Six Tips for Strengthening Stakeholder Relationships

First, by way of disclosure, assessing the strength of relationships and helping organizations improve them is one of the things I do for a living. That said ...

THE FUNCTION OF PR
PR practitioners have argued for as long as I can remember about what the actual function of PR is. Some say it is to generate publicity. Some, to generate awareness. Others cite behavioral goals, such as increasing sales, reducing employee turnover, or increasing stock price. There also is a camp that argues the real purpose of public relations is to help organizations build and manage effective relationships.
                                                                                                                                   
If you'd like to learn more about managing and strengthening stakeholder relationships, e-mail me at fanderson@forrestwanderson.com or call me at 415.513.5042.
                                                                                                                                   

A WAY TO MEASURE THE STRENGTH OF RELATIONSHIPS In 1999, Dr. James Grunig and Dr. Linda Hon published through IPR "Guidelines for Measuring Relationships in Public Relations." Grunig and Hon drew on literature exploring personal and business-based relationships as well as insights regarding how organizations and stakeholders can affect each other. They developed a list of six factors that collectively assess the state of a relationship between an organization and a stakeholder group. These are (definitions from Grunig and Hon):

1. Control mutuality (think "mutual control") -- the degree to which parties agree on who has the rightful power to influence one another.
2. Trust -- one party's level of confidence in and willingness to open one's self to the other party.
3. Commitment -- The extent to which each party believes and feels that the relationship is worth spending energy to maintain and promote.
4. Satisfaction -- The extent to which each party feels favorably toward the other because positive expectations about the relationship are reinforced.
5. Exchange relationships -- In an exchange relationship, one party gives benefits to the other only because the other has provided benefits in the past or is expected to do so in the future.
6. Communal relationships -- In a communal relationship, both parties provide benefits to the other because they are concerned for the welfare of the other -- even if they get nothing in return.

Grunig and Hon included in the paper a set of tested perceptual questions addressing each of the six factors above. Grunig and others have validated these questions. So, by measuring the strength of stakeholder perceptions of the organization on these six relationship factors, we can gauge the strength of a relationship between the organization and the stakeholder group.

Following are my tips on strengthening stakeholder relationships.

TIP 1: ASSESS THE STRENGTH OF THE RELATIONSHIP
Tip number one is to survey your stakeholder group using some variant of the questionnaire Grunig developed, so you know how weak or strong your relationship is and where it is weak or strong. For example, in one project I did, we learned the organization had excellent scores with all stakeholder groups on all but one of these six factors. So improving stakeholder relationships in that case was a matter of focusing on that one factor.
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND COMMUNICATIONS
The remaining five tips have more to do with how organizations behave than strictly with communications. However, if PR has played the border spanning role of identifying key stakeholder groups and where they stand on the issues that matter to them and has shared this information with management, PR will have made a great start toward helping the organization truly manage its stakeholder relationships and, ultimately, its reputation. PR can further enhance the organization's reputation by educating management on this model of relationship assessment, why it is important and how to measure progress.
Finally, one reason some organizations under perform on these factors is that the organization does not communicate to stakeholders what it is doing in relation to the factors. Most stakeholder groups are too large to deal with one on one, so organizations get input from representative members of these groups. But organizations should communicate to the entire stakeholder group its responses to the input. In addition, it usually makes sense to describe the process of inclusion the organization used to get the input, so stakeholders who were not personally involved know people like them were. This, clearly, is the responsibility of PR or Communications.

TIP 2: BUILD STAKEHOLDERS TRUST IN THE ORGANIZATION

• Consistently treat stakeholders fairly.
• Whenever your organization makes important decisions take stakeholder opinions into account and otherwise demonstrate concern for stakeholders.
• Keep organizational promises.
• Demonstrate competence by doing what you say you will do.

TIP 3: PAY ATTENTION AND RESPOND TO WHAT STAKEHOLDERS SAY AND DO

• Demonstrate you believe stakeholder opinions are legitimate by responding to them.
• Give stakeholders a say in the organization's decision-making process, especially in those areas that affect the stakeholder group.

