The third and final day of Paine Publishing’s 2020 Summit on the Future of Communications Measurement, October 8th, was devoted to measuring trust, with presentations by Meg Fligg of Georgia-Pacific; Deanna Centurion of Cyera Strategies, and Eve Stevens of Microsoft. See this article for an introduction to the 2020 Summit. Visit this page to view a recording of Day 3 of the Summit.
Meg Fligg of Georgia-Pacific:
Toilet paper on a roll
A compelling tale of essential products and workers was told on Day 3 by Meg Fligg, self-proclaimed #TPNerd and Director of Communications and Public Relations for Georgia-Pacific.
Fligg readily admits that she has spent the last 25 years of her career waiting for toilet paper to be important. “This has been the only year in my career that people haven’t run from me when I say I make toilet paper. TP is now an okay conversation to have.” And in the early weeks of the pandemic it seemed like TP was all we talked about.
A crisis in the making
Back in March, as photos of empty grocery store shelves started flooding into the company’s social media pages, Fligg realized something was very, very wrong. Georgia-Pacific’s primary brands are Quilted Northern and Angel Soft, but they also private-label for large big-box stores. Even they had empty shelves. Soon the rumors started flying.
The reality was that the factories were still pumping out toilet paper, but the panic-buying and hoarding that the pandemic brought on emptied shelves around the country. Trucks were still delivering toilet paper every day, but they were going to big-box stores that order by the pallet load, not to your neighborhood grocery store. And suddenly all the “professional” toilet paper that is used in airports, bars, restaurants, and offices was sitting in empty buildings, or on trucks on their way to businesses that were now closed down.
“It was a complete surprise to people who make toilet paper,” Meg admitted. “In mid-March people noticed the lack of toilet paper on their shelves, and by June we had become belle of the bathroom ball. “Social media was flooded with jokes, snark, and visuals about toilet paper — something that never happens, according to Fligg. It was a whole new world. “The numbers we saw on social media were very, very large in a very short period of time. We wanted to be responsive and respond to everyone to at least acknowledge that we’d heard them, but we had no experience with that kind of volume.”
Rolling out a response
The first thing they did to discourage hoarding was to get data from their operations and sales team to produce the following infographic, (which, I confess, I have been using to decide when I need to go to the store):
That tuned Fligg and her team into the power of visuals and videos to get their key messages out there, and they proceeded to produce quantities of content in every conceivable format for employees, the media, and anyone who wanted to use it.
“Our mantra was ‘Be Transparent,’ ” Fligg told the Summit attendees, admitting that working for a private company with little interest in the media was a big shift in attitude. “We had to keep reminding folks that this is an opportunity, and we encouraged media calls.”
Creating a script for everyone to follow
The next thing they did was to agree on the goal of wiping out misconceptions and misinformation. So, their key messages were:
- TP is not made in China: “TP is made close to where it is used, because it is bulky and hard to ship. It isn’t stuck in some port in China,” was essentially the message. They illustrated it with mesmerizing videos of TP coming down conveyor belts and cheerful employees making the precious substance.
- GP is considered essential : They had to make everyone understand that what they were doing was essential, and that their workers were also essential. Therefore they had to retool factories and change protocols to keep everyone safe.
- The supply chain is healthy and working: Finally, they had to tackle the thorny issue of explaining “supply chain” to millions of people who had never even heard the term. “In reality,” Fligg admitted, “the supply chain manages itself. We can change and adapt pretty quickly and ship directly to stores, it just takes a little while to restock all those shelves. The business was able to shift products from airports and restaurants into the retail supply chain.”
These messages were embedded in everything they did, and since they were the only messages, they made sure that everyone would stay on the same page.
Try everything
To get all these messages out there, Fligg and her team produced large quantities of digital assets and made them available to everyone. “They were getting questions, so we wanted to enable the answers,” Fligg explained.
Encouraging employees to share this content with their friends and family was something very new. “Our employees are normally very quiet and nerdy and, because we are private, very scared to share info. We had to encourage them to embrace their pride in Georgia-Pacific and what they did.”
“We turned a web page into a page of assets, and packaged infographics for employees to use and share. They lit up social media.” Fligg credits the fact that they kept the content simple and did not add a lot of detail.
Over-communicate
Normally GP’s leaders were visible once a quarter, but once COVID hit, they were in front of employees weekly. Typically, they posted leadership messages on Linked-In monthly, now it was on an as-needed basis. Employees, customers, and the public were able to get their questions answered in almost real-time by G-P leaders. “This helped boost credibility and ensured everyone stayed connected,” explained Fligg.
When they saw that the media was going to their Q&A page for answers, they made sure the answers were there in every possible format. And they could then track those messages all the way through to the media stories that were posted. “We realized that the media was working quickly, were probably understaffed, and were looking for quick info. So we made sure they could just cut and paste from G-P.com.
Metrics
The first thing they did was report on the actual numbers of those “cut and pastes.” They also tracked the results in a variety of other ways. Including the amount of revenue. For instance, a link from a Reuters article to their e-commerce store generated $140,000 in new sales.
Influencers
Prior to the pandemic G-P had established relationships and partnerships with a number of influencers in the communities in which they had factories. All those factory tours paid off when the TP shortage hit; photos from them were used in G-P’s social media. Even better, G-P reached out to the influencers to help get their messages out, sending them data on how much TP was needed, how the supply chain worked, and insider tips on how to find TP. Every one of the influencers shared something.
