Week 1: Introduction
Literature
Chapter 1. Defining Corporate Communication
CEOs and senior executives of many large organizations and multinationals
nowadays consider protecting their company’s reputation to be ‘critical’ and one of
their most important strategic objectives. This objective of building, maintaining, and
protecting the company’s reputation is the core task of corporate communication
practitioners.
Corporate communication is a management function that offers a framework for
the effective coordination of all internal and external communication with the overall
purpose of establishing and maintaining favorable reputations with stakeholder
groups upon which the organization is dependent.
• An important characteristic of the new definition of corporate communication
is that it focuses on the organization as a whole and on the important task of
how an organization presents itself to all its key stakeholders, both internal
and external.
• Instead of looking at specialized disciplines or stakeholder groups separately,
the corporate communication function starts from the perspective of the
organization as a single embodied entity when communicating with internal
and external stakeholders.
• Corporate communication can be characterized as a management function
that is responsible for overseeing and coordinating the work done by
communication practitioners in different specialist disciplines such as media
relations, public affairs, and internal communication.
• Corporate communication transcends the specialties of individual
communication practitioners and crosses these specialist boundaries to
harness the strategic interests of the organization at large.
Concepts and definitions
• Mission = a mission statement is a single sentence or short paragraph that is
used by a company to explain its core purpose, values, and culture.
• Purpose = a purpose statement is a single statement that defines the reason
of existence for an organization beyond simply making a profit; it typically also
specifies how the product, service or any other organizational activities
positively contribute to society.
• Vision = a vision statement represents the organization’s desired future state:
the overall set of aspirations and high-level objectives of the organization.
• Corporate objectives = statement of overall aims in line with the overall
purpose.
, • Strategy = the ways or means in which the corporate objectives are to be
achieved and put into effort.
• Corporate identity = the profile and values communicated by an
organization.
• Corporate image = the immediate set of associations of an individual in
response to one or more signals or messages from or about a particular
organization at a single point in time.
• Corporate reputation = an individual’s collective representation of past
images of an organization (included through either communication or past
experiences) established over time.
• Stakeholder = any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the
achievement of the organization’s objectives.
• Market = a defined group for whom a product is or may be in demand (and for
whom an organization creates and maintains products and services).
• Communication = the tactics and media that are used to communicate with
internal and external groups.
• Integration = the act of coordinating all communication so that the corporate
identity is effectively and consistently communicated to internal and external
groups.
The essence of what matters is that corporate communication is geared towards
establishing favorable corporate images and reputations with all of an organization’s
stakeholder groups, so that these groups act in a way that is conducive to the
success of an organization.
Whilst the mechanics in corporate communication might have changed, the
overriding principle is, to some extent, still the same – that is, when individuals hold
an organization in esteem, value its reputation and decide to buy from, work for,
invest or otherwise decide in favor of that organization, they are more likely to
become genuine advocates and supporters.
,In this view, the current state of corporate communication is one of gradual change,
where there is change in terms of how organizations communicate with
stakeholders, but also continuity in that the old principles of strategic messaging and
reputation management still apply.
• Communication was, up until the 1970s largely used in a tactical support role
for other functions such as finance and marketing in the organization, where
its role was to announce corporate decisions, publicize corporate events or
promote products and services.
• The 1980s saw a real shift in that communication became used in a more
strategic sense to realize the organization’s objectives and to build
reputational capital with stakeholders upon whom the organization depends
for its continued success and survival.
• 2000s: the ‘positioning’ paradigm gradually evolved into a new era of
‘stakeholder engagement’ which brings with it new points of emphasis around
interactivity, authenticity, transparency, and advocacy.
Chapter 3. Corporate Communication in A Changing Media
Environment
The term Web 2.0 describes a general ideological and technological shift in the use
of online technologies. The basic idea is that the web as evolved from being a
platform where content is created and published by individuals or organizations to
one where content and applications are continuously generated and modified by all
users in a participatory and collaborative fashion.
• The creation and ‘publication’ of websites, in other words, is indicative of Web
1.0, whereas blogs, wikis and collaborative projects are hallmarks of Web 2.0.
The underlying model of traditional media is one of ‘broadcasting’ → a model of
mass communication whereby an organization informs or tries to persuade many
members of a particular stakeholder audience at once.
Social media, in comparison, are probably best characterized as a form of ‘crowd-
casting’ → they enable stakeholders of an organization to self-organize as a ‘crowd’
in order to produce and disseminate content about an organization.
, The positioning model of communication is one where practitioners start with
their own objectives, develop extensive communication plans, and then assume that,
through creative and powerful adverts, PR campaigns and other media, the
organization’s reputation can be strengthened or maintained.
• This principle is one that no longer works, or at least not fully, in a social
media environment. Instead, social media necessitate a shift in thinking about
the underlying principles of corporate communication –from the controlled and
planned release of corporate messages (corporate positioning) to the
community-wide generation of content about organizations.
o Content generation defines corporate communication as a joint
activity between an organization and its stakeholders, where, in
principle, stakeholders can just as easily initiate a conversation as an
organization can.
One useful way of understanding social media, and its difference from traditional
broadcasting media, is by looking at the degree to which the medium allows for rich
forms of interaction when individuals and organizations use social media on the one
hand and to which it facilitates individual involvement on the other.
On the first media-related dimension, social presence theory states that media
differ in the degree of ‘social presence’ – defined as the acoustic, visual, and
physical contact that individuals can have with one another as they communicate,
such that they feel that they are both ‘present’.
• When social presence is high, it generally leads to greater degree of
involvement of individuals in the interaction and potentially higher degrees of
commitment.
