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Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.

From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.

What’s your Change Power Score (CPS)?

In the past 18 months, we’ve all been through significant change. The pandemic disrupted our work and personal lives with work-from-home requirements, laws around wearing masks, supply chain issues, childcare issues and more.

Given this, it seems like the perfect time to consider how good one is at handling change. And, while I like to think that we as a company are pretty good at it, there hasn’t been a way to quantify this ability until now.

In the July-August 2021 issue of Harvard Business Review, David Michels and Kevin Murphy, both partners with Bain, introduced “a new system for measuring (and improving) your ability to adapt.” It’s a nifty rating system that identifies nine essential traits that companies should possess to succeed at change.

And before you dismiss the importance of possessing an institutional change-management skillset, consider the following:

 

The Significance of Change Power

According to the research done by Michels and Murphy, “Change power is a strong predictor of performance. Companies with high change power scores are more profitable, grow revenue faster, offer better shareholder returns, have leaders and cultures that are more highly rated, and are home to more engaged employees.”

The authors share the example of Delta Air Lines’ response to the pandemic and point out that its change management acumen led to its decision to remove the middle seat in plans. This decision had a significant impact on the airline’s operations and business. One outcome was on revenue. In Q4 of 2020, “Delta’s revenue was 12% higher than the average of American, United and Southwest combined – a difference management sees an indication that its customers were willing to pay for the extra space.” The airline also saw its Net Promoter Score (NPS) reach an all-time high during this period (see below).

 

Calculating Your Change Profile

To determine a company’s change profile, the authors designed a system in which employees are asked to provide a score “on statements related to each of the nine traits.” The survey is then scored and compared to an index, and the research found that organizations who score in the top quartile of the index have a more robust capacity for change.

They explain, “Each move into a higher decile on the index (from, say, the 50th to the 60th percentile) correlates with a margin of improvement of 150 basis points and an increase in total shareholder returns of more than 250 basis points.” And this shareholder return is just one benefit.

Companies with higher capacity for change also tend to have employees who view their leaders and cultures more favorably and state they feel more inspired and engaged than companies in the lower half of the index.

 

The Connection to the Net Promoter Score

If you’ve worked in PR and marketing, you’re probably familiar with the Net Promotor Score (NPS), but you may not know it, too, was developed by Michels and Murphy’s Bain colleague Frederick Reichheld. Today it is a very popular predictor of business success, so much so that we often included it in our clients’ press materials.

Consider one of our clients, Kantola Training Solutions, as an example. During its 35 years, Kantola has focused on continuously improving its platform and client service approach to drive superior levels of customer satisfaction. As such, it has achieved a world-class Net Promoter Score of 70 with its clients.

With the Change Power Score, I soon predict more of our clients will want to include it. I also wonder if Bain has additional research planned to determine a correlation between these two scores or systems.

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How to Develop a Social Media Crisis Management Plan

The article is written by Dr. Clāra Ly-Le, Managing Director at EloQ Communications. It was originally part of the blog “Using social media during communication crisis in Vietnam”, which was published on EloQ’s blog.

Many businesses may have a solid social media presence with a high volume of engagement, but the quality of their engagement is mediocre. It is important to remember that engaging widely does not mean engaging wisely. Especially during crises, a good social media crisis management plan can help guide a company’s outreach efforts to ensure it’s engaging with relevant audiences and using influential channels to better manage its message. This social media strategy can be categorized into three groups: people, platforms, and preventative actions.

 

Connect the people

Managing an organization’s social media platforms requires more than one person. A crisis management team is the first thing to consider in a crisis plan. Since a company’s social media presence can be largely connected with its brand value, the management of social media platforms needs to be a joint effort by management, the marketing team, as well as the digital experts.

Besides the crisis team members, it is also helpful to include strategies on internal communications within the plan. Internal communication is a two-way relationship within an organization, enabling an exchange of information management and employees. If reporters or other people ask an employee for opinions on a crisis, and the employee does not know what happened or what s/he can or cannot say, a misstep can sensationalize the story. Therefore, a company should strive to keep employees in the loop at all times.