Fligg said that their influencer efforts not only helped get their messages out, but it also solidified their relationships and enabled them to find new influencers in those communities. The effort reached 30K consumers on Facebook and Instagram that they wouldn’t have reached otherwise.
“We had a huge variety of assets to offer all these media outlets, and as a result created numerous media relationships.” They captured the name and contact detail of every person they talked to and are continuing to follow up, currently about shortages in paper towels.
Lessons learned
- Over-communicate. If you feel you have quadrupled your communications, you’re doing it right.
- Stay focused, stick to strategy, adapt quickly. They used a single expert document, and no one issued any communications without using the expert document.
- Get help from others. “Breaking down silos and working with various teams helped us execute faster. Our response to the crisis has ushered in new opportunities to educate institutions on our methods and approach, as well as be a preferred partner for customers by providing and guiding solutions to new challenges. We continue to leverage employees and leadership as ambassadors to advocate positive awareness of business efforts and demonstrate the value of their voice.”
- Don’t assume that people trust you just because you have a well-known, well-loved brand. In a crisis you really need to reinforce the trust messages.
- Go wide, not deep. “We traditionally have gone deep rather than wide. Now leadership understands they have ten seconds to tell us the headline. That has been a tough barrier, but now our communications are much shorter and tighter.
Deanna Centurion and Marathon Oil:
Building trust in a dangerous industry
We next pivoted 180 degrees from a comfortable soft product like toilet paper to oil pipelines. It was quite the shift, but Deanna Centurion of Cyera Strategies navigated it beautifully. She told the story of how Marathon Oil decided to measure trust among the landowners closest to its pipeline. Building and measuring trust is essential in the oil and gas business. Because if they don’t trust your messages, they won’t heed your warnings and behave safely, like calling before digging fence post holes or planting a tree. Ignoring safety guidance frequently results in death and destruction.
Prior to the Marathon trust measurement program, pipelines in general had experienced more than a decade of eroding trust. Consider the recent oil spills in rivers, the PG&E San Bruno Gas explosion, and the Dakota pipeline protests where video of dogs attacking Native American protestors was seen across the country. The result was boycotts of bank funders, and more expensive borrowing costs.
The benefits of trust
Marathon Oil saw the benefits of trust in:
- Faster project completion
- Lower legal costs
- Lower regulatory risk
- Lower interest rates
- Improved reputation
- Easier partnerships. With a lot of capital-intensive projects, Marathon wants to be the partner of choice.
Measuring trust
The first step in measuring trust was to initiate a variety of communication outreach, from farming events to local pizza parties to letters from the CEO to assigning individual account managers to each landowner. How would they know if they were working?
They started with focus groups, but those didn’t really provide hard data. So they called in Deanna to measure trust via a series of surveys and a bespoke trust score. They set targets, tested knowledge of the messages, and addressed any area or demographic that was below the targets.
They found that dependability and follow-through were ranked lowest on the trust scale. The first Aha! moment was when they realized that those weren’t things communications alone could fix. So they had to make sure that operations was in lockstep with comms. Once they were working together their scores began to go up,. They found that higher trust scores highly correlated with feeling informed and being confident in the company’s ability to respond in an emergency.
According to Centurion, the key elements to measuring trust are:
- Leadership buy-in
- Agreement on a definition of trust
- Consistent data collection
- Applying data through actionable insight
- Keeping an open mind to new insights
Eve Stevens of Microsoft:
Developing a massive real-time trust dashboard
What happens if you can’t do surveys often enough to provide the data you need? Eve Stevens, Senior Manager of Insights at Microsoft, helps run the Communications insights program. She outlined the media analysis program that captures coverage about the markets in which Microsoft operates. All those various media items are computer-analyzed and human-curated into a single dashboard used by Microsoft’s communications professionals around the globe.
The system is set up to provide ongoing insight about Communications trends and results from an outside-in perspective. In other words, they aren’t looking for a Microsoft point of view, but for a real-world perspective of what the market says about Microsoft.
Stevens says:
“We focus on the priorities of the communications teams and their impact. There’s a lot of listening and learning. We keep a close eye on how audiences are engaging with media and influencers. And we do lots of bespoke topical research with single-stakeholder issues. We want to know what communications tactics work and what don’t.”
As for measuring trust, Stevens admits that, “Trust is one of the knottiest challenges I’ve had to face. How, from an external media perspective, do you measure trust, which is a very individualistic perception or belief? Especially knowing that we are measuring influence on the audience, not the actual audience.” And of course it has to be done in multiple countries and multiple languages. Their solution was to create an agreed-upon definition of trust that is as universally applicable as possible.
Developing a trust metric and algorithm
Early on they realized they needed cross company buy in on scope and objectives. They started with the established market research’s definition to determine how Microsoft’s audiences perceive trust and understand what Microsoft’s trust drivers were. Then they worked with internal teams to find commonalities and agreements between different groups’ trust constructs.
The broad business alignment, including market research, comms, public affairs, and executive leadership, made Eve realize that each team had its own trust narrative. So she had to develop a methodology to include all the various trust drivers. Not only did they have to make sure everyone in the company agreed with the trust metric, but they also had to make sure it was universally applicable.
They also had to ensure that the trust metrics didn’t reflect trust in the article or media outlet, but rather in the company or product discussed. Eve says, “We tried to foresee all the various scenarios that might drive trust up or down. The end result was an algorithm that looks for and categorizes the media content into multiple facets of trust and helps us identify what aspects of trust we need to keep an eye on.” ∞
