Leading engagement

It’s no surprise that the attributes required for effective leadership are those required for effective stakeholder engagement. My website, Stakeholder Engagement offers resources for developing capability for stakeholder engagement. Alongside specific stakeholder engagement capabilities, I have identified leadership, organisational learning, communication and adaptive capacity (change) as four essential capabilities to support enhanced engagement.

Compare this to the findings of the Hay Group 2010 Best Companies for Leadership research. The top twenty companies collectively, from General Electric at number one, to BASF are huge, and therefore have potential to do a lot of good by modelling leadership excellence.

Hay Group’s Ruth Wagemen pinpoints the practices the twenty best companies are more likely to do than the rest of us:

  • “developing structures and practices that locate the best practices wherever they are, and whoever has them, and make sure that that’s what’s getting used throughout the organisation”
  • they were “far more likely than everyone else to have an ex-pat programme that is intended to help people learn how to operate really effectively in a different culture and to lead effectively in that context”
  • “were more likely to actively collect the best practices in leadership development throughout their subsidiaries, throughout the world, and to harvest those lessons and to share those practices with the rest of the organisation”
  • “were much more likely to pay men and women the same, for the same kind of work.”

Organisational learning to the fore

What is particularly encouraging is the strong thread of organisational learning through these findings. The idea has been around for a long-time, but is yet to become mainstream. Bob Garrett relates how organisational learning emerged after World War Two, with the work of Reg Revans, Fritz Schumacher and Jacob Bronowski. Chris Argyris gave it impetus and Peter Senge popularised it in The Fifth Discipline. It appears that organisational learning’s potential is being tapped in these trail-blazing companies. Peter Senge urges us to “stop thinking like mechanics and to start acting like gardeners”. One interpretation of this, is to leave behind industrial age practices of organising and management, and embrace the more organic and emergent processes of the knowledge age.

Businesses can scour their internal environment for knowledge as is modelled by the top 20, and seek learning from external stakeholders too. Fostering stakeholder engagement capability can only benefit this process.

Hay Group links

Organisational learning links

Communication and engagement part 4: listening

Communication is a core skill for stakeholder engagement.Earlier blogs in this series introduced the communication spectrum and looked in more depth at its engagement and appreciation aspects. This post explores how listening fits with the communication spectrum.

Listening, as with communication, is generic. The communication spectrum helps us to be more specific about the type of communication we want to use, and the same principle applies with listening. For those who haven’t had some sort of coaching or training in listening (the majority of us?), listening is undifferentiated. Some may have learned about active listening. Part of the problem is that good listening, while outwardly passive, takes a lot of focus and discipline, and it’s a little hard to simultaneously listen, and stand back an observe yourself in action.

The neutral zone

Using the communication spectrum, we can identify three zones of listening. In the neutral zone, our listening can be passive and possibly not very effective. We might be disinterested or bored. If our interest is piqued, we might either move towards being more engaged or, on the other hand toward debate and conflict.

The red zone

If our listening heads south towards the red zone we begin to listen for what is wrong. You have probably caught yourself doing this – what started off as a conversation, at some stage became a contest. A clear sign is that you find yourself trying to score points and the communication takes on the pattern of strike and counter-strike of a rally in a tennis match. In formal debates, speakers have their own material to present, but are also listening to find fault in the arguments of the opposition. Debate in our democracies unfortunately operates on this premise, often yielding more heat than light.

The green zone

If the communication heads for the green zone, the listener will draw on skills of rapport building, empathic listening or active listening. For some, these skills have developed non-consciously, others work at them. Expressing appreciation to others needs to be preceded by either observing, or listening for what is right about that person.

Listening for engagement

Communication skills are a core competence for any organisation aspiring to better stakeholder engagement. Improving staff communication skills, in either listening, speaking or writing, equips your staff to engage better internally and externally. One skill especially relevant is empathy. When working with people on engagement processes such as stakeholder mapping, or identifying materiality, I encourage them to think from the stakeholder’s perspective. It takes some practice – it is very easy for people to revert to their own perspective. I suspect this is because most of us are keen to maximise advantage for our organisation. Stakeholder communication calls us to be more nimble and inclusive in our thinking, listening and speaking.

Communication and engagement part 3 – Appreciation

Engagement and appreciation are dimensions of the communication spectrum (introduced in part one of this series). Fostering them will improve communication generally and better equip your organisation for stakeholder engagement. Part three looks at appreciation.

