In 2004 I had the honor of being the keynote speaker opening the Mega Brasil Congress on Corporate Communications. And last month, I was invited back once again to open the annual conference. The subject of the three-day event in São Paulo was “Innovation” and as I began to write my speech I thought I would talk about how much our lives had changed in the intervening 13 years.
But once I started writing, I began to realize that when you look at the way we live and work today really is not very different at all since 2004. Communications has changed drastically. But the way we live, not so much.
My mom’s kitchen of 60-plus year ago had just about everything in my kitchen today other than the microwave. It’s bigger and more stylish, but my bathroom isn’t much different from what my grandparents had 100 years ago: toilet, sink, bathtub and light above the mirror. We had a car back in the 1950s, a Chevrolet, and we traveled faster back then: the speed limits were higher. And jet travel had already begun: at the same speed as today’s jet engines.
People often remark that the world has changed so much but I say “Whoa. Wait a minute.” When people began traveling by motor vehicles instead of horses, that was a different world. When you look back 100 years to 1917 and realize that more than half the homes in the United States still didn’t have electricity, being able to flip a light switch transformed the way we live.
So my speech about how much the world had changed instead talked about how—other than communications—my office today was pretty much the same as the office where I began my career in 1977 (the coffee is better quality now and we have fewer file cabinets.) My home of 2017 was not all that different from the home I grew up in during the 1950s; or the one my parents grew up in during the 1930s.
But wow, communications. Here we had dramatic change. Smartphones didn’t exist when I made my keynote address in 2004 since it wasn’t until three years later that Steve Jobs would unveil the iPhone. In the U.S., something called The Facebook had just expanded outside of Harvard University to a limited number of other schools. Only students were allowed to sign up with .edu addresses at these certain universities.
Today information travels at the speed of light. Our traditional gatekeepers—the editors, the publishers, the broadcasters—no longer decide what we see or hear. Now it’s mostly our selected friends and family that help curate the content that reaches us each day. They’re the editors deciding what we read. Depending on which study you believe, the average person spends between two and five cumulative hour each day during the 50-85 times they check their phone. And The Facebook? Thirteen years later we have 1.94 billion active users of Facebook; more than a billion log in every day.
I grew up during what was known as the golden age of mass media. Radios and then televisions were becoming ubiquitous in households around the word. Newspapers raked in millions as they were virtually the only way to hire someone for a job or rent an apartment or sell a used car.
What we know as the modern practice of corporate communications—really the first acknowledgement that communications was something a business even needed to address—came about with the growth of the mass media during the last century. Suddenly the news media started paying attention to business and businesses needed someone to be the point of contact for this powerful media force.
This was the beginnings of corporate communications as a profession—in line with the growth of the mass media. And over the intervening decades we’ve earned a seat at the table: today at the largest companies you’ll most likely find the company’s most senior communications executive reporting directly to the CEO. At the Fortune 500, that’s the case at more than half.
We’re at point now where I think every business is keenly aware of how critical the communications function is to the success of the business enterprise. Not long ago we saw how one person’s iPhone video turned out to get more attention for United Airlines than the more than $100 million dollars that the airline spent on planned marketing and communications over the past 12 months.
If I had to bet, I would say Dr. David Dao was not the first person dragged off a U.S. passenger plane by the police. He probably wasn’t even the first person dragged off a United Airlines jet. But if “a picture is worth a thousand words” as goes the familiar expression then a video is worth about a million words since it’s that much more powerful. Today we have roughly 230 million videographers with their smartphones on hand every day in the U.S. More than 300 hours of video content are uploaded every hour to YouTube; and every day the billion or so YouTube users watch more than five billion individual video clips.
So how do companies need to approach communications in this challenging new environment? First, I suggest it starts at the very top of any corporate organization. The best company chief executive officers realize they don’t need to hire a “Chief Reputation Officer.” The stewardship of the company’s reputation—and the reputation of its brands—are the responsibility of the CEO since that’s probably the most valuable asset of any company, more than any factories, patents or even the secret formula for Coca-Cola.
Once that fact—and that responsibility—is accepted then the next step needs to be a company-wide education process of the value of reputation and the importance of continuously managing that. Not just for the top executives—but for everyone who is out there representing the company.
And this focus on communication must be incorporated in the company’s daily processes and procedures. The corporate entity needs to be viewed as a living, breathing creature—its health constantly monitored and preventative measures—a wellness program if you will—must be adopted and followed.
Effectively managing the totality of the corporate communication process is now one of the most important jobs for any business to be successful.
Excerpted from Jeffrey Sharlach’s Keynote Address to the Mega Brasil Corporate Communications Conference in São Paulo, May 23, 2017