The Power of Pecking Orders: How to Use Rankings to Improve Your Programs

CEOs aren’t much different. It is in their DNA to want to top their category in the Fortune 500. University presidents obsess about where they stand in the US News and World Report rankings, not to mention where their sports teams rank in whatever league they’re playing in. Magazine editors understand this obsession all too well, and constantly rank cities, states, even countries on their prowess at everything from crime to sex.

Communications professionals can learn from this obsession with rankings.

I’ve been in countless meetings organized around getting the groups to agree on definitions of success. I generally start off with a question about how they measure failure. Invariably the answer is, “Nothing ever fails.” Which is probably true in most organizations. People rarely admit to failure for fear of the consequences—which I consider the ultimate management failure.

On the other hand, anyone who has ever spent time in Silicon Valley will tell you that the key to success is to fail fast and often and learn from the experience.

Rebranding Failure

But when it comes to communications professionals, there is something in their genetic makeup that makes them recoil from the concept of failure. So I suggest we eat our own dog food and rebrand the concept of failure. Let’s call it “forced ranking.”  Trust me, you are going like it: Management instinctively gets the concept, your bosses will love it, and your programs will continuously improve.

Here’s how it works.

First you need a definition of success, a metric by which all the various projects you are working on can be judged. Then rank your program with respect to that metric, and see what you can learn. Here are three examples:

Example 1: Media Coverage of Key Messages

If your goal is to position your organization as a leader in its field, then you can analyze all your media coverage around your event or campaign and see what percentage of it contains the  key message “Company x is a leader, or one of the leaders in the field.”  That metric, “% of stories that contain one or more key messages,” becomes your standard of success. Now rank all the programs according to which had the highest % of key messages vs. the lowest. Do a root cause analysis to figure out why the top-ranked ones were more successful, and why the bottom-ranked programs failed.

Example 2: Website Traffic

If your goal is to drive traffic to a website, you’ll want to start with a web traffic report that might look like this:

Now, sort that report from most to least visits, and it will look like this:

Now look at your media coverage around the dates when you had the most unique visits. What did you do, what was going on, what campaign was underway? Whatever you were doing (in this case) around January 13-17 was clearly working better than what you were doing around January 26-27. What can you learn from that? An important point here is to make sure that everyone agrees on the definition of “working.”

Example 3: Manage a Crisis

If you’re trying to manage bad news you can use the ranking technique to help figure out what works and what doesn’t. In this example we’ll rank previous crises by desirable or undesirable results, and then use those rankings to identify well-managed crises. You can examine the well-managed ones to see what lessons can be applied to future crises.

No matter what the crisis, you probably have two basic goals:

1. Get your version of the story out there by communicating your key messages, and
2. Reduce the number of undesirable messages by keeping overall coverage to a minimum.

So the ideally managed crisis will have both high key message communication and low overall coverage.

To begin, rank order all your previous crises according to the extent that you achieved the goals above. To measure the key message goal, use the metric “% of articles containing our key messages.” To measure the coverage goal, use “total volume of coverage.”

Let’s suppose you’ve had seven previous crises. Your rankings results might look like the following:

Ranking of Crises by Percent of Articles Containing Key Messages (most to least):

1. Merger talks
2. Product recall
3. Chemical spill
4. Layoffs
5. Customer Twitter issue
6. Insider trading accusation
7. Bad Facebook post

Ranking of Crises by Total Volume of Coverage (most to least):

1. Insider trading accusation
2. Chemical spill
3. Merger talks
4. Customer Twitter issue
5. Layoffs
6. Product recall
7. Bad Facebook post

Now graph these on a chart like the Crisis Rankings Chart below. Place crises on the vertical axis according to the rank of their key message content, lowest to highest. Place crises on the horizontal axis according to the rank of their volume of coverage, lowest to highest.

Crisis Rankings Chart

Ideal crisis management results in high messages and low content, which is the upper left side of the chart. So any crisis located in the upper left side of the chart is one that was well managed and is one to learn from. Any crisis located in the lower right of the chart is one that was poorly managed, and you probably want to avoid repeating. In this example, the product recall crisis probably provided an opportunity to communicate key messages about future products and concern for customers, i.e. a sign of effective crisis management. Whereas the insider trading accusation crisis probably included many messages you would rather not have seen in print and was probably driven by legal resulting in ineffective management.

So now compare your management of the upper left crises to the lower right crises to see what you can learn:

• What were the most effective actions to mitigate the crisis and/or ensure messages are communicated?
• Who were your most effective spokespeople?
• How and where did you communicate?
• What media did you use to get those message across?

Remember, you aren’t just demonstrating success, you want to learn from your mistakes. Do this a few more times and you’ll be on the top of the pecking order in your organization. ∞

Thanks to Modern Bushman for the image.