Genuine and heartfelt appreciation is at the apex of communication. It facilitates our relationships, building enduring bonds. It’s a potent antidote for complacency and rejuvenates long-term workplace and personal relationships.

The TV series “Undercover Boss” exemplifies appreciation. In a typical episode the “boss” – usually a CEO or owner engages in low-level jobs. They get to talk to a range of staff and use their engagement skills to establish rapport and get to know them on a personal level. The show finishes with the boss revealing their true identity and expressing profound and specific appreciation for the work these people have done, and, more importantly, who they are.

I have seen both the U.K. and U.S. versions of the show and notice, that across diverse cultures, the responses are the same. The impact of appreciation and acknowledgement on the employees appears profound. Universal human emotions are common currency across the diverse cultures represented. And the experience invariably has a profound impact on the boss.

Of course these programmes are edited for impact and are formulaic, but please suspend any cynicism you may have and check out this extract from a show. (apologies for the ad. at the front)

Positive psychology

The disciplines of positive psychology and appreciative inquiry provide the conceptual framework and tools to support appreciation. Positive psychology identifies the negative bias in our thinking – understandable in an evolutionary context shaping risk aversion responses. In the twentieth century we invented hundreds of words to describe deficit and dysfunction (and built industries around these). Thus, in our private and organisational lives, we are naturally inclined to the negative. While acknowledging this, positive psychology aspires “to find and nurture genius and talent.”

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, identifies that those “experiencing positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative ones leads people to a tipping point beyond which they naturally become more resilient to adversity”. This calls us to be more aware of our emotions and look for the positive around us. Finding those things that we are grateful for, is the portal to appreciation. Viktor Frankl, in his inspiring Man’s Search for Meaning, reveals how this can happen in the most extreme environments:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken form a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way” (pg 65 to 66).

Appreciative inquiry

As people respond to the myriad things that can go wrong, the default mode of operation in organisations can be fault-finding and problem-solving. David Cooperrider and others advocate an appreciative approach. “…problem-solving approaches are notorious for placing blame and generating defensiveness. ‘They sap your energy and tax your mind, and don’t advance the organization’s evolution beyond a slow crawl’”.

By contrast appreciative inquiry advocates that we look for what is working well and magnify it. This is akin to the idea that the racing-car driver is best to focus on the road ahead rather than the wall. Appreciative inquiry can shape strategy or operations by selecting an affirmative topic, such as “where are our best examples of delivering a great customer experience?” and then working through the four stages of inquiry – discovery, dream, design and destiny (see below). Imagine the intensification of engagement and potential for positive change made possible by this process.

Caveat: appreciation works best with proximity

I believe that engagement is the gateway to appreciation, or a pre-requisite (I welcome your thinking on this). In situations where peoples’ voice is not given space for expression, appreciation will be a rare commodity. In many organisations islands of appreciation can develop amongst colleagues and teams in close (or virtual) proximity. The challenge is to make it more pervasive and immune to boundaries. And appreciation is not ingratiation. The organisation phenomena that fosters primitive “kiss up, kick down” behaviour creates the antithesis of appreciation.

Generating appreciation

Here are simple steps to increase appreciation

  1. Check your filters – audit what you pay attention to in different situations.
  2. Notice what good/great/beautiful about a friend, loved one, contact or colleague.
  3. Express appreciation addressing specific behaviours or attitudes rather than general compliments.

What has your experience of appreciation been – I would love to hear your story.

Additional resources:

Appreciative inquiry

Positive psychology

Communication and engagement part 2 – conceptual tools for engaging

In part one of this blog, I introduced the communication spectrum. In part two we will look at some conceptual tools to support an engagement ethos.

The communication spectrum prompts us to ensure most of our communication is either engaging or appreciating. Here are a few tools to support engagement practices. In part three we will take a closer look at appreciation.

Engagement infers establishing rapport and mutual understanding with others, supported by communication skills, such as active listening, that you are probably already familiar with.

Suzanne O’Rourke and Sandy Barnett’s shared meaning model

This simple and elegant model shows us that engagement happens when our understanding of an issue is consistent with the person we are communicating with. As engagement deepens, we can expect the overlapping area of shared meaning to grow.

