Last year, while speaking to a bunch of employee
communicators in Toronto, I had a conversation with a woman who works at a
large bank. We were talking about communication audits—where, among other
things, you take a hard look at what messages you’re sending, what’s missing, whether
your vehicles are working, and how to fix what’s broke.
A good audit has lots of components: interviews with
executives, focus groups with managers and employees, a survey, and an analysis
of your communication vehicles are the most popular tactics.
“Why would I want to go through all that?” this woman asked
me. “Shouldn’t any smart communicator know, instinctively, whether or not what
they are doing is working? And if it ain’t working, shouldn’t we know what we
need to do to fix it? Isn’t that just part of our job description?”
Well . . . yes, I said. And . . . no, I said. To illustrate
why every communicator needs an audit, allow me to tell you The Tale of Two
Mirrors.
As regular readers of this blog know, I am an Alopecian.
That means I have Alopecia, a condition (Alopecians do NOT call it a “disease!”)
that makes your hair fall out. Some people lose patches of hair. Some lose all
the hair from the neck up.
And some, like me, lose everything—all body hair, eyebrows,
everything. When I get out of the shower, I look like a big, fat, shiny, slippery
baby seal.
When I first lost all my hair, it was a little traumatic, and
I used to do stupid shit like draw eyebrows on my face (try doing that after
you’ve had a couple of martinis!). But eventually, I got used to being bald . .
. and now, there’s no way I would take my hair back.
I love being bald. I can shower in 9 seconds if I don’t wash
my feet, and 18 seconds if I do. I feel sorry for all you animals with your gross
pelts of hair that you have to wash and comb and blow dry and straighten and
cut.
But here’s the thing. For the longest time, I thought I was
completely bald. But I’m not! I have faint, wispy, white hairs that grow on my
head . . . but I was unaware of them until about a year ago.
And that’s where the Tale of the Two Mirrors comes in.
In our old apartment, we had two mirrors. The bathroom
mirror and the bedroom mirror. The bathroom mirror was the “good” one.
You know what I mean by that, right? You know how you look
better in some mirrors than in others? Whether it’s the lighting in the room or
the mirror itself, every mirror is a little different.
(For example, for some reason, I always think I look pretty good in
airplane bathroom mirrors, but that might have something to do with the fact
that I am often drunk on airplanes.)
Anyway, in that apartment, I only used the bathroom mirror,
because it was nice to me. The bedroom mirror, on the other hand, was a real
son of a bitch, and I would avert my eyes whenever I walked past it.
But one day, Cindy was taking too long in the shower and I wanted
to see how I looked before going out, so I looked in the bad mirror.
HORRORS!!! For the first time, I saw all these hairs
sticking out every which way from my head!! I don’t know if it was the light in
the room or the angle or the mirror itself . . . but it was awful.
In the good mirror, I looked like a chubby Yul Brynner, all
sleek and polished and cool.
In the bad mirror, I was Larry from the Three
Stooges, or a fat ass Albert Einstein without the mustache. I looked like a
defective Chia pet.
Had I never looked in the bad mirror, I never would have
seen the hair, and never would have started shaving my head. By now, I would
have looked like Gandalf from Lord of the Rings.
Well, to me, a communication audit is a bad mirror. You
think you know your vehicles; you think you know what’s working; you think you
know what’s not working; you think you know what the audience needs; you think
you’re on the same page as your executives.
But there’s a good chance you’re wrong on one or more of
those things. Maybe even all of them. You’ve been looking in the good mirror
for too long. You need to hold the bad mirror up to your communication efforts,
which is what an audit does.
An audit will make you see the warts. The unwanted hairs.
The blemishes and the scars and the acne. And it will show you what you need to
do to fix the problems (and believe me, there are problems. There are always problems.)
The good news is, you don’t have to hire a high-priced
consultant to do a communications audit. You can do it yourself.
In fact, learning how to conduct a do-it-yourself audit is one of
the important components of our new seminar that Cindy and I are doing, with
IABC, titled: Strategic Communication.
We’re going to look at research, strategic planning, tactics
and channels, and measurement. By the end of the day, you’ll have everything
you need—including worksheets, tutorials, sample plans, discussion guides for
focus groups, sample surveys, tons of vehicle best practices (including tons of social media case studies), etc.—to dramatically
improve your communication efforts.
We’re kicking off the seminar series in my hometown,
Chicago, on March 12, at the Allerton Hotel, right on Michigan Avenue. And
Cindy and I are thinking about putting a group together that night to go to
Second City, if you’re interested.
Then, later in the year, we’re going to roll it out to some
other cities. It’s great to work with IABC on this, because the seminar will be
linked to both the Gold Quills and the accreditation process.
You can sign up at the IABC home page, www.iabc.com, or via a direct link here:
Strategic Communication.
Hope to see you there. I should be freshly shaved.
Recent Comments