TIP 4: DEMONSTRATE COMMITMENT TO STAKEHOLDERS

• Show stakeholders that your organization wants to maintain a long-term relationship with them.
• Engage stakeholders to build loyalty to your organization.

TIP 5: SATISFY STAKEHOLDERS

• Identify and enhance the ways stakeholders benefit from their association with the organization.
• Make interacting with the organization a "delightful" experience.
• Make stakeholders feel they are important to the organization.

TIP 6: MOVE BEYOND AN EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIP TO A COMMUNAL RELATIONSHIPAs noted above, exchange relationships are those in which two parties in a relationship expect a benefit in return for a benefit -- tit for tat. These relationships are the basis of most for-profit businesses. That is, a customer expects a certain quality product in exchange for the money she spends, and the organization expects the money in return for the product. Employees expect pay, benefits and a sense of fulfillment and organizations expect work and engagement.

A communal relationship goes beyond that. One party in the relationship believes the other will give benefits with no expectation of a return. An example of this is corporate social responsibility programs, such as when a bank goes beyond the basic business exchange to "give back" to the community by supporting programs that benefit neighborhoods. Some argue that this corporate giving is not really selfless in that the organization expects good will in return for the benefit it bestows on the community. And this may be. Nevertheless, when a stakeholder believes an organization helps people without expecting anything in return, the relationship is at a different level than if the stakeholder believes the organization only trades benefit for benefit.

PARTING THOUGHT
In closing, I'd like to re-emphasize the importance of assessing the strength of the relationship at the outset. That there are six factors to manage when building relationships is a great insight. But to manage we must be able to measure. This tells us not only where to focus our efforts but also whether we have succeeded.

Helping Your Organization Succeed in a Complex Environment

I recently had the good fortune to attend a short presentation by Sally Blount, the new Dean of the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. She spoke of the changing environment, new trends and issues that business schools and all organizations are going to face in the coming decades.

BIG-TIME CHANGE

She noted speaking to a number of the captains of the finance industry -- the men and women who can take business actions that move markets. They told her they used to be able to take these actions and pretty well predict the outcome a specific action would have on the market, but that this no longer is the case.

So what's changed? The actions are the same. But the markets, obviously, are not. Why?

EXTRAORDINARY COMPLEXITY

I would argue that the external environment has become far more complex than ever before. This complexity has been driven by huge technological changes in every walk of life. These changes have in turn affected nations, organizations and individuals around the world. Transformations such as these, combined with constantly increasing population, cannot help but reshape cultures as well. And whether you agree with global warming or not, I would argue it is one of many perceived ecological environmental changes that are influencing world economies and politics. All this complexity has added innumerable variables to what were once fairly straightforward economic equations. The world in which we all operate has become extremely complicated. Man-made and natural processes that once had a manageable number of inputs and outputs now have so many as to be practically unmanageable.

A MODEL FOR THINKING ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT

When I attended Kellogg, I took a course entitled "Management and Its Environment" taught by Dr. Stanley Hallett. It was not only one of the high points of my Kellogg career but the wellspring for much of my professional career. The class was about the way our society changes across time and the interplay between business, government, non-governmental organizations, the judicial system and so forth. Dr. Hallett's view was that for organizations to succeed, their managers needed to understand and respond to changes in the environment. He broke the environment into:

• The green, or ecological, environment
• The technological environment
• The social/cultural environment
• The economic environment (which includes the organization's financial situation as well as the competitive and general economic environment)
• The regulatory and legislative environment

As I was trying to say above, all these environments have experienced exponential change in the past few decades.

THE IMPORTANCE TO ORGANIZATIONS AND COMMUNICATIONS

My take away is that understanding the environment, while more difficult than ever, is more important than ever to the success of organizations. This is because the morphing external environment can alter how stakeholder groups feel and what they believe, and this can cause a misalignment between these stakeholders and any given organization with which they might previously have been aligned. And this means the organizations for which you work.

