Communication

Twitterstorms. We’ve all seen firms deluged by them. Online petitions. We’ve all watched as clicktivists click up their numbers. Whether your data’s anecdotal or empirical, that the frequency and speed of campaigns (effective or otherwise) has increased is unarguable. The ease and low cost of publishing and organising means that companies can quickly find themselves facing a crisis.

Some crises are well deserved, while there are others which companies seem to walk into by accident. The trouble VW is mired in is clearly of its own making. However, Lego has faced a couple of crises in recent times either because of long-standing commercial arrangements or a policy of trying not to get drawn into an issue.

When Lego’s partnership with Shell came under scrutiny, at first the company said it would not bow to campaigners. Then, facing repeated high-profile videos of its famous figures drowning in oil, Lego said that it would not renew its licensing deal with the oil giant. More recently, when the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei approached Lego to secure bricks for a new art installation the company refused, saying it did not get involved in politics (although surely the not getting involved position would’ve been to sell him the bricks?).

No more hiding places

In both incidents, Lego did what most corporations do. It tried not to be drawn into an issue. It took an agnostic approach. Companies do this because they like to stay out of the fray. They prefer to focus on the business of doing business. It has been, until very recently, the sensible option.

There are, however, fewer issues on which agnosticism pays off for companies. As the online conversation becomes more shrill and as it moves more quickly from issue to issue, companies will find agnosticism is not always the route to a quiet life. They will have to take a view and state it.

Environmental campaigners have been at the forefront of forcing corporations to move away from the we-don’t-take-a-view attitude. Every company does something positive when it comes to sustainability. Companies have realised that environmental agnosticism is no longer an option. In Lego’s case, it has discovered this means not only what you do to reduce environmental impact, but also who you partner with.

Other campaigners, particularly those focused on social issues, are making headway too. Whether it be ethical supply chains, diversity or gay marriage, agnosticism isn’t the hiding place it once was. And it’s not just activists, either. David Cameron has called for companies to speak out about the benefits of being in the EU. So there’s political pressure to take a position on big issues.

Moving beyond agnosticism

Brand consultants have long had tools to help companies work out what they stand for. First came ‘values’. Often abstract (and, nowadays, normally dull and identical), developing a set of corporate values was a way to help companies really focus on what they stood for and make day-to-day decisions in a brand-consistent way.

Then along came ‘purpose’. Defining a purpose is a way for companies to formalise how they relate to the communities they serve and society in general. A company’s purpose is usually aspirational and talks about a role that’s wider than generating a profit or making widgets.

Purpose is popular for good reason: companies that know their purpose, whose staff understand and believe in it, have a much clearer understanding of why they do what they do and are more quickly able to make decisions.

These companies will also find it easier to take consistent positions on social and other issues, express those positions clearly and, importantly, defend them and themselves.

All you need to know about LinkedIn’s latest attempt to become a more social.

LinkedIn has rolled out a series of changes to its Groups. As with the introduction of LinkedIn posts (the professional social network’s blogging platform), the changes are a move to make LinkedIn much more social.

Groups were the original social element on LinkedIn, a place where people with shared interests could discuss them, but their success has been mixed. Some Groups contain vibrant discussion. Many, however, are ghost towns. Even in the most active groups, a tiny minority maintain the conversation, while the majority sit silently on the sidelines.

Mimicking networks

Many of the changes seek to mimic real world networks. Let’s look at what’s changed and what that means.

All groups are now private groups. You can only read the conversations within a Group if you’re a member. The idea is that members will feel more at ease, knowing what they say can’t be overhead.

Members can approve new members. Know someone in the club? Then you don’t need to wait for a moderator to approve your entry into a Group. This move helps to clear up an important bottleneck.

Pre-moderation is gone. Group members can post what they want and it’ll appear immediately. This clears another bottleneck to free flowing conversation. However, it does open the door to a flood of promotional posts. LinkedIn say any negative effects will be mitigated because they’ve introduced better content filtering. Only time will tell on that front. In the meantime, community managers will need to monitor their groups much more closely.

These changes are supported by a range of design tweaks to the look and feel of Groups, aligning their design to the wider redesign of other parts of LinkedIn. You can also add images to comments – a long overdue addition.

Group managers will have mixed feelings about these changes. In particular, those seeking to operate closed networks on LinkedIn have lost the ability to control Groups as tightly as they might like. Managers will also need to spend more time actively managing Groups. This is good news for LinkedIn, but not so much for time-constrained Group managers.

The cumulative effect of all these changes should make LinkedIn much more social. However, these are structural changes so don’t expect the ghost towns to suddenly come to life.

Stock metaphors are diluting your message.

Stephen Waddington recently published a fun blog post about business jargon. He asked people which bits of business jargon they loved to hate and organised the responses into a structured list.

Social media went wild for it and everyone agreed we hate jargon. And yet it is everywhere. Indeed, it is the commonness of certain phrases that makes them jargon. So how do we free ourselves from its clutches?

A good place to start is stock photography. Just like jargon, every right thinking person hates stock photography. We despise its over-acted poses. We loathe its homogeneity. And, above all, we hate its omnipresence.

The solution to avoiding poor stock imagery is simple: get better images. You can search for images with greater nuance. You can pay more to access a better quality image library. Or, budgets allowing, you can commission original work. Doing these things takes time, money or both.

Browsing through Stephen’s list of jargon, it’s striking how many phrases employ imagery.

Thinking outside of the box
Low hanging fruit
Lipstick on a pig
Blue sky thinking

Our jargon problem is a stock image problem. This one is about the images we conjure with words. As with stock photos, the solution is simple: get better images. Doing so will take time, money or both. But the cost of failing to find better images is an audience that switches off.

Whether in meetings, at conferences or in the various bits of branded content that are churned out every day, stock metaphors lose you eyeballs and ears and, most importantly, the minds they are connected to.