Continuing our series marking the Global Excellence Awards – an international celebration of the best in PR and communications hosted by Communication Director – we asked four jury members of the North American Excellence Awards to share their experiences of leading communications across the continent.
Between you, you represent decades of professional experience in corporate communications. During your careers, what have been some of the biggest developments in the way communicators work?
MARJORIE BENZKOFER The obvious answer is technology. When I started at ComEd in 1993, I used a pager and a cell phone that came in a large shoulder bag. But perhaps more subtle and even more profound is the interconnectiveness of stakeholders. Then we could talk to employees through one channel, regulators through another, each in its own swim lane. But today they talk to each other and we have to be taking a holistic approach managing reputation. Usually when companies do stakeholder research it is with one or two audiences, rarely taking a 360 degree view. When we don’t invest in research to listen to what our multiple stakeholders are saying and thinking, we create blind spots for our organisations that can have lethal effects.