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Today’s Featured Leader, Nicki Drinkwater, is the General Manager for Media & External Communications at nbn. She joins us in this issue to talk about effective ways of gaining and maintaining the trust of the public.
Nicki is a reputable, successful, and mission-driven leader with 20 years of experience in a variety of industries and marketplaces. She also possesses a broad range of public affairs, communications, and leadership abilities.
Read along and you’ll surely pick up a thing or two from Nicki!
There are some basics that are really helpful here. Firstly, a great starting point is to ensure you have master messaging document that sets out what your organisation wants to be known for, and the key messages you need to communicate in order to make it happen. Getting this strategic messaging signed off by the relevant people across your organisation – and having a process to keep it up to date – makes it much easier to get campaign or announcement-related messaging signed off. Secondly, document your approvals process and remember to include the relevant subject matter experts to confirm your facts, as well as your leaders and any legal approvals. Depending on the size of your organisation, you could consider a tool like Microsoft Planner or Trello to help with this, or just schedule a couple of standing weekly meetings with your regular approvers. At the very least, make sure you follow your process and get your approvals in writing, even if its just an email or a Teams message. One trick that’s really working for us when we’re drafting our messaging and taking it through approvals is to highlight the lines that are lifted straight from our pre-approved master messaging document – this way our approvers can spend their time on the rest of the content, which speeds up the turnaround time.
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Firstly, it’s about remembering that you can never please everyone all the time, and this is especially true with social platforms. Managing stakeholder expectations here, especially if your organisation is new to social or if you have leaders who aren’t that familiar with it, is really important. The key is to demonstrate that you have good plans in place to minimise any negative comments and deal effectively with those that inevitably will pop up. Two things that are crucial here are 1) having a solid social strategy and 2) effective community management. Your social strategy should include a content and channels plan which sets out the kind of content you’re going to post on each channel, and who your audiences are for each. If you don’t have this expertise in house, it’s a good opportunity to reach out to your network or enlist the services of a specialist agency. And as social is a two-way interaction, you need to pay as much attention to how you’ll respond to your online community, as you do in serving them content. Having some guiding principles for your online community management is a must – these set out what you will do and what you won’t, and what you expect from users of your pages or channels. For example you might agree set hours for community management, set SLAs for your response times, and encourage your community managers to respond to individuals by name and to sign off using their own name, so your customers know they’re dealing with a real (and hopefully empathetic) human. Where you can, it’s a good idea to publish your community guidelines on each of your channels so you can refer back to them in replying to comments.
This is a great question and something that some brands and organisations do really well – and others don’t. For me it comes down to the basics of great comms.
1 – Know your audience. Just like marketing, the first step with any comms is to be clear on who you’re talking to and understand their needs and expectations of you.
2 – Be real – Once you know your stakeholders’ expectations, be realistic and transparent about how you communicate against them. Avoid overcommitting (or over-promising) and underdelivering. If you’re going to trumpet the good stuff, be prepared to own up when things don’t go to plan, or you get things wrong. Showing your customers that you care and sharing what you’re doing to fix it or prevent it happening next time helps built trust. Tailor your messaging to your audience and your channel. Content isn’t a one-way street – don’t talk at your audience, make your content conversational – join their conversations and encourage them to join yours (but remember you’ll need good community management to do this effectively). And remember at the end of the day, it all comes down to people so make it personal – highlight the human stories behind your brand, product or service. Consider using your people in your comms to build personal connection.
3 – Insights, insights, insights. Whether it’s insights into your audience, your products or services or previous comms campaigns, using insights to tailor your comms is really important to building successful connections. There are plenty of media monitoring and evaluation tools out there that will help you analyse the impact of your earned comms. Tools like RepTrak are great for tracking your reputation with stakeholders and understanding the drivers so you can consider these in planning your comms. Your social channels are a valuable source of data and insights too – which posts, channels, topics get the best engagement and reach? Which generate the most positive – or negative – comments? Also, which topics are your customers asking you about? Insights from social listening can be great in identifying interests and needs and helping inform your future content planning.
Our starting point – as always – is our purpose, which for nbn is to lift the digital capability of Australia. It didn’t exist ten years ago and yet now the nbn network supports so much of what we do every day. It’s the digital backbone of our country, a vital link in the chain that delivers broadband to homes, businesses and communities across the country. We know that in the past six years, data use has tripled. Over the next decade, as the internet continues to transform the world and how we live, it’s our job to keep investing in and growing the network to stay ahead of that demand. That’s why we’ll keep pushing more fibre deeper into our communities and improving fixed wireless and satellite coverage – so millions more people can enjoy even better broadband. We’re also creating more virtual business fibre zones across the country – giving many regional entrepreneurs faster and more reliable broadband at the same price as the city – and working with governments, communities and developers to expand our network into our newest suburbs and towns, creating smart cities, and transforming old CBDs into technology hubs. Another area of focus for us is continuing our efforts to break down the barriers which prevent some of our most vulnerable people from taking advantage of the digital world. All of this means looking ahead and investing in innovation, and we have a number of partnerships with leading scientists and universities to help invent new technologies.
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