Today, many organizations are more complex than they were ten or twenty years ago, and different parts of the organization are responsible for understanding and responding to the five parts of the environment I list above. For example, IT or R&D might be responsible for understanding and responding to technological change, and most large organizations have a governmental affairs group that is supposed to understand and respond to regulatory and legislative change.

However, this increasing complexity also is an opportunity for public relations or communications, because all these changes affect an organization's stakeholders and how they will react to actions the organization takes. PR and communications departments should seize responsibility for understanding and managing this. If they don't management will place the responsibility elsewhere and communications departments will be increasingly marginalized.

This is an opportunity for communications professionals to add real senior-management-level value to their organizations by identifying and understanding emerging trends and issues and how they will affect interactions between their organizations and key stakeholders.

In a future post, I will discuss a method I've developed to conceptualize and manage these complex issues.

Please comment or call if you'd like to discuss this. I'd love to hear from you.

MBA vs. Master's -- Which Is the Better Option for a PR Pro?

Emily Geesaman asked the title question on Linkedin a couple of days ago.

Two folks, Susan Maxwell Stevens and Karen Derby, APR, both observed that the answer depends on the kind of background the PR pro has. If a business undergraduate degree, then perhaps a Master's in communications would make the most sense. If a journalism major, then perhaps an MBA. Certainly, I agree with their counsel.

That said, the more I watch communications and business evolve, the more convinced I am that the MBA is, in general, the better choice. We talk in communications about managing reputations and relationships. But the truth of the matter is this is not done through communications so much as through the actions of the organization. And those actions are driven by management policies. Organizations may be able to communicate their way out of bad behavior once or even twice, but they cannot do this consistently. The new drive towards transparency requires that organizations act in ways that are consistent with the norms of their stakeholders and the society in which they operate. This is managed at a policy level, not a communications level.

So, if you want to make a difference in the organizations for which you work, or if you even want to be able to execute communications programs that are effective (because they say things that are to stakeholders reasonable and true), you will have the greatest likelihood of doing so if you are a part of the management team of your organization. Understanding what MBAs understand will help you be a part of that team more than understanding what communicators understand.

Of course, understanding both is best.

If you're interested in reading more of my thoughts on reputation and the MBA's potential role in communications, I've recently written two blog entries that address these topics: http://tinyurl.com/24prdvj and http://tinyurl.com/22ofeyn.

Which New Social Media Should You Use?

I've recently attended presentations on social media at which presenters have given the ever increasing list of social media. In virtually every presentation, someone has asked how to choose which social medium to use, when there are so many available.

The best way I know of to determine the best media to use to reach a given stakeholder group is to ask that group which media they use. This is no different for social media than it is for advertising or PR. And though there still are many ideas regarding how best to evaluate the effectiveness of social media, determining which social media stakeholders use is as simple as surveying them.

I refer you again to Groundswell, the excellent book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. They note the importance of gathering "Social Technographics," or information on a target audience's social media habits. Which social media they use? How engaged are they in social media (do they blog, do they post comments, do they lurk, do they not even follow)?

However, I strongly urge you to build a complete media profile. Do not to stop with these "Social Technographics." Ask general media questions regarding stakeholder use of newspapers, magazines, television and radio. Ask where they would expect to find or look for the kind of information you would like to share with them. You may learn it likely will be more effective to use traditional media.

It also is critical that you not do an online survey, unless you have strong reason to believe your entire target group is online (e.g. CIOs or CTOs of hi-tech companies). Use a telephone or mail methodology so you don't mistakenly "learn" everyone you talk to is using the Internet, when in fact, you have only surveyed the members of your stakeholder group who are.

What traditional media cannot do is create the kind of engagement and interaction that is unique to social media. So, if your goal is that kind of interaction, you may wish to look for a way to use social media. The point I'm trying to make is: it won't work if your stakeholders aren't there.