 

Identify the platforms

This is one of the most overwhelming steps in social media planning, as there are so many channels to choose from. Crisis managers, or social media managers, must first identify the target audiences, in order to determine which platforms are ideal for effectively reaching those audiences. Target audiences can include – investors, shareholders, suppliers, customers, employees, and even the government. One single message cannot be suitable for all those audiences. The company must decide which target audiences are of higher priority, or another option is to use social media so it can customize and tweak its messaging accordingly.

Much research suggests that it is better to use an “owned channel,” such as a blog, forum, or organization-generated community, than to apply a third-party platform, such as Twitter or Facebook. An owned channel is believed to be a more effective way to build a credible and meaningful online presence than relying on the communication flow and audience of an existing platform. Moreover, if the crisis is minor, it is easier to broadcast the response on these channels, as the company can control the statements, tone and material.

However, communication channels dimension does not include only the owned channels. Conclusively, there is a plethora of channels out there, and a company must always ask itself which social media channels should be used and why, and how it will use these channels effectively.

 

Work on the preventative actions

The first preventative action to consider is pre-draft updates. While an online crisis can hardly wait for a response to be approved by many levels of management, crisis managers can pre-draft templates for Twitter messages, Facebook posts or blog entries, with blank sections for the case details. The templates can be approved by the legal team beforehand so that the crisis team can disseminate the message on the appropriate platforms as soon as the details are confirmed.

The next action is creating a terms-of-use policy, which is outlining how people can or cannot behave. This is a way to guide the conversations and prevent people from taking the issue too far on the company’s owned channels.

Scooping up the negative domains and usernames is a proactive way to control the easy to remember names that can share destructive stories about the company. Norton (2013)’s example was if a hateful party owned the ihatestarbucks.com domain and started distributing negative stories about Starbucks, people tend to remember the domain and spread the stories more effortlessly. If the company gained control over the names first, they cannot be used against its campaigns [1].

Another action is dark sites, which are online hubs that remain in the dark until a crisis breaks out. They contain pre-made resources, such as message from CEO or hotline contacts, and the blank parts to be filled out with the crisis details. These sites are used to respond to a crisis in the most professional and timely manner.

The last preventative action is targeted advertising, which is used to control search results to make sure Google or Bing shows the correct and suitable messages when a searcher types in a relevant keyword. Beside its preventative characteristic, this action can also be used for responsive purpose. This tactic has been employed by BP during its Deepwater Horizon crisis, when BP tried to use PPC advertising to tone down the news of the disaster. Crisis managers should consider a list of potential keywords, as well as a search landing page (such as a dark site) to prepare for the upcoming crises.

 

Conclusion

While the application of social media during a crisis may still be up for debate, it is still important to develop a social media crisis management plan in advance to manage the information flow. In a time of crisis, social media can be an effective tool for companies to inform and engage target audiences and better control the message in real-time.

 

[1] Norton, C. (2013). Online crisis management. In R. Brown & S. Waddington (Eds.), Share this too: More social media solutions for PR professionals (pp. 159-168). Cornwall, UK: John Wiley & Son, Ltd.

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Building and Maintaining Momentum as Spaceflight Prepares to Execute an Industry First

Our client Spaceflight Inc. is no stranger to executing industry firsts. In December 2018, the company launched the largest number of satellites from a U.S.-based launch vehicle, and in Feb. 2019, the company launched the first privately funded lunar lander on the first-ever rideshare mission to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO).

In June of 2021, Spaceflight executed another industry first by launching the first-ever electric propulsion orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-2 mission. Spaceflight’s SXRS-5 mission was also the first time the company had launched two Sherpa vehicles, Sherpa-FX2 and Sherpa-LTE1, from a single mission. This important milestone not only demonstrated the company’s leadership in the industry, but its commitment to innovation and creating tools and services that enable their customers to get their satellites to the orbit they need on their timeline.

We worked closely with Spaceflight’s marketing team to craft a plan that would create excitement about the launch in the weeks leading up to takeoff.