David Rock’s levels of focus

In his book Quiet Leadership, David Rock identifies 5 levels of focus as in the diagram here. As with the communication spectrum, it has a horizon, and we need to be mindful that staying beneath the horizon too long is not good for communication. How often do you encounter those who tend to spend too much time communicating detail, problems and drama? Being mindful of the level of focus helps us to refocus on vision. This should ensure your communication is more engaging, especially when the vision expressed is relevant and inspiring for both parties. The key here is mindfulness – being able to be engaged in the communication, while at the same time being aware of the communication dynamics. This is no easy task, but comes easier with practice.

The Glaser’s P.R.E.S. model

Peter and Susan Glaser teach a four-step model to facilitate communication. It is especially useful to enable a group of people to each identify and communicate something of importance to them – it enables lots of voices to be heard. Each participant gets a minute in total to make a point, support it with a reason, provide a brief example and quickly summarise. Try it in busy meetings, and to draw out the essence of someone’s thinking.

Stephen Covey’s emotional bank account

You may be aware of this idea from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Think of your communication as a transaction. Each time you communicate positively, you are making deposits in the other person’s emotional bank account. But when you criticise, or argue, you are making a withdrawl. This concepts illustrates how continued withdraws will soon “bankrupt” a relationship. The best way to prevent this is to make frequent deposits.

These concepts are simple but profound. Imagine how your workplace would change if there was solid intention and action to embed these engagement practices. If you think your communication has been aligned with these models, please leave a comment and let us know how it has made a difference.

Communication and engagement, part one – the communication spectrum

The term “communication” embraces the range of human interaction. Being more precise about the type of communication we want to enhance, enables us to better evaluate the quality of our communication, and move the organisation forward with specific communication skills, such as engagement.

Communication is interaction. Messages are given and received verbally and non-verbally. When people ask for “more communication” what specifically do they mean? Such a request is very broad and wide-open to interpretation. Here is a model that I call the communication spectrum. It represents a range of communication flavours that we might encounter in our most intimate relationships, our families, communities and workplaces.

At the top of the spectrum in the green zone are appreciation and engagement. We want more of these for effective communication to foster the development of the important relationships in our lives. Talk is in the neutral range of the spectrum. It can range from the more positive manifestations such as dialogue, (inferring an exchange) through to monologue (inferring communication with a dominant party).

The red zone is where our communication can go wrong, and so often does. Debate is ok, but not when the contest is more important than the communication. Conflict can be very productive, but it also depletes us. And communication is really heading for the red zone when someone withdraws, seeing no point in further exchanges, or a lack of safety. Both physical and verbal abuse are communication, and neither serves any useful purpose.

This model provides an easy to understand tool to evaluate the quality of our communication. We can simply ask: Is this communication above, or below, the horizon? Or, how much of my time do I spend above the horizon? What would happen if I spent more time in engagement and appreciation?

Effective stakeholder engagement will happen in a workplace communication climate where engagement is valued, not just as a skill to use with external stakeholders, but as a predominant way of communicating. In part two of this post, we will look at ways to foster this skill.

Appreciation is not ingratiation – where an underling curies favour in a transactional manner. It is more the result of experiencing empathy for others, being grateful for their contribution and gaining insights into their world. Thus appreciation is a skill that supports engagement.

So what is the quality of communication like in your key relationships? And, where it is needed, how can you move it above the horizon?

Note that the categories here are very broad. Others could be included. Do you see any major omissions?

Stakeholder mapping

Stakeholder mapping is a key process for formalising your stakeholder engagement. Follow this four step process to establish a stakeholder map. Using a matrix to rate the factors that determine the relevance of each stakeholder group will provide another perspective on your business.

AccountAbility’s AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard specifies:

“In order to design stakeholder engagement processes that work, engagement owners need a clear understanding of who the relevant stakeholders are and how and why they may want to engage. The engagement owners need to understand not only the stakeholder group but also the individual stakeholder representatives.”

How you achieve this will, to some degree, will be determined by the size of your organisation. Assuming you don’t have huge resources at your disposal, what I suggest here is a pragmatic four step way to map stakeholders.

1.    Determine the factors that you will use to rate each stakeholder group. These might include:

  • statutory, or other responsibilities
  • their influence on your performance
  • your impact, or potential impact on them
  • geographical proximity,
  • their dependence on your business
  • any existing formal representation they may have on your business’s board or other committees and working parties
  • their relevance to your strategic intent
  • the potential for creating or enhancing shared value.

Select the factors that are most relevant in your first attempt. I especially recommend you include the last – creating or enhancing shared value. This is the factor that most aligns your stakeholder engagement with the win-win orientation of Sustainability 2.0.