However, you may hypothesize the people you want to reach are likely to use a specific social medium in the near or longer-term future. The research you do may suggest your audience is moving in this direction. In that case, you may want to commit resources to using that medium, but be aware that you are anticipating your audience rather than meeting it.

Another Way To Use Media Evaluation For Planning

MetLife and Echo Research won the 2009 Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award for excellence in public relations measurement and evaluation. This award identifies great examples of research and measurement integrated into public relations practice. IPR publishes winners as case studies on the Institute's website (www.instituteforpr.org).
This entry, "The Media Reality Check: A New Approach to Content Analysis" is somewhat unlike past entries in that it used media analysis as a starting- rather than an end-point. You can find the entry at: http://www.instituteforpr.org/files/uploads/JFGRAMetLifeandEchoResearch.pdf.

CHALLENGE
MetLife believed its messages about Annuities, Long-Term Care Insurance and Life Insurance were not being accurately and completely reported. This concerned the company because it felt that without complete and accurate information, consumers were less able to make informed decisions about these products.

SOLUTION
To determine whether or not MetLife was correct in this perception, it commissioned Echo to analyze the "message accuracy" of MetLife coverage of these three topics. Echo assessed message accuracy by quantifing:

1. The accuracy of basic facts,
2. The number of misstatements
3. Omissions of basic facts

Echo calls this approach "The Media Reality Check." They limited the media analysis to a set of publications MetLife considers to be particularly influential.

METLIFE POSITION SUPPORTED
Echo found the overwhelming majority of articles on the three topics of interest omitted a number of basic facts and included a number of misstatements. For example, 94% of the articles they examined on life insurance had at least one error or omission in their reporting on the topic. And omissions of facts were present more than errors. While 32% of the articles contained a misstatement of fact, 88% omitted a basic fact.

SOLUTION BASED ON RESEARCH RESULTS
MetLife has communicated this information to editors and reporters who follow these topics for key media. In followup measurement studies, not only has MetLife's coverage gone up, but also the accuracy of reporting. To me, this is a great case, because it focuses on how an organization can use research and measurement not just to evaluate, but to understand and assess (and in this case even quantify) a situation and use this information to develop a solution. Congratulations to MetLife and Echo Research for an innovative use of research to manage a communications challenge.

# # #

Thanks very much for reading. If you have questions you'd like me to address, or other topics you'd like me to write about, please let me know.

# # #

I work with organizations going through a change in strategic direction (merger, acquisition, building program, new product launch, change program, etc.) and that are concerned about what will happen with their relationships with key stakeholders (customers, employees, investors) if they send out the wrong, or confusing, messages. After working with me, my clients have a clear understanding of what their messages should be. I also provide them recommendations on other actions they can take to enhance their relationships with stakeholders.

I also work as a PR and communications research director for hire for agencies and other organizations.

# # #

The Institute for Public Relations, (IPR) is dedicated to the "science beneath the art" of PR. It focuses on PR research and education. If you are interested in the topics I write about, you will almost certainly be interested in IPR. You can find it at http://www.instituteforpr.org/. While you're there, check out the Essential Knowledge Project at http://www.instituteforpr.org/essential_knowledge/.

Best wishes,

Forrest

Forrest W. Anderson
Founding Member
Institute for Public Relations
Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation

Multiplier Claim Fraudulent

I just read a paper by David Michaelson and Don Stacks, colleagues of mine at the Institute for PR's Commission on Measurement and Evaluation.

They have done a series of experiments to determine whether there is any basis for the claimed "multiplier" effect of editorial coverage over advertising. The argument being that the third-party endorsement of editorial coverage generated by PR is more believable and valuable than advertising. Then, those who make this argument make up a number and say, for example, PR-induced editorial coverage is three times or five times as valuable as equivalent advertising.

Michaelson and Stack's most recent study supports their earlier work. They state in their discussion: "We found no major differences between public relations and advertising on overall communications impact."

