Information Preparedness
An integrated model for communication in the information age
(This article previously appeared in Strategic Communication Management magazine, and has been published in several overseas publications)

By Stuart Z. Goldstein

Despite the considerable advances in the technological arsenal available to today's communicators, Stuart Z. Goldstein believes that, in many cases, the "tail is still wagging the dog." In this article he encourages communicators to prepare their strategy from a proactive stance, and takes the lead by giving us his view of the future for the communications function.

There's an exercise I often use when speaking to young communications professionals at local universities. I'd like to share it with you to introduce and emphasize an important point in this article. First, I ask them to describe the current functions, responsibilities and structure of a communications department in a major company. After five to 10 minutes, I then ask them to take what they've just defined and tell me what that communications role will look like in 15 or 20 years.

There really is no right or wrong answer. The point of the exercise is to underscore the need — for all of us, as communicators — to develop a conceptual framework that stretches our thinking and considers:

• how the different component pieces of what we do within the disciplines of corporate communications and PR interrelate;
• an understanding of the trends affecting the communications industry in general; and
• how innovations in technology are changing this framework looking toward the future.

It s amazing, but in the last 20 years the basic strategies and structure of what we do in communications has not changed significantly. But is the world the same as it was 15 or 20 years ago?

Historically, the role of communications has been seen as adjunct to the business. Communicators were tacticians, called in to write press releases, speeches, annual reports, marketing brochures, etc. This snapshot of the profession may be a generalization, but it serves as a sharp contrast to the real demands today on communicators in a fast-paced, highly demanding and competitive business environment.

Our profession has been forced into a transformation as companies have downsized and demanded more accountability from their communications departments. While there will always be a need for people with skill levels to implement the tactical elements of communication, dynamic forces reshaping business demand that communicators have a better understanding of how to get to that strategic level. Companies are looking for communicators who can integrate their activities with the firm s business strategy and who see themselves as catalysts for change. These seasoned communicators will have experience across the communications disciplines and will know how to leverage the pieces to influence outcomes and affect results.

In the information age, communication is a business imperative. The public no longer distinguishes between product performance and corporate action. The visual impact of media has created a sort of corporate persona, where every decision or product is seen as a sign of corporate judgment, ethics and responsibility.

Technology—a Key Factor in Driving Change
Technology is dramatically transforming our world and the way we communicate. However, describing a laundry list of software or hardware trends and their impact on our profession hardly seems relevant, since they will change by the time this article is published. More importantly, we should focus on how we think about using technology in the context of creating more effective strategies.

Technology has already redefined the role of corporate communications as a knowledge-based profession—some of us just don't realize it. Innovations in technology and telecommunications have expanded the following:

• the quantity, quality and speed of communication;
• the impact of audio and visual media on public opinion; and
• the competition for reaching and influencing key constituencies.

But communication professionals today are so absorbed in dealing with the "here and now," that they are not developing the infrastructure tools that will allow them to operate on a more strategic level. The end result is that more often than not they re reacting to today's realities rather than influencing them.

Let me give you an example. It involves the tainted meat scandal that occurred in Seattle, Washington. In this case, reports hit news wires within minutes of the first reported illness and the television cameras arrived at the CEO's door 20 minutes later. The wire stories carried the news to New York, where the financial markets reacted and the company's stock started to plunge. In the midst of all this, the head of corporate communications is likely to have turned to his staff and said, "Tomorrow morning, we 've got to organize a crisis communication task force meeting."

That is the real world — it's often the tail that wags the dog!

Our profession has already been radically changed, because information flows more rapidly than ever before and that affects how we approach communication.

The rationale for a crisis task force, as it used to be conceived, and even as we manage it today is, "Let's get the group together; let's talk about it." Well, the message is already out. Companies no longer have the luxury of time for lengthy discussions to formulate strategy.

Information Preparedness — the Key to Success
Information preparedness will determine communication success in the future. And various technology capabilities will provide the wherewithal to better manage and influence events — not after they occur, but before they occur by anticipating and planning.

