Can you measure corporate communications?

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Yet another successful web management round table session has taken place. This time the topic for the presentation was how to measure online corporate communications. This was discussed along with other topics important to the participants, for example resources and budgets, stakeholder management, content strategy and corporate social media.

The H&H Web Management Round Table is intended for communications and web managers for larger international companies to meet and share their experiences and challenges with each other.

Social media – going from “what to do” to “how to manage”

Social media has been a reoccurring topic throughout the three years of round table meetings, and so also this time. The angle of social media has slowly gone from “what is this” via “is this something for us?” and “where do we begin” to “how can the communications department handle more and more channels with the same resources”.

Business goals should lead the way for social media goals

Although marketing and communications departments in the end strive towards the same goals, i.e. the business goals, they have different focus on how to get there.

Marketing is mainly directed at the end customers while the focus for corporate communications is target groups such as investors, shareholders, journalists, and job seekers etc – to improve the corporate brand and follow regulations so that stakeholders have the correct information.

This difference creates a challenge for the communication departments, which was quite obvious in the round table session. Not only is it about how to measure and prove that it is long term valuable, it is also about how to manage with limited resources.

Social media guidelines

One of the good things about social media is that it is easy to see what others are doing and to consider if those activities might be relevant for your company as well.

Another thing is the issue of being transparent. Social media guidelines can for example be found on a number of corporate websites – one company that recently launched theirs is TNT.

The link to TNT’s social media guidelines, available in 6 languages can be found here: http://group.tnt.com/aboutus/ourbusiness/businessprinciples/socialmediaguidelines/index.aspx

Measuring corporate communications just as difficult online as offline

The topic of the presentation that H&H hosted was “ROI on online corporate communications”. This brought up not only the difficulties of measuring online, but also how to measure your success of corporate communications in general.

 The presentation did not give a template for how to measure your company’s ROI, but guided companies in how to find out what is relevant to measure. The end result of any communications should be related to the company’s objectives which in most cases has something to do with the value created in the company or the value that others set on the company.

Next round table

We thank the participants for taking the time to attend and look forward to the next time!

The presentation about ROI can be found here: