Communication for Leaders Nr. 1-2017
How Digitization Changes Corporate Communication How will digitization influence the corporate communication profession? We see five areas worth contemplating.
Torund Bryhn, Director of Communications and Government Relations, Gassnova E-mail: tb@gassnova.no
fectively, we have meetings around social platforms such as conferences, forums and seminars with follow-up conversations on email, Twitter and Facebook. Showing interest and engaging in what matters to the stakeholder on social media we see as the best way to strengthen relationships. This can be sharing and liking what they post on social media, but more importantly engaging with them in conversation on Twitter and Facebook. 2. Paradigm-shift from engaging a few stakeholders to mass-stakeholder engagement and mass-personalization. The other change we are seeing is an increase in stakeholders we need to engage. In the past, we sought to influence the few, who then influenced the many. Now, we must influence almost everyone. A mobile user is now their own media house pushing out information that can help or hurt the organization with just a tweet. Stakeholders are more empowered, emboldened and organized. As such, the expectation is to engage stakeholders at scale, while maintaining a trusting and personal relationship with them. We now have to be
great relationship builders and need to know everyone from journalists, NGOs, academia, government, editorial boards, and bloggers/ social media experts 3. The new age of transparency and conversation. Communication professionals can no longer rely on pushing a campaign, image or message to create an impression with impact. We need to engage in honest and transparent conversations in order to be heard. Transparency and the demand for conversations in real-time adds pressure and puts demands on communication professionals to be prepared and ready at all times to manage a potential issue raised by a stakeholder. This is why it is necessary to have a framework of rules that ensures accountability, fairness, and transparency in a company’s relationship with all stakeholders (financiers, customers, management, employees, government, and the community). 4. Demand for hard data. Corporate leadership wants and expects more hard, data-driven, sophisticated communications measurements from the corporate communications office. The C-suite
Today’s buzzword is digitization. We are living in an age where internet of things, virtual reality, 3-D printing, robotics, and automation are integral parts of our society and of the communication profession. How digitization will influence the corporate communication profession is obviously worth pondering. At Gassnova, we see the importance of continual learning and this year we invested a substantial amount of time and resources on listening, learning and dialoguing with academia, media strategists and leading bloggers. Inspired by these conversations and the 2016 reports from the Arthur Page Society (APS), we see five areas worth contemplating as digitization takes a larger place in our organization. 1. The shift from one-to-one to one-to-many conversations. The new way of conversing is setting new standards on to how to converse with, cultivate and manage stakeholders. Traditional meetings using one to two hours are too time consuming and too one-dimensional. To engage more stakeholders more ef-
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