The speed of communication continues to accelerate, and as it does, the pressure on public relations professionals to execute quick, accurate and authentic outreach to customers and stakeholders is on. However, a company can be prepared for these challenges by developing some core competencies.
5 Competencies of Connected Companies
- In The Loop: An ability to cater to an heightened customer expectation for a company to listen and respond in real time
- Nimble: A process in place to incrementally release anticipated information, instead of waiting for everything to be perfect
- Responsive: The ability to accelerate solutions to customer problems
- Organized: Tightly integrated internal collaboration to bypass antiquated bureaucracy
- Accountable: Accountability by internal players to both the business objectives of the company and the needs of the stakeholder
Clearly, there are a lot of tools out there that can facilitate this process and help to make it possible to meet these goals. For instance, blogs can be a great facilitator of two-way conversations. However, there are a myriad of other online forums where such communications are possible. For some ideas, you can read my post at Now Is Gone on Social Media in Seven Boxes, or you can take a look at the excellent Conversation Prism put together by Brian Solis and designer Jesse Thomas.
And to keep up with all of the online chatter, there are a myriad of monitoring and measurement tools, not to mention the free Google alerts tools and Technorati's search tool.
The bottom line is that the needs of the communication should drive the use of the tools, and not the other way around.
What other competencies do you think companies must have to succeed in a connected world? What do you think about the idea that tools should serve the needs of the communication and not be the reason for them?
