eCommunications for global organisations

Our team has just recently launched a website on Carbon Aware Travel Choice - a project that is co-financed by the European Union under the 7th Framework Programme for Research.

CATCH brings together government officials, scientists and transport experts of cities in Europe and beyond to communicate on Transport issues. The project specifically aims to support cities to encourage climate-friendly decision-making among their citizens, and to showcase learnings from good and bad examples.

As part of the project the CATCH team is developing an online knowledge engine that will help provide further details on carbon emissions which will also be very interesting tool for legislators on Carbon Emissions aiming to increase awareness of the environmental impacts of mobility, map out potential solutions to their management and to enable travelers to make informed climate-friendly travel choices.

The site includes Web2.0 tools like Youtube channel & Twitter and provides an interactive overview on Stakeholder opinions and current developments around Carbon legislation, climate facts and involvement of local authorities on this issue.

(This is a cross-post from Steffen’s blog)

If there’s an issue that’s impacting your organisation around which you want to orchestrate a shift in opinion or behavioural change amongst a set of people large or small, it’s not enough to do the right thing and explain it effectively. Two factors play a part here:

1. People don’t trust you. Trust in pretty much every sort of organisation is at rock bottom and falling, so people will need to hear it from others to buy into what you do and say.

2. With regards to the web in particular, search. You can’t push your content, people will find what they want; such is the nature of the web – meaning that it’s quite likely that they’ll pick another site out of the thousands that show up in Google.

So what do you do about it? Beyond doing and saying “the right thing” (not so easy in itself) and a solid media relations set-up, you’ll need to become ubiquitous online. What does that mean? That your web tentacles reach far beyond your own web presence. Others communicating around your issue should be talking about you so that when people are on the aforementioned ‘other’ site on your issue that they’ve found on Google, you’re present too.

How do you make it happen? You’ll need to know who all the other players are on your issue and communicate with them in mind rather than hollering in a void. Reference their content or even feature them in person, comment on their content in your own output, and make sure you’re giving your input wherever you can on other platforms. Assuming – again – that your message is solid, people will take notice and will soon start talking about you, giving you the third-party credibility you crave (assuming they’re being nice!) and giving you airtime in other places where people might land.

Will it come easy? No, Rome wasn’t built in a day – it’ll be a slog, but you won’t regret it.

Yesterday, I made a presentation on the topic of SEO (search engine optimisation) and its relevance to online communication.  It was a challenging subject as the meeting was hosted by IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) so you could expect people to be familiar with the concepts. My focus was to talk about how this very useful ‘tool’ should fit the communication mix – and not to discuss the details of the concept.

For those who are not familiar with the word, SEO (as well as SEM and SEA – search engine marketing and search engine advertising) covers the science and art of using search engines (such as Google, Bing or Yahoo) to get traffic to your website.

My main points on the subject were the following:

1. It’s really easy to get it wrong and most companies do so by default.  They treat SEO as an IT/technical project.  This means they see as a project that needs to be done (because traffic increase MUST be good).
2. They focus only on numbers (how much traffic will get and how many statistics can extract from this exercise)
3. They do it as a standalone project – often a company will choose to do an SEO ‘project’ before they have define what they wanted to online (let alone define a clear business and marketing strategy in which this fits)
4. They think it is the only way to get traffic to your site (or at least the easiest) - this can be plain wrong
5. Finally they feel it simply needs to be done

My suggestions (in a nutshell) to approach and formulate this web strategy (and discussing whether or not to hire an SEO company or do SEO internally) is the following

1. Get the basics right first – don’t start on these activities until you have gone through some key steps
2. Start from a clear business and communication strategy – make sure you have an online strategy that will deliver some clearly defined business goals and fits with your other marcom activities
3. Get the right tools to deliver your stories to your key audiences (is it a website, youtube channel, blog, twitter, event, press release?)
4. Create a content plan – define the key messages, products and the information that you need to communicate to your audience
5. Create an editorial plan – a plan on how to keep your story going over a period of time.  Plan the appropriate team and resources to deliver on this (launching a new site is easy, making it work over the long term is the hard part)
6. Create an activation plan – define a plan in which you define how you will get traffic.  This is the part of the project you look at SEO and how it fits in your campaign.  The first part of this process is to study what is happening online.  What are people searching on Google or Bing, and what are the relevant keywords for your audience.  The insights you can extract from this can be highly relevant to the kind of messages that might resonate with your target audience.
7. Find the right partners (Iprospect and ZN).  Tempting as it may be to learn the skills of SEO by yourself, you need professional help to get good results. Although some simple things can be done in house, to get a really effective SEO programme in place you need experts who know the latest changes to search engines and the best way to integrate the right tags at the right place.
8. Define KPIs (key performance indicators) and use them as a key business tool.  Most people are familiar with KPIs. However, few manage to use these as real business tools, keeping track of them, reviewing them on a regular basis and taking action according to the results found.  The key about setting good KPIs is to align them with your business objectives and to not simply focus on traffic indicators, and then ensuring that the data is useful.
9. Don’t do it if you don’t need to.  Finally and probably most importantly is it vital to ask yourself if you need to undertake such a project.  Often web traffic alone will not really bring value to your business, whereas targeted communication to key customers via email, having good content and relevant hyperlinks is what is needed.