First, we considered the compelling elements of this story. Then we strategized three key outreach campaigns as well as when to share them publicly and how to offer them to journalists in a strategic way.

We started our campaign by introducing the details of Spaceflight’s SXRS-5 mission in a press release. This included information about the number of payloads onboard, the customers flying, what Sherpa vehicles would carry satellites and which had propulsion units.

Next, we knew the hardware Spaceflight had constructed, its two Sherpa vehicles, would offer a unique visual story. We worked closely with the team to offer behind-the-scenes tours of Spaceflight’s integration facilities so journalists could get a close-up look at the hardware, technology and integration process.

Finally, we wanted to highlight Spaceflight’s engineering prowess and the unique, modular design of its Sherpa vehicles. To do this, we crafted a press release that broke down the Sherpa vehicles from a technical standpoint and described their versatility, the subsystems used to construct customized vehicles and the benefits that provides to customers.

Once we had these three key elements in place, we worked with the marketing team to brainstorm other ideas and mediums to build buzz and share interesting information about the mission. This included targeted outreach to industry podcasts, sharing customer missions through blogs posted on Spaceflight’s website and shared on social media, and finally a series of videos in which the mission and Sherpa vehicles were described in “bite-size” pieces for our audiences.

The series of campaigns have been a strong success, leading to eight media briefings, six customer stories and the list of coverage below.

We continue to be impressed by the Spaceflight team’s ability to develop and execute ground-breaking missions. Congratulations!

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Making the Most of Hybrid Meetings

The disruptions of the pandemic have left a lasting mark on corporate culture around the world, particularly in terms of where work occurs. A recent report from Accenture PLC found that 83 percent of workers viewed a hybrid work model to be optimal, and companies, from Microsoft to Ford Motor Company, have indicated they plan to accommodate this preference moving forward.

With this shift, the way workers collaborate will also need to change. According to a survey conducted by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), three out of five corporate meeting organizers responded that they expect to hold at least one hybrid meeting in 2021. The survey also showed that, while 71 percent of respondents said meetings with a combination of remote and in-person attendees were not part of their previous programming, 65 percent are now interested in holding hybrid meetings.

As this new form of collaboration gains traction, it is in our best interest to establish norms around hybrid meetings and find ways to elevate the experience. To guarantee that hybrid meetings are efficient and effective, it is important to keep three things in mind: inclusion, facilitation, and follow-up.

 

Inclusion is key

By definition, a meeting brings people together to achieve a shared objective. For that to be accomplished, each participant, regardless of physical location, must be able to participate and engage with other attendees. The most consequential effort organizers can take in planning a hybrid meeting is to focus on inclusivity. The goal is to have every participant feel engaged and productive, no matter their location.

To involve all, it is critical that participants can hear what’s being said. After a year of engaging entirely over videoconference, attendees will have a baseline expectation of high-quality audio. No remote participant should ever need to ask for a comment to be repeated. A conference room outfitted with a quality audio system is an ideal location for this sort of meeting. However, the same effect can be accomplished using strategically placed microphones or by passing a microphone among participants.

It is also important to ensure that all participants have equal visibility. While it may seem like a simple solution to have each participant, those physically in the room and those joining virtually, log into a video conference platform with their own laptop, that defeats the purpose of meeting in person. The goal is to give every attendee a clear view of the faces of the other participants, regardless of location.

A simple but effective way to accomplish this is to connect several laptops equipped with webcams to a conferencing platform. One laptop can be set on each side of the meeting table with the camera capturing the attendees on the opposite side. The remaining laptops can be arranged to share the meeting visuals, such as presentation slides or a wall of post-it notes, with off-site participants. Such a set-up gives each visual component of the meeting space its own position on the remote participants’ screens. Similarly, to keep remote participants top of mind, it may be helpful to display individual remote attendees on monitors positioned prominently in the room.

Providing virtual participants an accurate and complete view of the meeting space also translates into comprehensive meeting recordings which, a recent study by Panopto and Wainhouse Research found, 86% of daily video conferencing users value.

