The New Age of Corporate Social Advocacy

In last week’s video, we posed the question: is the word “democracy” now a polarizing term?

Just a few years ago, an executive saying or a company posting on their social account something like, “It’s great to live in the U.S., a democracy with free and fair elections,” would elicit a ho-hum response — if any acknowledgment at all.

But nowadays, we communicators have to think extra carefully about who such a message would come from, what the context is, and whether it’s even appropriate at all.

This brings us to this week’s topic: reintroducing a concept we’ve mentioned previously, corporate social advocacy, or CSA.

At a recent presentation, Dr. Luke Capizzo, who’s an assistant professor at Michigan State University’s Advertising and PR department, shared this definition of CSA:

“The act of an organization taking a stance on a controversial socio-political issue. CSA efforts are distinct from CSR programs in that they…

  • (1) often focus on areas and issues not directly relevant to a company’s business and
  • (2) are known to be polarizing or contentious for at least some organizational stakeholders.”

So, with that in mind, is talking about government and election fundamentals now considered leaning into CSA?

There’s certainly a sound argument for that, yes.

So, as we head into the final days before the presidential election here in the U.S., it’s a good time to dust off your company’s or clients’ CSA infrastructure.

There are several models out there, including a great one from Pfizer’s Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Sally Susman, published in her “Breaking Through” book.

There are a few core concepts that all of these frameworks have in common:

Whether the issue or news at hand that you’re considering saying something about ties back to your corporate values.

Whether it’s important to or impacts your key stakeholders, including employees.

And whether you have a realistic opportunity to make an impact of some kind.

So, our recommendation?

As part of your scenario planning for this election season and any potential aftermath, establish a CSA framework if you don’t have one already, and educate your decision makers about what it is.

Then, consider VERY deliberately which stances or statements maybe once were not but now MAY be a form of corporate social advocacy.

Is “Democracy” a Loaded Term?

Has “democracy” become a loaded term for executives?

The NYT’s DealBook newsletter posed this question last week.

With the landscape changing since the last US presidential election four years ago, in many cases, it HAS become more complicated – and let’s face it, less common – for individual executives to proactively share their stances.

But let’s take a look at opportunities for leadership at companies and clients to finish up preparations for the remainder of the leadup to elections and the potential aftermath.

The NYT article we mentioned pointed to the Business Roundtable’s recent statement “urg[ing] all Americans to respect the processes…for electoral determinations and an orderly transition.”

The Business Roundtable comprises more than 200 CEOs, including those of life science companies Eli Lilly, J&J, Medtronic, Merck, Pfizer, and Thermo Fisher.

So, this is an excellent resource to point to in your communications.

In a Ragan and Conference Board survey of mar-comm professionals from this summer, they found that over half of those surveyed actively encourage their employees to vote, and 43% give time off to vote.

Another great opportunity we have to show our commitment to the democratic process is simply to encourage our employees to vote.

And remember the power of an integrated comms strategy.

That encouragement to your teams to vote doesn’t only have to be an internal message.

It can be external, too.

Ragan’s report-out also reminds us of four of the most common scenarios orgs may encounter during this election season: being unwillingly brought into the political conversation, increased workplace disruptions, political discussion in company platforms, and potential misinformation and deepfake encounters.

Edelman’s 2020 advice from its Divide Guide on operational and comms considerations still holds true.

Among the stakeholders you should scenario plan for are government, the shareholder and business community, customers, media, and employees.

At the end of the day, similar to your corporate social advocacy strategy, any communications efforts in this arena should tie back to corporate values, whether the issues at hand are priority for your core audiences, and if you have standing to share your stance.

More on that next week.

Sources:

Personal Storytelling Makes a Difference

We talked earlier this year about the importance of including the patient perspective in corporate messaging.

In last week’s Comm Convo, our guest speakers reminded us, albeit from a different vantage point, why this is important.

They said the most effective way to get our stories across is at the human level.

And especially with audiences like government officials who have contrasting perspectives flying at them from every which way, it usually takes more than once.

What we also heard from our panelists was that, more broadly speaking, consistent and human-centric storytelling is the key.

Yes, this certainly includes working hand in hand with smart and credible patient advocacy organizations.

But it also means tapping into the personal stories that propel our industry forward.

For example, why is your leadership team focused on a particular disease area or modality? What’s the tie-in with their personal experiences or motivations?

Or, what experiences can your lab staff or manufacturing team draw on to provide the full picture to external audiences?

Or, what about the job creation or workforce development story in the local economy? Are there new and different kinds of jobs your company or client is creating that maybe didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago?

Of course our industry has its challenges and there are bad actors just like every other sector out there, but as our guests said last week, there’s a LOT to be celebrated.

We should be proud of the work we’re doing and proud to tell our story.

It can make a difference,  from Wall Street all the way to Capitol Hill.

Personalized Digital Content Creation

Most of us have at least heard about personalized medicine, but personalized content creation- in this industry???

Rest easy, we’re not talking about omnichannel marketing today.

Yet, there are still opportunities for us as biopharma communicators to personalize the types of content we do manage.

A 2021 McKinsey report found that “71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.”

Although these stats don’t exactly apply to most of us on the corporate communications and PR side, there’s definitely something to it.

In 2022, UC San Diego researchers reported that the average American consumes about 34 GB of information every day.

With that much coming at any given audience and the demand for hyper-personalization, we have to make every effort to tailor our materials as much as possible.

So, what ARE easy ways that we can create personalized experiences through corp affairs-driven content?

Common AI tools like ChatGPT are actually powered by Natural Language Processing, or NLP.