Andrew McAfee is publishing his book ‘
Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges


Below an interview he did for McKinsey last month:


He also talks about the role of business leaders have in the movement towards an open source culture in a company and about the kaizen/beta approach it takes in oder to get things going. On the question ‘how to measure success’ he only has a limited view it seems from the interview but his analysis of the roles of management, CIOs and CEOs is quite accurate. I’m curious on reading the book.

A video worthwhile watching: Ikea’s viral facebook campaign that was solely based on existing facebook applications:

This is a cross post from Ideaplants.org.
I just read an article on China Daily in which Marcos Fava Neves, professor of strategic planning and food chains at the School of Economics and Business, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, proposes to add another dimension to the model of sustainabiltiy. Normally we consider the economic, social and environmental perspective when assessing sustainability. Marcos Fava Neves proposes to add in the context of organizations that struggle to implement this concept as part of their planning and operations pro-activeness as an additional measure.


When reading the article I started wondering whether pro-activeness is really what we are missing. Companies do most of the time act in different ways. In my eyes the issue is rather a lack of ownership and leadership in the space of sustainability. In a traditional company structure sustainability is not assigned to any specific department and therefore it is unclear who should be taking the lead on this.


It’s not just about what you do but also about how you link individual activites. Ideally an organization has an overall sustainability strategy and links activites to this strategy with the aim to create one real and coherent sustainability story. Transparency and involvement of internal and external stakeholders is key here. This involves HR, marketing, business development, and many other divisions.

Getting everyone on board requires not just pro-activeness but also smart leadership.

This is a cross post from ideaplants.org:


When was the last time you made a rational choice in a complex decision?
Thinking about it seriously, I’m not even sure that I’ve ever made one.
How is it possible to consider all possible factors and anticipate what option might be best with our little brain that has a limited amount of knowledge?


The choice for the right study programme, the most promising job, the least polluting car, the relationship that will last forever or simply the greenest energy provider often bring us to the edge of our capabilities of making a rational decision.


James G. March wrote in his book ‘A Primer on Decision Making’ about the limitations of rationality. He identifies four factors that limit us in the way we make decisions while also considering challenges for organizations:


1. Problems of attention: Limitations in the time we can spend on considering all factors
2. Problems of memory: Capabilities to capture and process all the information we gather
3. Problems of comprehension: Capacity to grasp complex issues and interpret them correctly - this is especially difficult in complex situations that cover a wide field of knowledge areas
4. Problems of communication: Problems with sharing and communicating crucial information, factors that are not presented clearly and other limiting issues e.g. due to language and cultural differences.


All these issues make it quiet difficult for someone to make a decision that is solely based on rationality - this is probably not a good excuse for individuals and businesses, but it might explain certain behaviors and put off pressure of people that think they should always make rational and fair decisions.


Especially in organizations that have been around for a while decision making processes are extremely long and complex. In todays fast changing world, this limits and blocks the organization in making the right choices.


In today’s environment the biggest challenge is not anymore to make the right choice, but to adapt to the changing environment.


A lot of flexibility is demanded from individuals and organizations. It’s not a surprise that young organizations with less structure and processes seem to cope with this much better than multinationals that are following a model which is already many years old.

Tomorrow is a big day for us, and we hope for Brussels. We have been working on setting-up TEDxBrussels (http://www.tedxbrussels.eu) for the past few months and it has been an exciting and challenging experience.

We have long been fans of TED (http://www.ted.com) and avid watchers of the videos the organisation shares with the world, so when the opportunity came up to help with the organisation and launch of TEDxBrussels, we jumped in working alongside OLPC (http://www.olpceu.org/) and a number of others to make this idea a reality.  It has been a challenging  ride and tomorrow we will see if it is up to the vision that the team had in mind.

We very much hope this event marks the beginning of culture shift in Brussels, bringing together passionate individuals who believe in the power of ideas to change their surroundings.  One of the first initiatives to come out of this thinking is a project called ‘Imagine The City’, developed by TEDxBrussels, The Bulletin and AddictLab.  The idea is to get the community of TEDxsters to share ideas on how to transform their city on a platform called www.brusselslab.com.  Addict Lab will selecting ideas emerging from this platform on a regular basis and The Bulletin will feature some of the most intriguing ones.  Later we will look at how to turn some of them into a reality.

If you want to get involved in this community and start thinking about the next TEDxBrussels, then join the ning (tedxbxl.ning.com/).

See you tomorrow or online.

Today SCA Packaging has launched it’s second edition of the Design Challenge. This year the designers are challenged to develop a slick and fat-free packaging design.

Thanks to all the team for their input to make the launch happen!

Kanal Consulting Group a US-based management firm has developed a 12 step guideline to Implement sustainability accross an organization.

As reported on greenbiz.com, they propose the list of steps to implement sustainability in order to improve the “bottom line and the environment”.

The list covers: Be coherent in what you do, have a proper strategy and model, get everyone on board and roll this out across departments.

Employee engagement seems to be one of the key components that are still perceived as challenging when it comes to implementing sustainability.

In a way it makes sense - we are dealing with individuals on whose motivation the success of the project depends. Coming up with a really motivating internal campaign to get everyone on board, opening up the plan so employees can propose their own ideas requires not only a lot of preparation but also a rethinking of the current thinking that is being done around sustainable development. Is it time for an open source approach for global companies?

This is a post from ideaplants.org