CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS – MORE THAN DIDDLING AROUND ON SOCIAL MEDIA
(Posted 16th January 2015)
Recent major corporate events in the aviation industry got me thinking and comparing, how some airlines pull out all the stops and all the right stops too while others, almost in a take it or leave it attitude – one no longer employed CorpComms Manager of an airline in the region said as much in a mail last year – seem to have embraced the misguided approach that as long as they put their stuff on their Facebook pages, all is well.
Well, it is not. Of course do different airlines have different communication strategies in place. Some do their thing directly, close up and personal and Qatar Airways is a fine example of how their multilevel and multimedia engagement with the scribes yields excellent results for them. Others of the Gulf carriers use PR agencies serving a particular region or country and those, clearly under close supervision and feeling the competitive heat, equally go out of their way to make sure that news reach the intended recipients, as and when such news happen.
RwandAir’s small is beautiful approach too works well and from their PR and Corporate Communications team members to the CEO are they approachable and respond, telling what can be told on the record and what cannot yet be told linked to a time frame for publication, known as news embargo.
Fastjet successfully uses a PR agency AND engages directly with the media, making sure that key publications, in print and on the web, have all the facts at hand when things happen. For all those, a presence on the social media is just an additional element of being ‘visible’, just one link in the chain of tools they employ to stay in touch with their media community and the public at large.
And then there are those who apparently have delinked themselves from their PR agencies, where the wells of information have run entirely dry and which think that as long as they diddle with their Facebook pages, all is in order, because, after all, you can read it on Facebook.
My advice to them would be to take PR and Corporate Communications more seriously, engage or rather re-engage the media with a multi-layered and multi-pronged approach and return to the basics of PR. This requires personal relations, personal contacts, personalized mails and the periodic phone calls to make sure that those who wield the mighty pen stay buttered up, less in a material sense of course than in being kept close and in good terms and most important, they stay informed.
There is nothing worse for us media people than read about breaking news elsewhere and not be in the frontline of telling the story and it does influence ones mood how news are reported, especially when it is bad news for the corporates, at which point they suddenly do remember where to go and get some positive spin out of things.
New Year, New PR and New CorpComms Game? Time will no doubt tell and the amount of news you find here from the aviation industry will also tell the story as to who is sitting on their hands, playing around on Facebook and thinks that is all it takes and who isn’t. Watch this space!