2.   Create a matrix, with space for your stakeholder names in the first

broad stakeholder categories

column, and the factors you have chosen in the top row. In your first attempt, brainstorm to identify a list of stakeholders and then rank each factor, using a numerical scale, for each stakeholder group. I suggest a scale of 0 (no relevance) to 3 (high relevance). You might want to weight those factors that are critical so the numbers are potentially higher, but I recommend you start with unweighted factors to keep it simple – it will work. Here’s an example.

3.   Sort the matrix so stakeholders are ranked with those scoring highest at the top. Use a one-page matrix to consult with your colleagues (any more than one page makes the process too unwieldy). In meetings, conversations and workshops get your colleagues to rank stakeholders to establish a ranking that has broad consensus internally.

4.   Indentify your top 10 or so stakeholders and focus on these for the first year of formal engagement. This will pilot your processes and help to focus your engagement efforts with a range of stakeholders, and hopefully get some runs on the board. As you engage, you will unearth other stakeholders. In subsequent years, include stakeholders in this process and build from the initial 10 to a larger number.

As with other stakeholder engagement processes, some staff will find rating stakeholders challenging, as it requires them to consider their world from their stakeholder’s perspective. Expect this shift of perspective to be the first of many benefits from this process.

Fence post or tree? A metaphor for engagement

A fence post and a tree are both anchored in the earth. But they achieve it in totally different ways. A fence post is typically made out of wood, or perhaps concrete. If it is wood, it may be chemically treated to protect it from the organisms of decay in the soil. It is held fast either by compacted earth, or concrete and sits in the earth in attempted isolation.

In contrast, here is Guy Murchie’s elegant and insightful description of a tree root.

If you are among those who think of roots as nothing but dull appendages sleeping peacefully in the stuffy dirt under a plant, you may be interested to know of their real adventures while aggressively hunting for water, air and mineral foods, which means fighting many a pitched battle against competing roots or animals, intermingled with making friendly, constructive deals with rocks, sociable moulds, worms, insects and, more and more frequently, man. At the tip of each advancing thread of root is a root cap, a sort of pointed shoe or shovel made of tough, barklike, self-lubricating stuff that the root pushes ahead of it and replaces constantly by cambium cell division inside as the outside is worn away and turned into slippery jelly by passing stones, teeth, running water or other antagonists. But the tiny root cap is only the first of several specialized parts which, working together, enable the root to steer its zigzag or spiral course, skirting serious obstacles, compromising with offensive substances, judiciously groping for grips on the more congenial rocks, secreting powerful acids to dissolve the uncongenial ones, heading generally downward in search of moisture and minerals while ever careful not to run completely out of air. (The Seven Mysteries of Life, page 46).

Morton Bay Fig (image from Land Lounge)

Extending the metaphor – extending the reach

To extend the metaphor even further, consider mycorrhiza – fungi that establish mutualistic (or symbiotic) relationships with plant roots. Their microscopic mycelia effectively extend the range of roots in their search for water and nutrients. In exchange, the host plant provides its “suppliers” the products of photosynthesis. This “shared value” relationship renders the plant more drought tolerant and disease resistant while providing the fungi with exotic foodstuffs from distant climes.

While the fence post can only support a limited load, from small beginnings the tree can grow to its genetic potential. Its engaged root system provides the platform for a stunning range of diverse and beautiful aerial structures. I am in awe of the engineering feats of trees such as the Morton Bay fig that sprout branches growing tens of metres parallel to the ground.

Many companies are in the process of transformation from the fence-post like relationship with their environment to the organic model so ably described by Guy Murchie. Walmart, for example, the target of justifiable hostility in the past, is taking herculean steps towards sustainability. It is influencing its massive supply chain to do so much better.

The parallels to be drawn from this metaphor are numerous – please share your insights.

Organising for engagement

Organisations that engage well, are generally doing well (see my online stakeholder engagement post). So how do we embed engagement processes into organisational design? As organising around hierarchy was a core process of industrial age organisations, engaging is a core process of 21st Century knowledge age organisations. This calls for a reorganisation of how we work. From this perspective, if we strip organisations down to essentials, there are three core functions:

  • production of goods or services
  • engagement (internal and external)
  • support (e.g. leadership, management, finance)

The engagement ethos must displace older patterns of relating, and reorganising around this structure will help that to happen. Some functions that are clearly engagement functions are marketing, public relations, customer service and communications. Others, such as information systems could be positioned as either engagement, or support.

