In 2012, communicate more than ever but with content

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Since this is my first post of 2012, allow me to wish you all a very Happy New Year! I joined the team of #ZyncroBlog contributors a few days ago with the desire to share with you my thoughts on communication. Among them, you’ll frequently find an unarguable mix between corporate and business communication, style and journalist routines. In short, what you will read in post-form will be, without a doubt, the result of many years, working towards reaching out to the audience, be it internal or external, always with content. So here we go!!

Together with the Spanish tradition of eating 12 grapes on the 12 chimes on New Year’s Eve, which they suspect was done for the first time in 1909 by a group of farmers in Alicante and Murcia to use up an excess in production, there’s also the tradition of making nine new resolutions to coincide with the start of the year. Today’s topic is dedicated to what deserves to be a key resolution for all companies this 2012: communication, both internal and external.

Looking at the various channels available for communicating, some people will this resolution has already been met. However, more often than not, the main distinction between companies that communicate and those that don’t is not the tools used —traditional communication media versus social networks and media from the web 2.0— but the content published through them.

Nowadays, in the same way as we did before, we only talk about communication if the information being transmitted is something new, useful, powerful, curious and cumulative. In other words, we communicate when behind that attractive channel we’ve chosen for it there’s content that helps us in our decision-making, that feeds our know-how, that impacts us for being previously unpublished or that ensures greater commitment from the people in the company. In short, we communicate if our messages has and achieves a function.

The dawn of the social media and networks, their ease in passing on pseudo-elaborate content, has led us to forget that communication in general, whether corporate or institutional, is only useful if it has content.

Along these lines, there are key points to ensure this condition:

Planning. Having communication plans that prioritize goals, design strategies and propose tactics are essential for those companies that want to create a better, closer relationship with what R. E. Freeman called stakeholders—suppliers, competitors, employees, clients, financial backers and society in general.

Professionalization. Allow me to touch on corporatism a little. On this point, let me say that journalists —so-called source journalists— are a good guarantee of ensuring when we communicate, using whatever tool we want, we do it with content. Professionalizing corporate or institutional communication means working to ensure that what the audience knows about you is the same as what you want them to know about you.

Adapting contents to the channel being used. Companies save time by communicating the same thing in the same way, regardless of the channel chosen. Well, we need to avoid the temptation of publishing the same thing on our 2.0 channels as on our enterprise social network or in press releases, for example. Each recipient deserves and expects a specific form to that content being received. You will only achieve your desired goal with that communication action if you have made an effort to adapt its content to the channel and the audience.

Without a doubt, the list of key points for ensuring great corporate communication could go on and on… But since this is my first post and it should be brief, I’ll sum up. That being said, I promise there’ll be a second part that will talk about other, no less important points: knowing your audience, mastering the channel’s language, directing communication times… and much more!!

Happy 2012 to everyone!!!