During my tenure at American Express, I introduced into our department a method of tracking news wire stories through the local PC by subject.

The tools were in place when, in the middle of the Gulf War crisis, I saw a Dow Jones news story scroll across the wires on the PC: "Bomb discovered at American Express headquarters in NY." You can imagine how disconcerting this was, since we were on the 48th floor and we had no idea that there was a bomb reported in our building below us. We quickly called downstairs and discovered that in a mail room near Shearson Lehman's fifth floor trading area, a package had arrived from overseas. It was unidentified and unexpected. As part of normal security procedures, the floor was temporarily cleared until they could verify what it was. Bottom line, it was not a bomb. And within approximately 45 seconds, we were on the phone to Dow Jones. As we provided the real story, we could see the correction being reported on the news wire.

Now, a company can afford to have its trading floors cleared only so often before that disruption starts to hit the bottom line. And if that bomb story had been carried on the news wires and reported in the newspapers the next day, there is a high probability that further bomb threats would have been received. In effect, we had preempted a negative news story.

One of the current theories is that given the way information flows, you cannot allow a story to go out over the media channel without challenging it, or coming very close behind it, or else it will dominate the news. If your message is too far behind, you've lost.

What if tomorrow rumors began appearing in news-groups on the Internet about our company's products or financial health? Are we prepared? Do we have the capacity to both identify the problem early on and is there a strategy ready to address that kind of negative publicity? We need to be ahead of the curve in figuring out new ways of dealing with those kinds of issues and to bring that kind of influence.

And it's not just the reactive sense. Think of this type of capability in the proactive sense. What are the messages that we want to affirmatively communicate and how do we get our message out there?

There is one misconception we should clear up right away. The Internet is not a communications strategy. It is not the solution to all the communications challenges we face. It is a distribution tool. As communicators, we have to be the drivers of strategy. We have to understand the trends in our profession and in the media; to see the opportunities and think outside the box.

Defining "Strategic"
"Strategic" means different things to different people. Some talk about strategic communications from the standpoint of whether they have a plan which articulates their goals and objectives. Their idea of strategic is that they have an employee communication program that reflects what they will do in 1999, or a media relations program that maps out what they re going to do in that area. When I talk about strategic, I mean influencing outcomes and affecting results by:

• quantifying perceptions of various audiences through research;
• using these perceptions in developing targeted messages to distinct groups;
• creating the capacity to reach large, diverse constituencies with precision and speed;
• managing communication messages through preemptive activities to influence news and views on various corporate issues;
• verifying results based on action taken or by quantifying shifts in public opinion.

In the future, a communication department will function like a war room in a political campaign headquarters. As in a campaign, sophisticated research on perceptions of various publics will become standard practice and technology will be used to reach those constituencies, once identified.

Routine tools in the political world such as overnight polling and focus groups will be used to provide the critical baseline of information for deciding strategy and evaluating the effectiveness of that strategy once it is executed.

The shift toward research as a basis for communication planning is already under way. Union Carbide, for example, is already using overnight polling of employees as part of its internal communication program.

Experimentation by companies like Union Carbide underscores the growing competition for influencing various audiences, and the time in which a company can respond to challenging situations from whatever audience it deals with—that "window of opportunity"—is much smaller today.

Outside interest groups today are better organized and more sophisticated than ever before. They obtain marketing lists and carry out targeted mailings. They use 900 numbers to solicit funds as well as to identify supporters and mail literature. And they, too, have access to a growing arsenal of technology/telecommunications tools to help them communicate and influence diverse audiences.

Building the Technology Infrastructure
So what technology is needed to help us achieve a more strategic approach to corporate communications? It is not one particular piece of software or hardware, but a foundation that you build to provide a more solid footing for strategy. This electronic infrastructure for corporate communications will include several major technology components:

• An integrated (relational) database that allows you to leverage internal information across all public affairs/corporate communications disciplines.
• A diagnostic database that tracks and helps analyze opinion data on a wide range of issues across key segments of your various constituencies.
• Distribution channels like the Internet (passive and push technology), satellite broadcast of VNRs and audio dialers.
• An on-line resource library for print, video, and audio covering a broad range of content, including institutional memory, internal operations and senior management perspective.