What's really important about all this is two qualified researchers are objectively reviewing the claim PR practitioners have made about the value of editorial content being higher than advertising. We now have real experimental data that says it just is not so.

We cannot project their findings to all cases; there may be some circumstances in which there is some multiplier effect, but we have no experimental evidence to support that, just the assertions of people who do not question their assumptions.

I suggest you review the paper at http://bit.ly/2WFazS. It is pretty good reading for an academic paper, and certainly worth skimming at the very least.

And bravo to Don and David!

Questions To Ask Before Diving Into Social Media

Welcome new readers!

If you would like to subscribe to this e-Zine, please do so in the form on the left-hand side of this page: http://www.forrestwanderson.com/free.htm. If you know someone you think might enjoy the e-Zine, please pass it along.

And now to this month's article...

# # #

Social media holds great promise But if you want it to be an effective part of your communications, I suggest you ask yourself a few questions first.

1. With whom does your organization want to communicate?
2. Why does it want to communicate with them; what does it want them to know or do?
3. Do the people with whom the organization wants to communicate use social media?
4. If so, does a substantial percentage of them use it?
5. How much do they use it?
6. How do they use it?
7. Which forms do they use?
8. Is the kind of communication your organization wants to do appropriate for social media?
9. What social media forms or specific venues would be most appropriate for your organization?
10. How do we monitor what relates to us and our social media efforts?
11. How can we determine the impact our social media programs have had on our target audiences?

There probably are more questions, but these are the ones that jump to mind. Much of my business is helping people figure out which questions they need answers to and then helping them find those answers. So, I'm going to talk about how to find the answers to some of these questions.

The first two -- "With whom does your organization want to communicate?" and "Why does it want to communicate with them; what does it want them to know or do?" -- are the basic questions we need to ask before any formal communications activity. The answers should come from the person or people commissioning the communication -- usually management.

The next set of questions is:

3. Do the people with whom the organization wants to communicate use social media?
4. If so, does a substantial percentage of them use it?
5. How much do they use it?
6. How do they use it?
7. Which forms do they use?

These are questions you can answer by doing a survey of your target audience. In the best of all worlds, you would do this survey by telephone. That way you would not be making the assumption your target audience is online. However, if you are willing to make that assumption, which is usually a fair one these days, you can do the survey online. This likely will be much less expensive than doing it by phone.

8. Is the kind of communication your organization wants to do appropriate for social media? This is a judgment call. There is much speculation about how social media works, and social media means a number of things to different people. What you need to do is think about the communications strategy you think will help you achieve your communications objective. For example, if building a community of like-minded individuals will help you achieve your goal, some form of social media probably will work for you. If you want to send a one way message, social media probably is not the best medium.

9. What social media forms or specific venues would be most appropriate for your organization? This is a judgment call that can be informed. What is most appropriate has to do with what you are trying to achieve, as I discussed under question 8. However, you also could have, in the survey of your target audience you did to answer questions three through seven, a multiple choice question asking which specific social medium might be most appropriate for a communication like yours.

10. How do we monitor what relates to us and our social media efforts? If you care about only a specific set of social media (e.g. a specific set of blogs) you can do this yourself by simply subscribing or visiting them regularly. If you wish to be more comprehensive, there now are a number of companies that provide social media monitoring services including Radian6, BurrellesLuce, Buzzmetrics and a number of free monitoring tools (see this article).

11. How can we determine the impact our social media programs have had on our target audiences? This depends on how you answered the first questions I posed: "With whom does your organization want to communicate?" and "Why does it want to communicate with them; what does it want them to know or do?"

If you know who the members of your target audience are and what you want them to know or do as a result of the social media program, then measuring the effectiveness of the program is as simple as finding out how many know what you wanted them to know or how many did what you wanted them to do.

One of the key challenges in this kind of exercise is you need benchmarks to be able to see if there has been a change. If you wanted the target audience to know something as a result of the program, you could have asked questions to get at awareness in the initial survey we discussed above. That would give you a "before" benchmark.

