With excellent feedback in the luggage (statements of the participants will follow in another post), the #ExcellenceForum (XF) says goodbye to 44 communicators from 23 companies after two intensive and diverse days. And we say a big thank you to our host Axel Springer Corporate Solutions (ACSC) with Christopher Brott. ASCS left a lasting impression. Not only with grandiose architecture and unbeatable conference conditions, but also with expertise on many topics around the great common goal: data-driven communication (DUK).
Things are better together.
The practice of some provides decisive impulses for the practice of others. Was Fachtag#53 able to implement this basic idea of the Excellence Forum? Yes, said Dennis Klehr (Berliner Wasserbetriebe) in the quickest feedback on LinkedIn: "The exciting impulses in the context of the 53rd Excellence Forum symposium around Michael Heine, Thomas Mickeleit and Frank Sielaff, ... have ... inspired me ... to enrich my work as a communicator with new ideas and approaches". Can it be better than this - together?
Through data, communication and marketing continue to grow together, but never completely.
Christopher Brott provided a first take-away right away in his opening presentation. He spoke about the role of content and communication in what marketers call "lead nurturing. For communicators, it turned out to be thesystematic cultivation and expansion/enrichment of stakeholder relationships.
Both disciplines, communication and marketing, just use different terminology, but have the same goal with their respective stakeholders: Value creation through relationship management, measured in "the one KPI that matters" (OMTM: One Metric That Matters). Do you have an OMTM per stakeholder group? Which one is it?
Timo Barthelmes (B.Braun Aesculap) demonstrated the point at which the disciplines must diverge in his par force ride through all processes from content to customer. Halfway through his marathon, he turned the good old AIDA pyramid upside down and showed what other rules apply when CRM can take hold after the user has been identified. Then communication is controlled according to business potential - and is even restricted if none is identifiable.
Data helps to put things into perspective. Data helps to reassure.
Data...calm?
For "data-driven," whose hectic numbers far too often drive us into dead ends, this is a completely new and very sensible paradigm. Kai Fetzer (Bosch) formulated it during the presentation of the Bosch Content Flow by colleague Michael Schmidtke, Head of Global Digital Comms.
Michael showed which tools Bosch uses to successfully coordinate the practice of 2000 (!) content creators. Can this also succeed if you react to every negative peak? Absolutely not. What do you need? Constant measurement.
Bosch uses our Content.One to put topic peaks at the Output or Outcome level in perspective with other topic outcomes. If you measure constantly, you can see what may be insignificant.
Benjamin Schütz, Social Media Lead at RWE, also pointed to this method, relativization and classification. Under the title "Democratizing data use", he showed the COM-Group dashboard, which combines everything - owned, paid (social) and earned - for the first time. Just like Content.One, does in the service dashboard of the #ExcellenceForum.
Benjamin: No, it's not a good idea to respond to every campaign from activists. If you have comparative data, you can see that your own reactions only increase the reach of negative content.
Communication has always been VUCA. But VUCA now has an intensified quality.
A new thought for those advanced on the data marathon: don't think of data as a VUCA driver, but use it as a reassurance tool for dealing with VUCA.
Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Uncertain - this military leadership concept of the U.S. Army War College has also dominated the strategy discourse of communicators for 10 years. In the face of acute war and many permanent crises, do we have a new VUCA quality? That was the opening question of the panel discussion by co-moderator Thomas Mickeleit with Christof Hafkemeyer (EnBW) and Michael Schmidtke (Bosch).
Summing up the answer: Yes and no.
No, because uncertainties, complexity and dilemmas have always been part of the communicator's job, Christof said. "Communication has always been VUCA. Dealing with it is fun, which is exactly why I chose this job."
Yes, Michael said, because the overlapping of permanent crises (climate/Covid..) and the Ukraine war creates demands that did not exist in this form before. How to deal with it? With the help of relativizing data. And perhaps by spelling VUCA differently in communication...
Doing nothing is not an option: Data-driven communication requires cultural change.
The importance of a clear vision to master the data marathon was shown by two very valuable contributions from the CommTech WG.
Richard Tigges (Audi) showed, as a far advanced user, an impressive COM dashboard that actually integrates data from all work levels into a fully transparent content loop.
David Willmes (SCHOTT), at the beginning of the long haul, showed a clear plan for successful embedding. This chart by David nicely shows how comprehensive and without alternative the rebuilding work is that is necessary so that "Data Culture" supports all strategic, operational and organizational fields of action of the data marathon.
We wish all marathon runners the best possible success on their way!
Innovation through Data Science. The Excellence Forum takes the next step.
Finally, a sea of fascinating possibilities. With the help of advanced speech recognition (no, we're not talking about "artificial intelligence"), #ExcellenceForum starts the topic recognition of all benchmarking participants.
Mark Heckmann and Stefan Heeke (Deutsche Bahn) showed what else advanced speech recognition can lead to. What they presented as a new tool for employer branding was #mindblowing.
Live, in the last lecture of two fantastic days ("the best professional day ever" - according to one long-time participant. And hey, it's fifty-three now ) what happens when unsupported survey methods using speech recognition illuminate blind spots - the cultural dimensions of any questions.
We will use this fascinating method at #ExcellenceForum, first at one of the upcoming monthly #WebCircles. Live, of course 🙂
And it will continue live. At Fachtag#54, on November 10 and 11 in Düsseldorf, at Henkel.
Many thanks in advance to our upcoming host: Bettina Fischer (Henkel) .
We rock that! 🙂