Videoconferencing technology is rapidly evolving to bridge the distance between remote and in-person meeting attendees. Providers like Microsoft and Zoom have announced that they are leveraging innovations like facial detection and optimized gallery views to better simulate a meeting room.

 

Intentional facilitation

The next step is to bring all these pieces together into a cohesive, collaborative experience. This is where facilitation comes in, and care should be taken to test the technology and rehearse the flow of the meeting. By involving participants in this step, meeting organizers can let attendees know what to expect and give them time to prepare.

It is also useful to assign an onsite meeting facilitator to ensure that remote participants are not forgotten and that subtleties present in the room are translated to those not co-located. The facilitator should draw the remote participants into the conversation and make sure their voices are heard. One creative way, suggested in this Harvard Business Review article, is to connect each person joining remotely with an in-person attendee or “avatar.” These participants are linked by a direct line of communication so that the remote attendee can get assistance without the discomfort of interrupting the group. This could be anything from clearing a blocked camera angle, or discretely asking a quiet participant to speak more clearly, to placing a post-it note in a brainstorming exercise.

 

Thoughtful feedback

As with any new initiative, feedback is a crucial step to ensuring that hybrid meetings are productive moving forward. By soliciting feedback in a thoughtfully designed survey, organizers can fine tune their process and improve the experience of remote and in-person participants in the future.

At its core, making the most of hybrid meetings requires creativity from organizers and participants. It’s clear that this new form of collaboration is here to stay, and we can ensure effective hybrid interaction by creating an environment where every participant, regardless of location, is on equal footing.

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Is It Credible? Exploring What Factors Americans Trust in News Stories

It’s a simple question that, when asked, can bring a flood of responses: What makes a news story trustworthy?

A host of factors, which can vary among differing groups.

The Pew Research Center recently conducted a survey to examine those factors that Americans see as important when deciding whether they trust a news story. The findings may not come as a shock, as many Americans have their own biases regarding where they go for news. But the results provide insight into what different folks value when determining a story’s credibility.

The survey found that the bulk of U.S. adults believe that, when deciding if a news story is trustworthy, it is “at least somewhat important” to consider each of the five surveyed factors, with the news outlet that publishes the story leading the way:

  • The news organization that publishes the story (88%)
  • The sources cited in it (86%)
  • Their gut instinct about the story (77%)
  • The person who shared the story with them (68%)
  • The specific journalist who reported it (66%)
  • It has a lot of shares/comments/likes on social media (24%)

However, when taking it a step further in importance, the survey found that fewer U.S. adults view these factors as “very important” in news trustworthiness:  

  • The news organization that publishes the story (50%)
  • The sources cited in it (47%)
  • Their gut instinct about the story (30%)
  • The person who shared the story with them (24%)
  • The specific journalist who reported it (23%)
  • It has a lot of shares/comments/likes on social media (6%)

Political affiliation also influences how Americans determine news story credibility, with slight differences across party lines:

“Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were slightly more likely than Republicans and GOP leaners to say it’s very important to consider the news organization that publishes a story (55% vs. 47%) and the sources that are cited in it (51% vs. 44%). Republicans, in turn, are more likely than Democrats to see their own gut instinct as very important (35% vs. 26%), though this is a minority view in both parties.”

Pew Research conducted the survey among 12,045 U.S. adults from March 8-14, 2021. It served as one of the latest reports on how media is viewed among Americans, which in recent years, has included more distrust and skepticism.

Last year, Gallup’s annual Governance poll found that many Americans remain distrustful of mass media, with six in 10 respondents saying they have “not very much” trust (27%) or “none at all” (33%) in mass media. Gallup has conducted its poll on trust in mass media since 1972. Overall, public trust remained at or exceeded the majority level until 2004, when it fell to 44%. After hitting 50% the next year, it has not risen above 47%. The sharpest decline since the poll’s inception came in 2016, when the trust level fell to 32%.

These poll and survey findings raise good questions about how we view news, what we value and trust in news reporting, and where our biases may lie. Sometimes, to really get to the heart of the matter, it may be best to turn the question on ourselves: What do you think makes a news story trustworthy?