If you wanted them to do something, you will need to figure out how many did it as a result of exposure to the social media. In some cases this might be easy. For example, if you want them to check out a website, you might create a link in the social media you are using and a special landing page on the website. Then you could count the number of people who went to the landing page. But your actual measurement will depend on the behavior you are trying to induce.

Look Before You Leap
As I said above, social media is full of promise, and it is very tempting to try it out. But if you want it to be an effective part of your organization's communications program, you need to exercise the same discipline planning for social media that you would for any other program.

# # #

Thanks very much for reading. If you have questions you'd like me to address, or other topics you'd like me to write about, please let me know.

# # #

I work with organizations going through a change in strategic direction (merger, acquisition, building program, new product launch, change program, etc.) and that are concerned about what will happen with their relationships with key stakeholders (customers, employees, investors) if they send out the wrong, or confusing, messages. After working with me, my clients have a clear understanding of what their messages should be. I also provide them recommendations on other actions they can take to enhance their relationships with stakeholders.

I also work as a PR and communications research director for hire for agencies and other organizations.

# # #

The Institute for Public Relations, (IPR) is dedicated to the "science beneath the art" of PR. It focuses on PR research and education. If you are interested in the topics I write about, you will almost certainly be interested in IPR. You can find it at http://www.instituteforpr.org/. While you're there, check out the Essential Knowledge Project at http://www.instituteforpr.org/essential_knowledge/.

Best wishes,

Forrest

Forrest W. Anderson
Founding Member
Institute for Public Relations
Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation

Four Great Ways To Use Research in 2009

For this first e-Letter of the year, I thought I'd offer some ways you might productively use research in the coming year.

Planning
As you may have gathered, I am a huge proponent of using research to plan and lay out strategies. So here are some ways to use research, or simply good information, for planning.

1. Research Those You Wish to Influence
Virtually every business objective is based on evoking or provoking the behavior of some person or group of people. They might be your boss, your board of directors, employees, customers, partners, shareholders, community members, activists or some other group.

Questions to research include:

• What do these people want and need in general?
• What, specifically, do they want, need and expect of you or your company?
  
• How do they process information? (What are the best ways for you to communicate with them?)
  
• What actions can you or your organization take to encourage them to act the way you would like them to act?

If you think you know the answers to these questions, ask yourself if you really do. Or are you instead making assumptions?

Once you decide what and how you want to communicate be sure to test the message and channel with your target.

How to do this research depends on who you intend to research. If your target is people inside your organization, and includes a relatively small number of individuals, you might do one-on-one interviews or focus groups. These same techniques work on external groups, such as customers, as well. But sometimes this research has already been done and you can purchase reports or your organization may already have done research. If you are gathering information about a large number of people, you might start with the interviews and follow those with a survey to quantify the data.

2. Research the World Around the People You Hope to Influence
The business or general environment around those you hope to influence has a definite effect on your ability to influence them. For example, if you were a good performer, asking your boss for a raise or a budget increase might have met with success in 2007. In today's economy, in most organizations such a request would be tantamount to suicide.

A very useful way to think of the environment as something that might affect your stakeholders is to break it into these sub-environments:

• The green or physical environment
• The technological environment
• The social and cultural environment
• The regulatory and legislative environment
• The economic environment of both the world and your industry

The question you want to research on each of these is, for example:

• What is going on in the green or physical environment and how is that likely to affect my customer in the coming year, especially with regards to the behavior my organization would like to encourage from that individual?

To answer the question, you would review news coverage, read articles by experts in the field, and so forth to identify trends. In some cases the news articles will tell you how stakeholders feel about the trends. In other cases, you may wish to interview some stakeholders to get their opinions and points of view.

Almost always, what's happening in one of the environments above will influence others. For example, the US population seems now to be concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprints. If you work for an energy utility, your organization probably has a policy to encourage some kind of behavior among customers. But regardless of that policy, energy consumers are likely to look for ways to reduce their use of carbon-emitting energy sources by relying on other sources. So this will affect the economic environment of your firm. In this case, questions you might research include:

• What effect will this have on the sales of the utility?
• What plans does the utility have to respond to these changes?
• How will your department be affected by these changes?
• What can you and your department do to help your organization respond?

