Why communications is happine$$

I’m staring at a LinkedIn update showing a pearly-mouthed woman who wrote a blog that “went viral” (yeah, that) and kickstarted her career in ‘content writing’.

The gong held aloft by this girl, all white-teethed and glossy eyed (not glassy — presumably that came later during the celebratory quaffing), says ‘in’ on it. Because that’s what LinkedIn calls itself when it wants to be a thing among millennials.

Having an award with in on it looks a bit odd in this context. It makes me feel uneasy, since it points to something a little bawdy. Or it could be simply that it’s Friday and my mind has already begun to wander to more Bacchanalian pursuits.

But I couldn’t be more delighted to see youngsters receiving high praise and starting jobs in content writing.

Content writing! What a time to be alive!

Lord help us.

In other news, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the intersection of customer service, communications and marketing. And because I admit to not knowing a great deal a great deal, my next ministration will come as no surprise.

Communications doesn’t sit alongside marketing and customer service. Communications sits in the throne. Offering counsel is customer service, which receives an abundant supply of good fortune in return. In today’s money, marketing is the clown prince.

Communications informs everything we do. Companies rarely pay sufficient attention to their communications and instead fill their customers’ news feeds with pestering and provocation.

Noone wants noise. Everyone wants the signal. They want a signal they matter. They want validation for being your customer. And if they don’t get that proof they made in your favour the right decision, they’ll make another one.

Communications is the currency of the forward-thinking organisation. Communications decides whether you have customers. Communications is the difference between selling on features, and benefits.

Why, then, do meagre numbers of chief executives make it their wont to insist that communications gets a seat at the top table?

Communications like its baby brother, or progeny, marketing is given to being some soft part of the business that doesn’t matter very much because the metrics point only to the achievements of operations and business development. Communications is seen as the lubrication to the machine that is the business.

And we all know how favoured oil is.

But equally, you try running a car without a good sip of Castrol GTX. Let’s see how that goes.

Until we understand the power of communications and that ultimately marketing and customer services are lost, if not non-existent, without it, businesses will never emerge from the current era of futility where noone really knows what to do and thus we see every entity large and small thinking they should have a presence on every social network, ignore newspapers, and jump on whatever the next ‘big thing’ might be. Because that is how success is defined by the loudest of voices.

Everyone falls into the same trap. Twitter not working for you? Blame your social media assistant. Not generating enough leads through LinkedIn?

It’s not the platforms. It’s probably not your staff, though let’s be honest, a bit more training and mentorship wouldn’t go amiss. It’s inconsistency, and an abject disregard for what your customers want.

What you’re missing is the communications strategy that leverages your most passionate people to get out there and create happine$$ for your customers.

There’s a reason why I just spelled happiness wrong. But you’ll have to stick around to find out why…