People don’t want to hear from ‘experts’ any more.
Trust in leaders of any description – from business, charity, politicians, NHS – has dropped dramatically.
You need to give your staff a voice – all staff not just the management – if you want your company message to be trusted and believed.
What does that mean and how do you go about building trust?
Our day-to-day experience in PR, measuring what campaigns work best, has been showing us for some time that content from junior staff or public feedback gains the best traction – the most views, shares and positive response.
It seems that only people ‘lower down the ranks’ have any authenticity – people who have nothing to gain by promoting a particular point of view, or equally have nothing to lose by telling it like it is.
Now a survey carried out by FleishmanHillard Fishburn has backed this up.
…“leaders of companies were seen alongside politicians as being amongst the least credible sources of information (7% and 2% respectively).
Conversely, employees ranked alongside family and colleagues (34%) as the most credible sources of information.”
Here’s what to do to get your message across
Be honest
Identify your messages. What are you trying to say? For example, it might be that ‘your company is a great place to work’ or ‘our products are made from better quality components so will last longer’ or ‘our response times will be better’.
Find the evidence which backs this up. The evidence might take the form of internal sales information, product information and supplier details, or actual happy staff and customers.
Identify natural spokespeople
Look for people who are happy and comfortable to describe their experience, and record them or gather their words. Transcribe what they say or collate the information,
Use as much visual material as you can
Video content is ideal and it must have subtitles, but a slide show of photos is great; a strong graph, a funny picture. An interesting infograph. Visual communication is the most powerful medium you can employ.
Find the correct channels
Don’t try and reinvent the wheel, but do be creative looking for outlets, think of all your stakeholders and what media they consume at work and play, and then explore how your content would be appropriate and engaging on that channel.
Help people find it
After you’ve been creative in developing content and finding the right channel you then have to be ultra-meticulous in how you reference it. You must have the right links, tags, and meta descriptions attached to your content. Describe your photos, check your URLs and snippets. It does take time but you need to help google help you.
Use the professionals
When you have to work so hard to get your message across, and when false news or disbelief can cost you so much in lost sales or opportunities, it’s worth investing in people to help you get it right. They won’t speak for you but they will help your voice be heard.
For an informal chat about how we can help your authentic voice to be heard, drop me an email nicky@twelvepr.co.uk or call me on 01608 495012.
To read the original research about trust click on this report title: “The Authenticity Gap”.