3. Monitor
The research I recommended above on the world around those you hope to influence could be a one-time exercise. But it shouldn't. For communications people to offer the most value to their employers and clients, they need to be on top of emerging issues. This means knowing what's going on in the world in general and paying particular attention to those issues you think might have an impact on your key target audiences. These days you may read a daily newspaper or get your news online, but regardless, you should get your news. I recommend the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and whatever publications are of most importance in your particular industry. I also suggest that when you read these publications, read them broadly. At the least, it takes employees, investors (or donors), management and customers to create a thriving organization. So, you should be aware of trends that might affect any of these groups of people. So read articles about HR, finance, management and marketing. Try to connect the dots that are news stories to create a model of the world of your stakeholder group.

In addition to monitoring issues and trends, these days it is critical for communications people to monitor media. The ways people communicate on the Internet change daily creating new opportunities and threats. We must follow them, if we wish to remain effective communicators and counselors. To do this kind of monitoring, I find it necessary to make an appointment in my calendar once a week or once a month to review changes in media practices. Otherwise, monitoring gets pushed aside by other activities.

4. Evaluate
The last way to use research that I will mention today is evaluation. This almost goes without saying, but the only way we can become better communicators is by evaluating the effect our communications programs have on their intended target audiences.

How to do this is a subject for another e-Letter.

Tough Year Coming
It's likely to be a tough year for our profession as well as many others. Above, I've tried to offer a number of ways you can not only communicate more effectively, but also demonstrate your effectiveness and value to management.

If you have any questions, please let me know. If you have comments, please leave them on my blog. And if you know anyone who might be interested, please pass this e-Letter along.

# # #

If you'd like updates on developing messages, strengthening relationships and other communications topics once a month, please subscribe to this e-Zine. You can do so here:

http://www.forrestwanderson.com/free.htm

# # #

If you would like to make any comments regarding this e-Letter, please visit my blog at http://forrestwanderson.blogspot.com/ and comment there. I'd love to hear from you.

# # #

I work with organizations going through a change in strategic direction (merger, acquisition, building program, new product launch, change program, etc.) and that are concerned about what will happen with their relationships with key stakeholders (customers, employees, investors) if they send out the wrong, or confusing, messages. After working with me, my clients have a clear understanding of what their messages should be. I also provide them recommendations on other actions they can take to enhance their relationships with stakeholders.

# # #

The Institute for Public Relations, (IPR) is dedicated to the "science beneath the art" of PR. It focuses on PR research and education. If you are interested in the topics I write about, you will almost certainly be interested in IPR. You can find it at http://www.instituteforpr.org/. While you're there, check out the Essential Knowledge Project at http://www.instituteforpr.org/essential_knowledge/.

Best wishes,

Forrest

Forrest W. Anderson
Founding Member
Institute for Public Relations
Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation

Creating CEO Crib Sheets

Here is a research idea you might be able to use to make yourself more valuable to your boss and your position more secure.

In virtually every selling situation, the seller has an advantage if he or she knows as much as possible about the person to whom he or she is selling. Since one of the primary functions of most senior managers is sales, at one point or another almost all of us have been asked to pull together research for our bosses or their bosses.

I've done this working for not-for-profit and for-profit organizations as well as for PR agencies. When I was in senior research positions at GolinHarris International and Burson-Marsteller, it frequently was my department's job to prepare the agency to pitch new business.

However, what I enjoyed most was putting together crib sheets for senior executives at these agencies. Typically, these included the chairman, CEO or regional heads, as they prepared for one-on-one meetings with similar senior executives at other companies that might become customers or partners.

Research Level I
The obvious PR thing to do is to pull together a report on recent media coverage of the company. However, to most senior executives, this is of limited value.

