The Secret of Good Communications
by Gina McAdam
If you’re searching for the secret behind good communications, you could do worse than to adopt Lord Beaverbrook’s advice to his talented but dissolute granddaughter, Lady Jeanne Campbell. In the 1950’s, young, alone and pre-Norman Mailer (she was his third), Jeanne was writing for Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard from New York when he told her:
‘Emphasise human interest. Put the strawberry on top of the basket. Write short sentences. Cut, cut, cut. Always interview people face to face. Never rewrite from another newspaper. Keep widening your circle of acquaintances – even if it means accepting the invitation of bores. Use your feet.’
Now I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first person to regard this particular whiplash approach as the template for good journalism. But I would go one step further to say that regardless of the whom, what and why – and be it B2B or B2C communications – it’s all about how you can:
- make people care about your message
- lead with the most interesting proposition
- keep it simple and concise
- stay fresh
- stay networked, and
- maintain boundless energy
My presentation at Eurocomm 2008 is called ‘Trading Places: Using Communications to engage the Private Sector in Public Agendas’. I’ll be drawing from my consultancy experience of pulling together, through communications, some truly disparate groups. Of negotiating a minefield of incongruent attitudes and dissonant voices, and harnessing them towards a common goal. One laid out by government, no less.
I think it’s fair to say that in general people who work in the public sector, at least in the UK, are somewhat ambivalent about their counterparts (if you can call them that) in private enterprise. Perhaps it’s inverted snobbery – civil servants, educationists, social workers are worthy; the rest are all free-market capitalists. Corporates and private businesses, on the other hand, can have a negative knee-jerk reaction to anything emanating from government, and see public officials as maybe just a little bit out of synch with the real world.
Perhaps the greatest challenge was getting executives to show up to meetings at all! But they did.
Keeping my interpretation of Beaverbrook’s advice close to my chest, we thought of ways to entice businesses into a programme demanding precious time without the promise of profile or riches. In the end, it was all about engaging them in own their terms, in ways that interested them as business people: speaking their language (and not in arch sound-bites), meeting them on their own turf (the empty boardroom, the Adam Street Club), using media and technology that made sense and cost less time (short emails, shorter texts), amongst others. And never, ever, using words like ‘incongruent’, ‘dissonant’ or ‘harness.’
The other side of the coin of course was getting the public sector representatives to accept these terms too. But I won’t go deeper than this here. I hope to see a few people at my seminar in Barcelona.
Being a La Sallite (or La Sallian) myself, I’m overjoyed that Eurocomm 2008 is being held where it is in Barcelona. In Manila where I’m from, De La Salle is known for generating graduates who go into the world to become straight talking, no nonsense, risk-taking leaders and entrepreneurs. In other words, the ideal communicators.
Gina McAdam (U.K.) is Director of Stratemarco Limited. She was born in the Philippines and has a B.A. in Literature from De La Salle University. Gina began her career as an account executive for Saatchi & Saatchi-Ace Compton and JWT in Manila. She has worked in teaching and publishing in Madrid and New York and used to be Head of Marketing and Head of Policy and Public Affairs for a national training organisation in the UK. Gina is Immediate Past Vice President of City Women’s Network (UK), a member of the Institute of Directors and a Changemaker for the UK charity Working Families. She is also a Director of the Café Spice Namaste Group in London. Gina holds an MA from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and attended Henley Management College.
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Gina will be speaking at the EuroComm Conference on the following:
Trading Places: Using Communications to engage the Private Sector in Public Agendas
This session will explore the work done to engage the private sector in major public sector programmes carried out on behalf of or involving key agencies in the United Kingdom, including the Learning & Skills Council (LSC), London Development Agency, Small Business Service and JobCentre Plus. Gina will describe the communication strategies she used to involve initially resistant businesses in a scheme funded by the then Department for Education and Skills with the aim of raising skill levels in the £94 billion UK hospitality and tourism industry. The outcomes prove that communication is instrumental in encouraging cooperation between public and private sector stakeholders and in helping them to ‘trade places’ and to better understand each other’s views.
