

And then, this was the main point of the story, he is with his son in McDonalds and the boy is trying to get at the last morsels of his McThicKShake so he turns his bendy straw upside down and is then able to manoeuvre the straw to get to the last drops. As his father looks on, he has the light bulb moment and of course the next scene is showing him in front of the board selling in his new invention, the bendy straw drill. Amazing! And his son becomes a model student and ends up becoming president of the world or something.

But, all the cynicism aside, the basic principal here is sound. I know when I am putting together my latest internal comms project, the trick is to find something ground breaking and different. Ok, it's not impossible, but it gets harder every time you try. Perhaps it's just about looking in different places. There's no right and wrong way to produce good internal comms, but maybe you need to take a step back, look around, and come up with your own bendy straw drill.

Tone from the Top

Over the past few months I have been increasingly interested in understanding what value internal communications actually has in a modern day organisation. I know there have been many studies and much commentary about the importance of good internal comms, but with it being so difficult to measure, I often wonder what actual value it has. Infact, in my most cynical of times, I even ask myself "would anyone notice if we didn't turn up to work tomorrow?"

I decided there is only one real way I'm going to answer my question - and that is to ask those people who are at the top of their organisations what they think. Those people who set the tone and the culture.

So that is exactly what I've started to do.

Called 'Tone from the Top', I have begun a programme of interviewing senior business leaders and asking them what they think about internal comms and the value of having a dedicated internal communications team. But rather than try to summarise their words, I have created a podcast where you can download the actual interview and hear their thoughts, straight from the horse's mouth.

It can be accessed at http://www.ToneFromTheTop.co.uk, so please feel free to browse it.

To support and introduce the interviews, I am going to write a short summary blog published on these pages and which gives the highlights of the interview. If you have any comments, please let me know - I'd be delighted to hear them. Perhaps now I can finally find out the answer to my questions!

What's in a word?

Yesterday the former Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, died and today the papers were full of stories and anecdotes. My favourite one was by the ex UK prime minister, John Major.

When attending a dinner at the Kremlin, Major leaned over to Yeltsin and asked "in one word, how would you describe the state of Russia at the moment?"

The Russian president paused for a moment before replying "good". This surprised Major as he knew that Russia was struggling to get back on her feet following the fall of communism.

So Major turned to Yeltsin again and asked "how would you describe it in two words?"

Yeltsin thought for a second and replied "not good".

It doesn't cost much

Today is Marathon day.  Thousands of people converging on London to watch thousands more running in the blazing sun.  Whilst those who know me would no doubt agree, running isn't for me - but likewise, watching others do it is something I could do all day long!

So I was delighted to receive an invitation from my brother-in-law to go to his firm's office to watch the Marathon from there.

"They put on free drink and food all day and you can watch it from the roof terrace" was his hard sell "and you can bring the family too". 

"OK" was my much considered response.

So I spent the best part of the day with my family, watching the Marathon from a roof terrace in London.  Not a bad way to spend a Sunday I thought as I downed my second chilled beer and watched the kids run around the room laughing and having a great time.

Then, as I do, I started looking around at all the other people.  There was probably about 150 people on the terrace, all doing exactly what we were doing.  Of those, probably about 60-70 or so worked for the firm (which has about 300 employees) and they were having a great time.

The food and drink could not have cost much more than a few hundred pounds, and in return for a relatviely small investment, and judging by the coments I was hearing, the firm was gaining a huge amount of employee loyalty.  My brother-in-law and his colleagues, at that moment, couldn't praise the firm enough.

So enough with all the fancy internal marketing campaigns - invite the family round and have a bit of fun. 

How does Mickey do it?

Half term week has been and gone and I took the chance for a family break in Disneyland Paris - and I must admit that I think I enjoyed it almost as much as my kids!

Disneyland is undoubtedly an impressive place. From the moment you arrive to the time you leave you are immediately transported into a world of Mickey Mouse et al. And for me, sad that it is to admit, I spent a lot of time observing staff behaviour and critiquing the place. No matter where you go, Disney is everywhere, from the bars of soap in your room to the shape of the many flowerbeds in the grounds - Mickey reigns supreme.

The staff all have a happy and engaging attitude even though many are spending their days in the cold February weather of Paris. So what has Mickey got that makes the Disney values so evident in the day-to-day actions of the staff? And why is it all so difficult for other organisations to replicate this model?

Perhaps the trick is to give their people over-sized mouse ears to wear and sing "it's a small world after all"!

Who caers abuot typos?

I had an interesting exchange earlier in the week when a friend was reviewing my last blog entry.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“You spelt ‘environmentally’ wrong”, was his response, quickly followed by pointing out two other obvious mistakes.  He then went on and said "you'll lose all credibility if anyone notices them." In my defence, I had been writing the blog on my mobile whilst sitting in a train!

This got me thinking. One of my own pet hates is the common typo. I spend my whole life, or so it seems, trying to find mistakes in other people’s work. In fact, I simply can’t read a document that’s full of typos – I have to correct it first.

What amazes me though, is the sheer number of mistakes in documents I read. Documents that have been written by people from all age groups and from all ranges of experience – from senior management, through to junior members of staff.

Does that mean that it has become acceptable to have mistakes in your work? Do people not really mind? Or has life and work become so complex, that the basics don’t really matter anymore?

Maybe it is because the human mind is so advanced, it doesn’t actually need to see letters in the correct order to work out what is written. One of my favourite emails on the circuit is this one:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe,

So perhaps it doesn’t actually matter whether we make any effort to avoid typos and grammatical errors in our work.

Maybe not – but I still hate it!

Internal Communications or Internal Marketing?

I was chatting to my friend and colleague Lee Smith about his recent article 'don't mention the c word' (published on simply-communicate.com and well worth a read), in which he talks about how creativity seems to be disappearing from the world of the IC professional.

It got me thinking about what IC really is all about. I remember only a couple of years ago having a debate with a director of IC about renaming the IC department to Internal Marketing.  The rationale at that time was that people were so disengaged with the communications that were being sent out, that the only way to re-engage them was to start making it interesting.

So what better way to do this then start applying the principles of marketing.  Treat your internal people as customers and then use the same techniques as you would in a traditional marketing campaign - ie run internal advertising, competitions, lavish, high budget award dinners and conferences usually reserved for only the most deserving of clients, and mini intranet sites to promote the launch of some new internal programme.

I imagine you might be reading this thinking that this sounds like normal IC programmes and maybe you're right.

So does that mean we are really simply marketing folk just focusing on a different audience? Should we really be merging with marketing teams? Do we change our name to internal marketing?  (By the way - the director kept the team as IC!)