The EuroComm Blog 2008

by Velin Velkov

Lately I have been thinking about how our profession will look like 5 to 10 years from now. If we look back within the same time horizon we will see how many things have changed. We now have so many new communications channels – wikis, blogs, podcasts and so on. They have profoundly influenced the way we communicate. Who can predict how communicators will work in 10 years? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing, however, will remain the same – communication is all about human beings.

From my experience working in the software business, I can testify to the power of the innovative technology to revolutionalize the way companies operate and communicate. This is important to us, because we professional communicators have to innovate too. The reason is that should we not do it, we will be hardly pressed to get our message across. Take employee communication for example. Unlike in the past, our employees have the opportunity to plug in to alternative communication channels, which may or may not support the official company line. For this reason we start blogs, wikis and all those social-media platforms. Again, the key word is social, meaning being interactive with other humans.

In my practice I often see communication for communication’s sake. Well, the results are far from sterling. If you get your strategic basics wrong, the coolest technology will not help your professional reputation. The challenge, therefore, is not to get carried away by the possibilities offered by innovation, but to harness this innovation in the achievement of your communication goals.

The role of professional bodies like the IABC is to drive forward innovative thinking in our profession. I see the upcoming EuroComm conference as one of the venues for this. One of the good things at these conferences is the possibility of getting together with like-minded professionals from throughout the region and even from other continents. As a volunteer leader of IABC this lets me stay in touch to the association’s members and reminds me of the importance of the human element in communication.

I hope to see you all in Barcelona.

Velin Velkov is the IABC Europe & Middle East Chairman and the Communications Manager in SAP Research, Heidelberg, Germany.

by Marc Wright

Preparing for Barcelona my thoughts return to the last EuroComm which was held in Dublin November 2006. I looked at my notes from that trip:

Ramon Ollé is former CEO of Epson Europe and the Executive President of the Business Engineering School at Ramon Lull University, and he addressed us on the issue of ethics. He made some key points.

“Behind every language is a culture - just because you can speak their language, it does not mean that you speak their culture……For years we have been sending Xmas Cards to our Japanese colleagues without realising that for them 25th December is just a normal working day.”

Ramon had just a couple of slides - and this was the main one. It’s the Chinese ideogram for ‘Ethics’. The image 2nd down on the right a a human eye and the cross above denotes the number 10. The curvy image bottom left denotes ‘heart’ while the No 1 on the left means ‘work’.

As with all ideograms the meaning is multi-layered. On the surface it means ‘communicate as though 10 eyes are observing you.’ It’s the equivalent of the old PR advice “never say anything you would not be happy reading on the front page of The Times. But then Ramon peeled away another layer. It can mean ‘look with 10 eyes before you communicate’, i.e. truly understand all your audiences before you open your mouth. I prefer this advice particularly when you include that heart, which adds the instruction to communicate with and from your emotions.

Not bad - it would make a good logo for any communication agency.

John Simmons of The Writer and author of Dark Angels told the Guinness Story – appropriate as the brewery is round the corner and most of the delegates had visited the splendid Guinness Storehouse – all of them had tasted some of the black stuff on the pub crawl up and down the Liffey the night before.
One of the great ideas he described was the propagation of the 1759 emails. That’s the date the Guinness Brewery was established by Arthur Guinness (who rather presciently signed a 9000 year lease on the premises for £45 a year). But in the 24 hour clock 17:59 is also the time on a Friday when employees prepare to head off for the weekend. Hence the 17:59 emails that are sent out with a pithy story about an event from the last week to grab the imagination.

From these simple stories whole marketing campaigns have been inspired, including this brilliant ad from Guinness South Africa. (Click on the image to read the copy).

John is currently writer-in-residence at Kings Cross Underground Station. Look out for him next time you switch trains on the Northern Line.

by Yang-May Ooi

Not so long ago, when you organised a conference - especially an international one - it was a matter of course that you’d have a conference website to act as a portal for conference information, queries, accommodation and registration. Having a presence like that on the web has become a given. You don’t even question it.

Having a conference blog is a relatively new idea that’s probably only really taken hold during the last year to 18 months, with US conferences leading the way. Silvia Cambie and I spoke about “the conference website and blog” in one breath from the start as we talked about all the things we had to do to organise the EuroComm conference in Barcelona. We were comfortable with the idea of having a blog because we’re both bloggers.