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Intentional Query Design: Second of a Three-Part Series

A well-written question will mean the same thing to all respondents.

Jennifer Leigh Brown

When creating a survey, if you’re hoping to receive accurate and insightful answers, the phrasing and functionality of your survey queries can determine the success of your results. Questions that are poorly worded, biased, confusing or don’t allow respondents to accurately reflect on their experiences can result in erroneous data. Answering these queries is a waste of time for respondents and, worse, their responses can be misconstrued in a surveyor’s findings.

In my last blog, Thoughtful Survey Design, I detailed how to identify your survey purpose, determine your target population and determine questions that will help determine demographics. For this post, we’re diving into the meat of surveys and the importance of crafting thoughtful, well-phrased and unbiased questions. First, I’ll define some crucial terms around survey development:

  • Respondent – an individual of the target population.
  • Bias – a factor that affects the representative capacity of a question, including how clearly and easily respondents can respond to a question.
  • Satisficing – a tendency for respondents to put in the least amount of effort they can when answering a survey.
  • Skip logic – when some survey questions are conditional and only appear if relevant. Use this feature to filter your respondents and the questions they face based on their responses.
  • Qualitative data – Labels, names and descriptive information. Occurrences can be counted and you can determine proportions and percentages.
    • Nominal data are categories, names, or labels that don’t have an innate order. This can include data like country, brand name or mode of transportation.
    • Ordinal data is nominal information that contains a sense of ranking or order. This can include data like year in college or a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
  • Quantitative data – Indicates how many or how much of something on a numerical scale. Further statistics can be calculated with this data.
    • Interval data is recorded with standard units of measurement with equal intervals. This can include temperature, SAT scores or your credit score.
    • Ratio data is interval data but with a meaningful zero point that represents the absence of that characteristic. This includes weight, time, distance and count.

 

Question Types

Before crafting your questions, it’s important to know what type of results you want. If you want proportion and frequency statistics, text responses, and relative comparisons, you’ll likely have to ask different questions than if you want statistics like averages, standard deviations and probability distributions. To help clarify, below are some key question modalities and the output they’ll give you.

  1. Multiple Choice. Multiple choice questions are a flexible and relatively easy-to-use question style for both surveyors and respondents. This format can allow for just one response (forced-choice) or for the respondent to select all the options that apply to them, but Pew Research suggests that forced-choice questions yield more accurate data. The data these questions yield is easy to parse; typically results are a count of the number of responses to each option, or, in the case of the multiple-answer option, a matrix of each respondent and their choices. Depending on the options the question offers, this question type can result in qualitative or quantitative data.
    1. Binary/Dichotomous. These questions offer just two choices, such as yes/no. These questions don’t provide a neutral option or allow the respondent to express nuance, but can be useful for skip logic that allows respondents to go into detail with further questions based on their choice. These questions can provide ratio data if the binary choices are translated to 1s and 0s.
    2. Rating. Questions that ask you to rate something, like from one to five stars, are typically easy to understand and translate across language barriers. These scales seem to make opinions and experiences quantifiable, but the data you receive is actually ordinal because the intervals aren’t standard.
    3. Likert Scales. These are a type of rating question, typically ranging from a 1 for “strongly agree” to a 5 for “strongly disagree.” Similarly, semantic differential questions ask you to complete a sentence with one of the options provided. Like Rating questions, Likert and semantic differential questions result in ordinal data.
  2. Rank Order. Ranking questions require respondents to order the options provided based on a perceived quality. The respondent is required to make choices between two or more things which can offer further insight into the respondents’ opinions. These questions can be frustrating and time-consuming, so make sure to limit the number of items and use these questions thoughtfully. As the options themselves have no order, the data collected is nominal.
  3. Text Boxes. Text boxes can vary in size and character limit but accept free responses from participants. Typically, this data is nominal, but some survey tools allow you to specify that you only want to receive numerals. This can be useful for gathering phone numbers, zip codes, ages and more.
  4. Submission. Requesting that your respondent upload a file or submit a picture can be a useful way to receive more information from respondents but can be confusing or invasive. Be clear on the submission you expect, acceptable file types, how to upload, and file size requirements.