The Integrated Model
Today, public affairs professionals often see themselves across the different disciplines (e.g., media relations, government relations, employee communications, philanthropic activities) as clients to one another.

Each department within the corporate communications / public affairs umbrella has its own administrative database to help manage record-keeping for that particular program, and for that program alone. While these systems support each function, in almost all instances there is an inability to compare data across the departments.

Even when a strong team spirit exists within an organization, the design of the technology may limit its ability to respond. One department comes to the other and asks, "Can you give me this information?" The other department is likely to respond, "I can give you a list of names, but I can't give it to you the way you need it because of the system and that request may take us until next week."

The integrated model, which some companies are already heading toward, will help position the organization for a higher state of readiness. This will be achieved by integrating databases that track and facilitate the cross-referencing of information from contacts with the media, elected officials, philanthropic group members, shareholders, employees active in their communities, etc.

In this scenario, the communications umbrella will consist of a string of departments that perceive themselves as integrated in terms of how they operate, integrated in terms of where data is kept, and integrated in their understanding of how to use data to "leverage the whole" of their public/external affairs effort.

Designing this relational database model requires that communications professionals see interconnections and leveraging opportunities. For example:

• The ability to track reporters who have written positive articles about a particular issue or seem predisposed to your company;
• The ability to track philanthropic grants and philanthropic group members by Congressional or state legislative districts, and communicate information to them on issues affecting the company;
• The ability to compare the biographical backgrounds of elected officials with the backgrounds of the employees who are involved in the local political contact program. This will help target areas of common interest that might assist your company in establishing stronger political ties;
• The ability to provide PR people with direct, on-line access to information about your philanthropic activities to use in marketing stories to the press or to feed information to employees meeting elected officials that will help leverage these meetings to communicate other company concerns/messages on key issues;
• This integrated database can also support a large-scale institutional memory for easy, on-line access to news clippings, corporate statements, photo files, a video library of all production/operating facilities and linkages to external "information brokers" who can provide unlimited access to data when needed.

The Pepsi bottling scare is an excellent example of how information preparedness really saved the day. Within a week of news reports of a needle allegedly being found in a bottle of Pepsi, the company was able to distribute a video on the safety of its bottling operations. Now imagine a company creating a video library that can distribute this footage over fiber optic networks or via satellite almost simultaneously with news wire reports. This represents a new dynamic in how messages will be managed.

Media Tracking
Many companies still do not track media contacts. But think about it. If you have 7,000 media calls coming in each year, what are they calling you about? What kinds of issues are they raising with you? What has your experience been with that reporter? Rather than viewing the calls operationally, think about them strategically. Tracking this information gives you the ability to analyze and manage it.

Equally important, automated media tracking preserves your institutional memory. This is particularly key because turnover in media relations is high. In two years, you may see a complete turnover in the media relations area of a corporate communications department. Whether it s one key staff member or several, it can be increasingly difficult to reconstruct what was said, when it was said, to whom it was said, how it was communicated, what the circumstances were and what insights were captured on the reporter writing the story. This information can be vitally important if the issue resurfaces—and most controversial issues do.

In a period when professionals are often at organizations only for brief stints, it is imperative that companies have effective safeguards to reconstruct how media situations have been handled. That continuity, constancy and consistency of communication strategy will be key to the success of the organization.

On-line Access & Distribution
On-line access to external databases is another fundamental component of the communications infrastructure. Many companies already use external information databases. Some of these databases provide in-depth coverage of who's who in the media, legislative information and access to wire services. Additionally, there s a growing number of "information brokers" who specialize in an industry or type of data analysis.

Corporate communications professionals should not only broadly investigate avenues of information sources that will strengthen their efforts, but ensure the ability to capture and retain this information. While it is often cost effective to use outside data providers, there will be instances when capturing this information requires developing software to bridge with your internal technology infrastructure.

