Insights

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Time to activate your influencers…

It’s a tough time to be a journalist in the traditional media. According to the Reuters Digital News Report, only 15% of the UK population had used print news in the last week, down 7% on 2020. Alongside this, the numbers watching TV in the UK have dropped by 20% in the last seven years.

The future for the media will be very different, and this demands a dramatic rethink of corporate communications tactics. Already, corporates and leaders are losing the influence and trust they once held – outside of their business – due to a digital strategy of silence and an out-of-date approach to the way they speak to their stakeholders.

Shifting sands
The change we are seeing is fundamental. It isn’t just about how people get their news, it’s about whether they want news at all. In the latest Reuters Institute for Journalism Report, Nic Newman describes an ongoing “decline in interest in the news overall” as well as the channels delivering them. Many people are more likely to turn to the feeds of campaigners than the words of journalists to learn about the world.

That change has inverted the relationship that stakeholders have with corporates, executives, and their employees. Previously, tradtional media organisations, multinational brands and high-powered CEOs could be considered trusted authorities. Now, due to the almost limitless amount of information presented online, the power has switched from the company to the individuals within it.

Digital channels should be in the hands of your storytellers
Adapting the communications tactics doesn’t mean abandoning everything that has gone before. Your digital strategy is best placed alongside your traditional communications strategy.

Delivering a consistent message across platforms increases your authority amongst your stakeholders. But that doesn’t mean saying exactly the same thing across every channel; you can share your message in different forms on different channels.

For a long time, the job of digital communications was given to sales and marketing teams, overlooking the natural story-telling capabilities of the communications teams and agencies to run their digital newsrooms and channels. However, some leaders embraced the potential of a new digital approach early. Richard Branson’s use of digital set the tone for the likes of BP’s Bernard Looney. Looney uses his LinkedIn to promote company initiatives, praise staff and provide news on speaking engagements. This approach allows him to make an authentic connection and helps humanise the BP brand.

This approach is not an accident. Both individuals not only write posts themselves, but tie up with their company communications teams to ensure consistent, company-relevant content is uploaded at timely intervals, keeping the channel active and interesting. This allows for a consistent delivery of company key messages alongside personal updates that demonstrate their credentials as leaders.

Use you digital channels to create human connections
As consumers are more likely to “trust someone like us”, activating employees and leaders as influencers across your own (and their own) channels is critical to creating advocates.

Building influencers out of employees has delivered success for the likes of Walmart, which transformed 500 employees into influencers under their Spotlight initiative. This has seen the brand become a force on TikTok through its “Walmart Cheers” and “Walmart dance parties.” By giving a voice to its front-line associates, Walmart is humanizing its brand and offering customers authentic, relatable content that they actually want to see and engage with.

Brands and business leaders that build a rapport with their audiences stand a better chance of creating advocates. Building these advocates out of audiences, through a two-way conversation, will also increase crisis resilience, when an issue arises.

Digital natives are less likely to visit a news website, or be committed to impartial news… [they are] … more likely to say they use social media as their main source of news. Deeply networked, they have embraced new mobile networks like Instagram and TikTok for entertainment and distraction, to express their political rage – but also to tell their own stories in their own way.

Finally…
Few modern businesses ignore digital communications. Equally, relatively few make the very most of their true potential online. As traditional media suffers, and the way consumers learn about the world changes, communications strategies will have to change more radically than ever before.

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What should a spokesperson do if they are about to go on air?

Hawthorn’s Board Director, Guto Harri, spent 18 years at the BBC before taking on some of the most demanding roles in communications. He presented a number of flagship programmes, was posted to Rome and New York and became the corporation’s Chief Political Correspondent before joining Boris Johnson as his Spokesman and Director of External Affairs at City Hall. In recent weeks he has featured as a commentator on the BBC, Newsnight, CNN, Sky News and many more. We asked him: what advice would you give a spokesperson about to go on air?

Answering the phone to a studio producer who puts you straight on air isn’t generally a good idea; I love it and the day starts with a glorious surge of adrenalin. But I had 18 years to practice. I often speak to Nick Ferrari on LBC before I’ve greeted my wife. But picking the right time, place and outlet to put yourself out there is otherwise a good starting point for any live, on-air commitment. Some of us are bad at breakfast. Others are jaded by teatime, and Newsnight is well beyond bedtime. Play to your strengths.

Think hard about location
Most media – these days – give you the option of joining from home or going into the studio. Choose the latter if possible. You will look better. The sound will be richer. The Wi-Fi won’t go down. More importantly, you’ll form a bond with the presenter, and stepping onto a properly-lit set will get you appropriately psyched for the occasion. Home is clearly in your comfort zone, but addressing a bigger audience with limited time and a trained interrogator takes more energy, focus and projection than most of us can engineer over a laptop.