 

Writing Queries

With your main survey focus in mind, start coming up with key takeaways to glean from the survey. You’ll use these core topics to develop survey questions. For example, your main focus could be to determine the best ice cream flavors to offer in Seattle. Some core topics might include determining respondent’s favorite flavors, exploring the boundary between interesting and off-putting flavor combinations, or ascertaining appropriate price ranges.

Based on your core topics, pair what kind of data will be able to address the topics. If you want to know a price that people would pay for a unique ice cream flavor, you’ll need to use a question style that offers quantitative data, likely a slider. If you want to get ideas for ice cream toppings, a text box will allow the respondent to respond freely.

From there, start drafting the queries. Use creativity and the 5 Ws (and H) of journalism to navigate and delve into your core topics. Once you’ve developed your first draft of your survey queries, double-check that you follow these best practices:

  • Keep vocabulary simple and check your grammar. Avoid jargon, use fewer words when possible, stick to active voice and consider using an informal, conversational tone to make your survey more inviting. Make sure to avoid double negatives and unclear references.
  • Be specific. Clarify any specificities around time frame, location, scope or experience.
  • Ask one thing at a time. Asking multiple things within the same question can confuse respondents. If additional instructions, examples or context is needed, try to keep these in a separate sentence.
  • Avoid leading/loaded questions. These questions make assumptions about the respondent or their experience that are hard for them to deny. For example, asking, “Why is ice cream your favorite dessert?” assumes that ice cream is their favorite dessert. In addition, acquiescence bias is the tendency for people to agree to a statement, regardless of the content. Rephrasing the question can mitigate this bias in many cases.
  • Offer comprehensive options. Research your population to determine the best options to include. If there are many more options available, consider using “of the following” to allow your respondent to answer in good faith. If your options are not comprehensive, you can also use an “other” option with a text box to capture their response – this doesn’t seem to affect the reliability or validity of the data.
  • Use extreme judgments like “never” and “always” carefully. For most subjects, there are exceptions and gray areas; using a scale with options between always and never tends to capture data better.
  • Vary your question types. Respondents can get irritated or lazy when they are asked the same type of question repeatedly, which can lead to satisficing. Varying question types and difficulty can make your survey more interesting to complete.

 

Survey Assembly

Once you’ve drafted your queries and made sure they’re well-phrased, unbiased, comprehensive and will help you address your core topics, it’s time to arrange them into an order that will make sense and encourage the respondents to answer all queries. If you need help eliminating unnecessary questions, consider learning about how you can choose your best idea.

As I explained in my last blog, start your survey with screening questions to confirm all participants are part of the intended population and, if they are not, use skip logic to cut their survey short.

The question order is mainly subjective, but here are some guidelines that can improve your results. Research from Ohio State University’s Jon Krosnick suggests that interspersing easy questions between hard or time-consuming questions will make the survey seem more interesting and easier to complete.

Grouping questions into themes will help one question give context to another. Progress bars and similar indicators can boost the completion rate. Funneling, starting with broad, easy questions, progressing to specific and time-consuming questions, and then finishing with quicker and optional questions, gives the respondent time to “warm up” and makes the survey seem quicker with a slide to the finish line.

To this end, consider placing optional demographic questions at the end of the survey.

After writing the introduction to your survey and uploading your questions onto your survey platform of choice, test your survey on yourself and others. This is a chance to check your timing, verify the usability of your survey tool, add context and instructions as needed and judge if you need to account for further edge cases within your close-ended questions. Finally, this testing will give you some scrap data from the program to check that the output will be usable when you go to analyze your results.

The final step is to publish it! Share your survey with the goal of exceeding your minimum sample size within your target population. Check out my last blog for more information about sampling.

I will go into more depth about how to analyze your results in my July 2021 blog – come back to learn more!

You should now have a targeted survey for a well-defined population that will give you data to tackle your core topics. You’ve given respondents the best chance to communicate their experiences easily and accurately. All that’s left to do is to see what they say.

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