In addition to receiving information electronically, equal emphasis must be placed on innovative approaches to distributing your news and information to your various constituencies. While the technology curve still has some practical limitations (i.e., not everyone has PC-to-PC communications capabilities or access to the Internet), firms must develop an array of flexible and timely options for communicating directly with different audiences.

Diagnostic Database
A third building block for effective communication strategy is an internal database that will help track and analyze ongoing diagnostic research on the perceptions of your various publics, including:

• understanding how your company is generally perceived by various corporate constituencies;
• gauging in advance how different logical scenarios (if P then Q) decisions will be perceived before action is taken;
• measuring the effectiveness of messages as they re communicated and then using this information to modify the messages, if necessary.

Smart companies today are beginning to ask themselves, "What is the basis for our communication strategy? What do we base our advertising on? Is it being driven by intuition or by research?" This issue poses a real dilemma for us as communicators.

Most of what we do in communications is intuitive, driven by our gut, usually drawn from past experience — a combination of things that we see, observe and feel. It is not very quantitatively based.

But we live in era when CEOs are demanding more accountability. If I were to ask: How would you demonstrate your effectiveness as a communicator? How would you prove that you've identified your audience properly and communicated the right message to that audience, that you re informed and influenced, and that you've actually achieved your desired result? How would you answer?

In the information age, the margin for error in communicating the right message and influencing change is narrower than in the past. In this environment, communication strategy tied to intuition and experience should be tested for validity through periodic research.

Technology is allowing us to become more sophisticated in using measurement techniques. Through the diagnostic database, you'll be able to track information over an extended period of time. It will permit you to draw correlations that reinforce or correct intuitive judgments, and can be used to plot changes in strategy.

The research will help us to integrate messages as well. Marketing, corporate communications, media relations messages, advertising—we re not going to be doing these things in the traditional ways that we did before. You re going to find in the media dominated world we live in, a two second clip on the nightly news can undercut a $100 million advertising program. So it s not just the product messages that are going to differentiate us from somebody else, it s also going to be the value messages. What is our company s philosophy? What is our approach to dealing with customers? What makes us special? Research will be used to ensure these messages are clear, consistent and constantly reinforced through an integrated communications strategy.

The Media is Also Changing
Innovations in technology and telecommunications are also shaping trends in the media. Competition in network media and cable has not only impacted the style and content of news, it has also reduced the base of available advertising revenue. This loss of revenue is putting enormous strains on broadcast and print journalism.

Newspaper chains are rapidly consolidating the fourth estate. As a cost-cutting measure, local news reporting staffs are being reduced and greater reliance is being placed on syndicated coverage by the news chains. The result, sadly, is that there are fewer sources of independent news today. The danger in that for us is that if there is a negative story it carries more weight in influencing public perception. You may not have more than one media outlet in a given market and that story may have been written by someone in Washington or the UK and it is then syndicated to 15 major newspapers. This trend applies to broadcast media as well, and it is going to continue.

Creating Direct Channels of Communication
As the control of media ownership (print and broadcast) becomes increasingly concentrated, however, companies will also need a technology infrastructure that helps them create more direct channels of communication: between the company and its stakeholders; and the company and segments of the general public.

Companies can even become their own news bureau, writing and distributing print, audio (for radio) and video stories via the Internet and satellite. If the stories maintain basic journalistic standards we will find greater acceptance to contributed material from cash strapped media organizations.

While everyone is suggesting that the reality of 500 cable TV channels is just around the corner, editorial decision-making may soon be made by three or four owners of huge media conglomerates.

Companies have already begun using technology offered by firms like Automated Data Processing (ADP) to speed the delivery of printed material directly to shareholders. Communicating directly with employees through dedicated cable TV channels is not far away. In this scenario, Social Security numbers are likely to be used to designate access for employee viewing rights in their home. Beyond the year 2000, this communication will be totally interactive—which could expand the use of cable TV for Annual shareholder meetings.

When General Motors is attempting to influence events in Washington or blunt negative or erroneous news coverage, they can call upon a database of over 5,000 shareholders who have been pre-identified as willing to write letters to legislators or to local media.