This doesn’t mean that every output sounds completely natural – we all know that’s not the case… yet.

But we can still take advantage of the way these types of tools work to adapt the same content for investors, or patients, or the media, or any given group.

And we can even pressure test customized messaging for each audience BEFORE it’s deployed by prompting these tools to have the same context and priorities as those actual groups.

That may even mean creating your own knowledge base for training data, including examples of past materials and any metrics you’ve used to assess success.

Then, once you’ve decided whatever you’re working on is as good as it’s going to get and actually deploy it, you can go BACK in with these AI tools again to help analyze how it landed.

So we keep going through this feedback cycle.

What does your own feedback cycle look like for personalized digital content nowadays?

Rethinking Storytelling in the Digital Era

As communicators in biopharma, we know that storytelling is key to conveying complex science, data readouts, and implications for human health.

Author Jeff Gothelf shared in Harvard Business Review a few years back that, “A poor storyteller can butcher even the best ideas, while a strong storyteller can present a daunting concept with care and compassion for their audience.”

Why is that?

Cognitive neuroscientist and behavioral economist Gleb Tsipursky says that “using stories speaks to emotions, inspires engagement, and is memorable.”

He says that stories tap into social intelligence, which he refers to as “the strategic capacity to evaluate and influence other people’s emotions and relationships.”

Translating these highly relatable stories into digital media that can still effectively convey key messages while also leveraging that social intelligence doesn’t come without its challenges.

A digital communications literature review last year published in the journal, Management Review Quarterly, put it this way:

“Compared to traditional communication, digital communication brings along distinct characteristics, such as changes in information flows, the density of information, or the timing of communication.”

The Center for Digital Storytelling recommends these seven elements of digital storytelling: 1. Point of View, 2. A Dramatic Question, 3. Emotional Content, 4. The Gift of Your Voice, 5. The Power of the Soundtrack, 6. Economy, or not overloading the viewer, and 7. Pacing.

How are you rethinking storytelling in the digital era?

Zeitgeist Du Jour

We started out this month talking about how we as biopharma communicators can foster a social-first employee partnership, despite the abounding compliance issues we face.

We’re CLOSING the month by looking at this in reverse, thinking about, as Digiday put it last week, “how extremely online culture is showing up outside of social media.”

The White House recently hosted a Creator Economy Conference, and the president told folks in attendance that they’re “the future.”

There are SO many microtrends these days, most of which seem to originate on the Tik-Tok.

We’re not even on Tik-Tok but know about them.

Why? Because we hear about them somewhere else.

When we google terms like “demure” and “brat,” we see explainers from major news orgs like the BBC and NBC.

We’ve started seeing thoughtful reflections and analysis about these terms – particularly in our comms world – on other platforms, like here, on LinkedIn.

Beyond ensuring awareness of what we in the biz may term big news stories and key mentions of our orgs and clients on social, we’re going to need to start to be fluent in some of these trends, too.

While there might be the occasional opportunity for a brand or executive in our industry to publicly hop on a trending bandwagon, we don’t see that very frequently – understandable.

But because what’s happening online is becoming part of our OFFLINE culture, that means that we are the de facto arbiters of figuring out how that translates to integrated comms strategies, including employee engagement.

Understanding the zeitgeist du jour and finding small ways to allude to some of them internally is another way to show that company leaders are attuned to what our colleagues are experiencing outside of the lab and office.

Making the Case for Industry Executives’ Social Presence

“Scientists and experts are expected to lead on the implementation of innovation,” according to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer.

And with more than 50 percent of people surveyed getting most of their information about new technologies and innovations from social media, we in biopharma are well-positioned to become trusted sources directly through our scientific leadership team’s social profiles.

Content from individuals at our orgs and clients is the new version of quotes in a press release.

Think about it – if a press release announces the news and quotes within the release comment on the news and add context, there’s a parallel opportunity here pertaining to how we can manage our companies’ and leaders’ social accounts, respectively.

Edelman’s Trust Barometer goes on to recommend that we can build trust via experts’ commentary by “explaining the research, engaging in dialogue, and harnessing peer voices as advocates.”

And, what’s more is that research from FTI Consulting last year found that “engagement rates for content from business leaders are more than two times higher than posts on company channels.”

With confidence increasing in advances like gene-based medicine if they’re shown to have been evaluated by scientists, we as biopharma communicators have a PRIME opportunity to not only control but also to directly shape the narratives of industry breakthroughs and their implications for society.

So, if an executive you work with is skeptical of publishing personal social content, or their next LinkedIn or blog post always seems to be an afterthought, we hope this helps you to make your case.

Ownable Social Media Strategy

Corporate and executives’ social channels are considered “owned” content.

But what we’re talking about is “ownable” social strategy.

Social media consultant and author of the popular “Link In Bio” newsletter Rachel Karten recently described “ownable” in this way that resonated with us:

“An ownable social media strategy comes up with a format or style that somehow feels at home on a platform but also fresh and new.

An ownable social media strategy builds brand (and industry) lore.”

We’d be remiss not to acknowledge all of the regulatory guidelines to which we must adhere, but sometimes fear of being shut down stymies our creativity.

While we may not have the next Duolingo owl up our sleeve, we as biopharma communicators have a one-of-a-kind perspective on – and access to – scientific advances that are literally changing lives.

As Nia Patel, of Marketers in Progress, shared in last week’s Comm Convo, “When it comes to being authentic, it’s about telling the stories that you want to tell, being true to yourself, and being true to the kind of content that you want to talk about.”

So, if we strip away the layers of reviews that each word we put out on social has to go through, what’s the essence of that ownable content for our orgs and clients? For our industry?