Saturday, June 20, 2009...7:00 am
Why corporate communications should lighten up
In the course of my series on how to survive the media recession, I talked about investigating membership professional organisations in order to boost your profile.
I also mentioned that I had written a free piece for the member magazine of Communicators in Business, the organisation for corporate communications writers and editors. The idea was to try to boost my profile in the world of corporate comms.
It’s about how businesses and public sector organisations often seem very frightened of actually having a personality – as if being somehow identifiable risked harming their brand image.
But this misses a crucial point – squeezing out any personality from an organization risks damaging its brand just as much, if not more so.
For anyone who’s interested in how the piece worked out, here’s a link to the feature. (Unfortunately it’s a PDF, as the magazine doesn’t get uploaded to the CiB web site.)
As and when I dig deep and take out membership, I’ll report back on how effective it is as a marketing tool.
3 Comments
July 6th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Hi Simon, interesting article.
I think part of the problem with presenting an engaging brand personality is just that – it’s engaging. Even though the notion of two-way symmetrical communication has been around for some time now, many corporates are petrified of losing control over the message. The fear of Facebook, which you mention in the sidebar, is another example of that.
July 6th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Welcome Des – thanks for the comment.
I do understand the need for some control – Facebook can be an awful time-sink, as I have discovered with my journalism students. But the key is in working with new comms technology rather than trying to fight against it all the time…
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