In a media-dominated world, communicating directly with broad coalitions of stakeholders (as well as segments of the public at large) that you can pre-identify as being predisposed to your views is absolutely critical. Corporate communication effectiveness increasingly will be differentiated by the degree to which communication strategy utilizes the infrastructure and tools that technology offers in reaching these groups.

The role that communications plays in a company s bottom line is greater today than it has ever been. And in a world where CNN comes into almost every home and news is reported with lightning speed, the absence of a strategic approach to communication can be devastating.

Using Research to Target Strategy
While survey research has long been used to gauge public perceptions on issues, we are entering an era where marketing segmentation analysis will be used to guide communication strategy. Instead of broad-brush strategies drawn from a large general sampling of opinion, technology supported research techniques will provide laser beam targeting capabilities.

Easy access to, and use of, direct database marketing techniques will significantly redirect how corporate PR professionals inform, influence and generate support among diverse stakeholder groups; e.g., employees, shareholders, customers and others. Companies will transfer to this type of research with the help of outside polling/survey research organizations. New capabilities in this area crop up every day, including companies that are now conducting overnight polling via the Internet.

None of the ideas I 've raised should boggle anyone s mind. The capabilities are not five or 10 years off; many exist today. Whether or not you accept each of the scenarios I 've described, the emphasis here is on the degree to which breakthroughs in technology are changing the way that messages are communicated and managed. These scenarios also underscore the influence of technology as the great equalizer in the competition for influence.

What s the Downside of Technology?

It is important to underscore that technology is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end: a tool. People still have to analyze and interpret data. A technology platform will provide corporate communicators with a heightened state of readiness and more effective methods for researching, targeting and executing strategy. The best technology infrastructure in the world, however, will not be a substitute for good judgment.

In addition, there exists the potential for business to abuse technology and violate consumer privacy. Each of us in the profession must exercise judgment in carefully defining boundaries. When it comes to the issue of privacy, we should make certain that the information used is in the public domain and readily accessible. And if we err, it should be on the conservative side of the issue. The public will be unforgiving if a company encroaches on this fundamental right.

The leadership of the CEO still plays a critical role in communication strategy. The best research and methods can be in vain, if the senior executive doesn't value communication as an integral part of the business.

A New Era of Communication
In the next century, companies will need professional communicators who have all the requisite writing skills, but see themselves as leaders. People who can help senior management understand how their decisions may be viewed externally and add value in guiding corporate strategy. People who think strategically about message management, corporate positioning and branding. Professionals who are equally capable of writing an annual report, conducting an on-camera media interview and guiding the use of technology to strengthen a company s ability to protect and enhance its reputation.

Communication departments will be structured around:

• research and technology to guide strategy development and to provide implementation tools.
• senior-level communication strategists with experience across the disciplines.

In this new era, media relations, issues management, advertising and the rest of the disciplines will be more closely integrated to ensure clear, consistent and constant emphasis on key messages. This integration, moreover, will offer the capacity to change advertising messages, sometimes overnight, to address the changing perceptions of various constituencies.

As we face a communications world that will be greatly influenced by technology, we must begin to look at developing new strategies, skills and tools for the world of the future. Our universities and professional trade organizations must be called upon to help us design new models and serve as laboratories.

I have described a number of issues and trends in this article, and proposed a technology infrastructure that I believe can move us towards a more strategic approach to communications. But I would like to end this discussion by returning to the exercise I use with college students. Looking ahead ten to 15 years, what is your vision of the role of communications?

The exercise is intended to serve as a clarion call, a challenge to each of us in the profession to stretch beyond our current thinking. Once awakened to new possibilities, we can ensure our relevance as communicators and continue serving as catalysts for change.

About the Author:
Stuart Z. Goldstein is Managing Director, Corporate Communications at The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation in N.Y. His 20+ years of experience cuts across the disciplines of corporate communications and public affairs, including serving as a spokesperson at two Fortune 500 companies. He also spent a decade running political campaigns in New Jersey. He can be contacted at sgoldstein@dtcc.com.

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