Work out why you’re there? Do their requirements coincide with yours? Are you commissioned to attack or defend? Both involve taking some pain. Think of how you can add context, perspective, or nuance and your insights will land better with a broader audience.

Make it memorable
Go light on facts and numbers. Pick one or two that speak volumes and drop the rest. No one’s interested in how hard you work or how much you know. A tasty bone that the audience can chew on is better than a carcass that overwhelms. Tell them something they haven’t heard, and flag it. Make them feel you’re sharing a secret, breaking a confidence, or telling a tale others would keep quiet. Think anecdote, parallel and metaphor whilst gently reminding them of your authority or credibility on the subject.

Surprise the interviewer
I challenge myself to surprise the interviewer, making them gasp or even laugh. Pick playful words, create some frisson, or pass on a killer phrase. A former aide to Boris Johnson told me some months ago he’d happily help him again – if he moved swiftly. He was – however – not interested in going back to “walk him to the gallows”. Five words, lobbed into an otherwise pedestrian answer, clearly tickled Laura Kuensberg and Adam Fleming when I joined them for their Newscast recently.

The masochist in me couldn’t resist an on air confession in another recent hit. When most of the world wanted to disown and condemn any association with drink-fuelled “work meetings” with Boris Johnson, I fessed up to launching “wine o clock” in his Mayoral days at city hall. Mad? Maybe. But not against the rules. And the reason why – I remembered very clearly how hard it was to get him to attend. He really isn’t a party animal. Saying that falls on a lot of deaf ears in the current climate. Painting the picture may just have opened some eyes.

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Name Role

Which brings me to my final point…
No one gets invited back to trot out the same old lines. Say something worth saying – from memory, experience or deep reflection. If an answer can be clipped and posted onto social media you will definitely have ticked their box.

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Sarah Sands moderates a roundtable discussion with Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate and UK newspaper editors and broadcasters ahead of COP26

The last time I was in a room full of newspaper editors it was to discuss press regulation, so naturally all ended in mutiny. On Friday, before Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate headed off to protest against investment in fossil fuel projects, and then onto Glasgow, I introduced them to media decision makers in a private, round table discussion hosted by the Natural History Museum.

This time there was a wholly different spirit and purpose. Greta has remarkable convening power, but as moderator I had wondered whether the journalists would feel they were being lectured. They didn’t. Here was huge media influence coming together in one room, abandoning cynicism, ready to listen and to take responsibility for informing the public and holding government to account.

Greta was also ready to listen, facts at her fingertips but never hectoring. Her faith is in the people rather than the politicians and thus she turns to the media. This slight figure, remarkably composed, speaking perfect English, can hold a room of media leaders who reach millions. Alongside her was a figure of comparable charisma, the Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate, talking of the moral responsibility towards the global south, which is responsible for a tiny percentage of the world’s carbon emissions, yet pays the highest price in loss and damage.

The media leaders talked, under Chatham House Rule, of their commitments and challenges. How to keep readers interested in a story both existential and urgent without overwhelming and alienating them? How to balance short-term gains – energy security – with medium term destruction?

The climate scientist Professor Simon Lewis, who joined Greta and Vanessa at the meeting, does not mince his words about the scale of the threat to “human civilisation”. Lewis claims in his book The Human Planet, that human kind is a geological force, changing everything, forever.

Greta and Vanessa wanted to meet the media decision makers because galvanising public opinion and keeping pressure on governments are crucial if we are going to get to net zero. The media are good at that. Indeed, Greta has said of the media: “You are our last hope.” There was honest self-examination during the session. One editor raised the rule of journalism that you cannot keep doing the same story and keep reader attention, but then observed that coverage of Covid had shattered that rule.

We discussed the lessons from the pandemic, during which media played an important role in informing the public and persuading them to get vaccinated.

There were further insights: television was thought to have an advantage over print in covering climate because of the power of images. Our senior journalists agreed that humanising and personalising the issue helped with engagement. They also emphasised that hope was important.

Audiences, particularly for financial media, like reading about technological solutions. Can journalists discriminate between aspiration and realistic achievement? Can even scientists be sure of what is going to work?

The editors talked about representing climate stories through entertainment or graphics or on the weather pages, in order to keep audiences engaged. It can be a tough sell: according to George Marshall’s book Don’t Even Think About It, our brains are tragically hard wired to avoid thinking about climate change.

Friday was a thought provoking session from a group of media leaders who have power and recognise responsibility. The final words came from Vanessa Nakate, who had found herself erased from media photographs when she spoke at the youth forum in Milan, an editing decision that seemed symbolic of the lack of attention paid to the global south in discussions about climate change. “Whose story are you telling?” she asked.

Then Greta headed off for her next protests, a small, self-contained figure, immediately mobbed by her supporters. An 18-year-old activist who has become a world figure.

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