Getting comfortable with an idea. It’s a key factor, I think, in whether or not a concept or a tool actually gets used by the wider world beyond the first adaptors. We just have to think back to the early 1990s, just 10-15 years ago, when businesses were trying to assess whether it was worth investing in word processors and computers. I remember joining a law firm in that time when the secretaries were still using electric typewriters and were stressing out whenever I asked them to make a change to the text of a document - because it meant pretty much typing the whole thing out again. Now, word processing is a necessity - and legal documents have unfortunately ballooned to hundreds of pages in some cases….

Back then, Tim Berners-Lee had only just invented the World Wide Web and hyperlinks so it would be another few years before businesses would get comfortable with the idea that a business website was a good thing to have. In 1995, the law firm I was working for did not have a website yet. In 1998, it seemed a daring thing for me as an individual to acquire my own URL domain name and have a website for my novels - only the biggest names in writing had websites back then. Now you can pick one up for under £10 a year and parents are even buying domain names for their children in the way that they would reserve a place for their kids at the best schools the moment the little darlings are born.

While talking to many business people and communications professionals, I’ve had a sense that there is still a residual uncertainty and even resistance to engaging in social media for business purposes. But overall, I am also seeing more and more businesses and enterprises start to use interactive online tools, even if it a small step like signing up to Facebook. My sense is that before long, the idea of social media will become more comfortable in people’s minds and it will become ubiquitous to have at least a blog alongside business websites - if nothing else, used as a way to add updates of company news.

What do you think? Do you think blogs will never work for some businesses? Or do you think that blogs are “so fifteen minutes ago”? Please add a comment and share your views.

Photo: thanks to ~aidan from flickr.com under Creative Commons Licence

by Yang-May Ooi

This is a team blog by volunteer team of communicators from across Europe and the Middle East, all with different areas of expertise and interests. We hope to bring you a range of interesting and topical blog posts on the theme of Innovation through Communication over the next few months as we come up to the EuroComm Conference in February 2008.

Blogging Team

We have a core group bloggers (bios in the About this Blog page):

Yang-May Ooi, communications & social media consultant, ZenGuide (UK)
Giles Colbourne, web usability expert, cxpartners (UK)
Marc Wright, internal communications expert, simply-communicate.com (UK)
Kevin Keohane, brands expert, SAS (UK)
Angie Macdonald, web writer & blog management specialist, ZenGuide (UK)

Guest Bloggers

We’ll also be posting articles by guest bloggers, including posts by some of speakers who will be giving presentations at the EuroComm Conference. So far, our guest blogger line-up looks like this:

Ian Andersen, Head of the Communication and Information Unit, European Commission (Belgium)
Phylidda Bar, Independent Public Relations and Communications Professional (UK)
Sam Berrisford, Senior Consultant, Change and Internal Communications, Hill & Knowlton (UK)
Ulrike Bleistein, Head of Pharma Informatics Communications, Hoffman La Roche (Switzerland)
Silvia Cambie, business communications expert, Chanda Communications and President, EuroComm Organising Board (UK)
Martin Crocker, Marketing Communications Manager, Gemalto (France)
Ulrich Gartner, Vice-President of Communications Europe, AB Electrolux (Sweden)
Rauf Hameed, Communication and Environment Manager, Tetra Pak Arabia (Saudi Arabia)
Hanna Kalla, Senior Consultant, Change and Internal Communications, Hill & Knowlton (UK)
Andrew Riley, assurance reporting and communications specialist, Harrison Riley and President, IABC UK (UK)
Velin Velkov, President of IABC Europe and Middle East Region (Bulgaria)

I’ll be updating this list from time to time as our guest list grows.

We’d like to hear from you if you have an issue you’d like to discuss with fellow communicators and business professionals along the theme of Innovation and Communication. To submit an article, please contact us via the Submit an Article page.

We welcome article submissions from business communicators on the theme of innovation and communication, to reflect the theme of the EuroComm Conference 2008, Innovation through Communication. You do not need to be a member of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). For more information about this blog and the conference, please go to the “About this Blog” page.

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