Research Level II
A more comprehensive report, and one of more value to your senior executives might include the following:

• The target company's long- and short-term strategies, especially those that might pertain to your company (such as purchasing strategies)
• Company organization
• Management profiles
  
• Division profiles
  
• The company's recent successes and failures
• What management sees as the organization's strengths and weaknesses
• What management sees as threats and opportunities
• What business and investment analysts see as strengths and weaknesses
• What business and investment analysts see as threats and opportunities for that company as well as the industry

You usually can find the information above in the target company's web site, annual report and filings with the SEC and in reports by investment and business analysts.

Research Level III
One of my first independent consulting assignments was to draft backgrounders for the head of a Fortune 100 company to prepare him to meet his counterparts at companies with which he wanted to create alliances. These alliances would include not only purchasing products from each other, but also doing research together to meet environmental and other regulatory goals.

My report included all of the Level II topics above. But what made the assignment particularly fun was the client wanted to know what questions kept the target CEOs awake at night. It usually is difficult, if not impossible, to find secondary research on this topic. This is probably because CEOs do not want to talk about these topics to the media and analysts. So this part of the report required thinking out of the standard research box a bit.

To do this, I tried to put myself inside the mind of the target CEO. I pulled out my general management text books from business school. I ran through checklists for the main functional areas of accounting, finance, engineering and R&D, production, HR and marketing. I also reviewed the sections on analyzing large international firms, which these target companies were. Then I combined that with what I'd learned through the rest of my research regarding the business environment the target companies were in, the year they had just had and the challenges they faced.

Some of the questions I thought might be keeping these CEOs awake at night were:

• How can I quickly expand our presence in Asia, Africa and Latin America?
• How can I maintain an environmentally positive image around the world?
• How can I get investors to see my company as non-cyclical and increase my P/E ratio?
• What can I do now to cushion the impact of the coming economic downturn? (At the time, the economy was booming, and the year they were coming off of was the best they'd ever had.)
• With the strong returns we've been showing, how can we continue to show improvements? How can we improve our profit margins? How can we demonstrate to Wall Street that we haven't hit the ceiling?
• How can we increase our capacity and throughput, so we can take full advantage of the [then booming] economy and not end up with excess capacity when the economy turns down?
• How can we maintain competitive prices as raw material and fuel costs rise?

I also put in a number of questions I thought the target executive was likely to ask my client executive, considering the businesses each of them were in.

I was uneasy with the section on what kept the CEOs awake at night, because I guessed about them. I didn't know for sure these were their issues. But, based on my understanding of their companies, their recent histories, their current and expected business environments and my general understanding of business, these were the things I thought they'd be worried about.

Results
My client was very happy with these reports. And the part they liked best was the section on what was keeping the CEOs awake at night.

# # #

If you'd like updates on developing messages, strengthening relationships and communications research topics once a month, please subscribe to this e-Zine. You can do so here:

http://www.forrestwanderson.com/free.htm

# # #

If you would like to make any comments regarding this e-Letter, please visit my blog at http://forrestwanderson.blogspot.com/ and comment there. I'd love to hear from you.

# # #

I work with organizations that are going through a change in strategic direction (merger, acquisition, building program, new product launch, change program) and that are concerned about what will happen with their relationships with key stakeholders (customers, employees, investors) if they send out the wrong, or confusing, messages. After working with me they have a clear understanding of what their messages should be. I also provide them recommendations on other actions they can take to enhance their relationships with their stakeholders.

# # #

The Institute for Public Relations (IPR) is dedicated to the "science beneath the art" of PR. It focuses on PR research and education. If you are interested in the topics I write about, you will almost certainly be interested in IPR. You can find it at http://www.instituteforpr.org/. While you're there, check out the Essential Knowledge Project at http://www.instituteforpr.org/essential_knowledge/.

Best wishes,

Forrest

Forrest W. Anderson
Founding Member
Institute for Public Relations
Commission on PR Measurement and Evaluation