Leadership implications

For smaller organisations, especially commercial operations, this could translate easily to a three-person leadership team. Larger organisations is where it gets really interesting. Eric McNutty and Rupert Davis in the December 2010 Harvard Business Review ask, “Should the C-Suite have a green seat?” They discuss the relative merits of having a Chief Sustainability Officer, such as SAP’s Peter Graf. While I believe that stakeholder engagement is a function of sustainability, perhaps sustainability shouldn’t be partitioned off, but rather should be a guiding value of every organisational function, championed by the CEO. Companies that are successfully championing sustainability, such as Interface have a strong CEO or executive team driving it.

If sustainability is the goal, engagement is a means of achieving the goal. As discussed before, engagement represents a new way of relating. While sustainability calls us to rethink how we sustain our environment, society and economic well being, engagement calls us to rethink how we relate with one another – so fundamental to, and vital for, our survival and well-being.

So a Chief Engagement Officer would be a great place to start (its just unfortunate that the acronym is CEO).

Marketing, public relations and customer services

Positioning marketing, public relations and customer services as engagement processes should reorient them in most organisations. In many organisations these functions still have a “hunter-gatherer” approach – go out and score a new customer or fight off competitors. Securing new customers gets more attention than retaining existing customers. Engaging infers a longer-term orientation and creating relationships rather than merely completing transactions. For example, Zappos uses its call centre to engage and as a source of information and opportunity to create a relationship. They have no scripts, quotas or call time limits.

What do you think of the production, engagement, support model? Are there functions that wouldn’t fit? And where would you position human resources?

Stakeholder engagement and community building

Nascent engagement processes emerging in companies around the globe mirror community building dynamics happening in wider society. Both represent an epochal change in the way we communicate. And as we recognise the profundity and pervasiveness of this change, the principles that underpin these global changes have the potency to inform and guide our engagement efforts in our local contexts. We will never go back to how we were.

Mankind collectively is approaching a state of maturity, never seen before on the planet. We are emerging from a turbulent adolescence to adulthood. The communication of our collective childhood and adolescence was (and to a large extent, still is) characterised by conflict and contention and occurred in societal structures that created privilege and power for an elite. Some of that residual power flowed, then trickled, down the ranks. Can you think of a period of our history where this wasn’t the case? If you can, I imagine you will find it was an aberration from the norm.

The communication of engagement

As we started to formalise the study of communication, the first models that emerged, post-World War Two, were transmission models of communication.  These presented communication as “getting the message” and focussed on external noise that impeded communication flow. The complexity of the people involved in communication wasn’t really factored in. There can be no true communication where there is an imbalance of power.

A contemporary model of communication that better equips us for engagement and the profound changes referred to above is Susan O’Rourke and Sandy Barnett’s shared meaning model. Here, true communication is that intersection in the understanding of two parties.

shared meaning

As our mutual understanding develops, the area of intersection grows. This model aligns nicely with the engagement ethos, applying to our workplaces and communities.

This blog has focussed on the business world, but parallel engagement processes can be seen in communities and nations around the world. People are finding greater cohesiveness in neighbourhoods, crises are invoking a unified response in effected communities and the widespread protests in the Middle East sees people revolting against old models of power.

Community building

Christchurch’s horrific earthquake has bought out the best in the community. There have been two parallel responses, the impressive institutional response from government and NGOs, and the inspirational grass roots response. Among the latter are the Student Volunteer Army and the “Farmy Army”. These two groups have emerged independently to rid the suburbs of an estimated 260,000 tonnes of silt generated by liquefaction. The Student Volunteer Army, in teams from 5 to 1000, has to date completed over 1,500 jobs logged on their website by needy Christchurch citizens. The opportunity connect with fellow human beings in a time of crisis, I suspect will be life-changing both for those receiving the help, and the young people so freely giving of themselves. A spokesman for the volunteer army, Louis Brown, described the phenomena to TV3’s Mike McRoberts “An incredible effort; people stepping up, taking leadership, building trust with people that’s not necessarily earned but given to each other in a matter of hours is incredible stuff”.  The images of the Student Volunteer Army marching the streets also serves to soften negative stereotypes of young people.

The student volunteer army on the streets of Christchurch (from TVNZ – click here for the YouTube video)

Another development that may well have a more long-lasting impact is the development of neighbourhood forums. The Rebuild Christchurch website offers a tool for people to build an online community, based on their neighbourhood. Hopefully we are emerging from the nadir of decades of dislocation in our suburban bubbles to rediscover our neighbourhoods.

