Why Your Left Arm Must Talk to Your Right Arm

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One of the biggest challenges businesses face is ensuring their left arm is talking to their right arm.

Navigating and removing the silos of business departments to develop and implement a holistic communications approach is certainly difficult at the best of times. In fact, IBM found that CMOs rate cross-communications as one of their biggest challenges in the coming year.

Questions we ask our clients include “how do you ensure your customer service department is talking with, and sharing intelligence with your public relations team? What capacity do you have to feed in real-time supply chain data to your marketing strategy?”

With the solidification of digital, this cohesive, integrated approach is now more critical than ever.

As I’ve mentioned here before, with the convergence of media (digital, ATL, outdoor and mobile) driving an unprecedented convergence of communications and a Global Village of hyper-connected people, brands can no longer rely on isolation or ‘walls’. This through-the-line communications environment means what happens at band camp, is now public across multiple touch points within a matter of hours.

So, if you have a major IR issue that has driven a large part of your organic media relations and digital conversation, it’s best to connect with your social media management team. Qantas learned this yesterday, and it highlights some interesting issues.

Qantas asked passengers to use the hashtag “QantasLuxury” to enter the competition to win a pair of first class pajamas, but many users decided to use that hashtag for their own purposes, complaining of how they missed catching up with friends, and even missing funerals, due to the recent stoppages.

Needless to say, the hashtag went off like a frog in a sock on too much coffee. Reported by media outlets the world over including Reuters, our little airline downunder created a global social media ‘epic fail’ story in a matter of hours.

Timing is key here. The day after negotiations with your unionized workforce fails, and the issue goes to binding arbitration, is probably not the best time to test your digital loyalty. One week after? Two weeks after? There’s no right answer on the timing, but the recommendation would be to listen.

Understand the sentiment of your stakeholders prior to engaging an innocuous Twitter competition and ensure you are purposeful to your audience.

But wait, it’s not all bad

Let’s flip this discussion; it could be argued that Qantas has managed to test the digital waters and glean a wide stakeholder insight through a simple Twitter hashtag.

As I wrote earlier, digital platforms offer businesses and strategists a wealth of insight simply through the soft data patterns. You can gauge insights in sentiment, reach, propensity to action and issues that matter to your stakeholders and this can become powerful intelligence when you marry the data patterns across your other CRM systems.

It is widely known Qantas has a large Frequent Flyer database that is regularly used to ‘test the waters’ on messages and campaigns. If I was Qantas’ strategist, I’d be bringing their digital team, their Frequent Flyer team and their IR team together around a large table and looking at how we could combine intelligence and craft a strategy to mitigate the wide-spread negativity moving forward.

While the #qantasluxury effort certainly didn’t go the way originally intended, Qantas now has a goldmine of information at its disposal. And let’s be realistic, a Twitter campaign that goes off the rails is not going to be the downfall of an international brand such as Qantas. Yes it has some bite, and might impact on their ability to reposition their brand online after months of negativity, but it needs to be put into perspective.

And it should be used as a learning point that digital activity cannot be viewed in isolation to your wider brand. Because in today’s though-the-line communications, there are no walls. But there are second chances.