Engagement lessons

What are the engagement lessons that we can glean from these events?

  • While government/authority support is vital, grass-roots initiatives can mobilise people quickly for the community’s benefit.
  • The burden of cost is reduced as communities become more self-reliant and resilient.
  • Tools of technology facilitate engagement and community building.
  • The “armies” formed themselves and didn’t need to be “empowered”. Democracies enable this – most organisations don’t.

From these lessons we can distil some principles and values to guide our engagement aspirations – but I will leave you to do that☺. I would appreciate hearing through comments how this relates to where you work.

Online stakeholder engagement – making the most of social media

How big is your company’s digital footprint – your online presence? As your digital footprint grows, your potential for online engagement grows with it. Ask yourself:

  • What are the interactive features of our website? How are we engaging? How transparent are we?
  • Do we have a LinkedIn group? How many of our staff are engaged there? Are we using Linked in to advertise jobs or link with other relevant industry groups?
  • Do we have a company presence on Facebook and Twitter? Are we monitoring what people are saying about us and how are we responding? How many followers do we have? Is our CEO leading the way?
  • Do we have a blog? What is our focus?

Growing your digital footprint, is a cost-effective way to enhance your brand. According to David Edelman, (in December 2010’s Harvard Business Review) up to 90% of a company’s marketing spend goes to advertising and retail promotions – “yet the single most powerful impetus to buy is often someone else’s advocacy”. If building customer loyalty grows sales – we can expect that building stakeholder loyalty, or at least engagement, will build your social capital.

Rather than build the case for enhancing you web presence, I now want to focus on two avenues to achieve greater online engagement.

Facebook

Nearly 20 million people “like” Starbucks providing the company with a platform to build their brand. Loyal fans promote their products without being prompted – the “mountain coming to the Muhammad”. Before I read their page, I wasn’t aware of the existence of an Earl Grey latte non-fat – but now I know where to go if I need one! The page I viewed included a suggestion from a customer for a Valentine’s drink.

Starbucks also uses their site to provide information about the company and its products, has an app for those wanting to find jobs at Starbucks and connects its fans to worthwhile social causes. For more on Starbucks, check out The Starbucks Formula for Social Media Success.

On a smaller scale, Tourism New Zealand’s Facebook page 100% Pure New Zealand, has over 300,000 followers. It’s a great platform for breathtaking photography and video featuring New Zealand. The front page appears to populated by staff, and engages through comments and “likes”. A “discussions” page enables engagement.

Blogs

If Facebook is not for you, consider a company blog. While blogs typically don’t reach the numbers as social media such as Facebook, a big upside is that you can screen out negative comments if you choose.

Blogger Mark Schaefer finds most company blogs bland, but has identified his top ten company blogs. He has excluded blogs for tech companies such as IBM and Oracle, because they are “so far ahead of the rest of the corporate world”.

Links to Mark Schaefer’s top ten blogs and their apparent goals
(unranked)

Caterpillar (problem-solving, community-building, loyalty)

Starbucks (new product development, engagement)

Marriott (customer satisfaction, sales, crises management)

Wegmans (direct sales, loyalty)

Manpower (thought leadership)

General electric (brand awareness)

Fiskars (customer engagement, brand awareness)

Southwest airlines (enhance corporate image and integrate with traditional media)

Patagonia (complement brand image, engage community)

Whole Foods Market (complement brand image, direct sales)

Note how these companies are using their blogs in pursuit of a diverse range of goals, but engagement, and aspects of community building are common to most.

If you are thinking that companies like Caterpiller and IBM (who are doing very nicely as figures emerge from the latest earnings season) have huge resources to support their blogging, consider this blog. I write Stakeholder Engagement blogs on a shoestring budget. From approximately 150 million blogs, mine appears second on a current Google search for blogs – and I haven’t got around to any search engine optimisation yet, apart from a few tags.

Mark Schaefer writes more about the benefits of blogging here.

Of course there is a down-side too. Those wanting to damage your reputation can have influence far beyond their numbers and resources by utilising social media. But why surrender without even joining the game? HBR’s Leslie Gaines-Ross recommends stockpiling your online credentials to draw on should they be needed.

So now’s a good time to engage online. There has been a fundamental shift from the shareholder to the stakeholder, and from announcement to engagement. The engagement ethos needs to permeate everything we do. We have two options – engagement or extinction.