ERBUT

For a comms director, life used to be easier. You could build a message and push it out via one of a few channels — advertising, PR — and that would be that. You counted the results and justified your job by the numbers — and a bit of fluffy feeling.

Some global companies were really good at this. They maximised the opportunities in sending information to others.

And that really is an important word — “send” — because today everyone is pushing the “send” button. But fewer people are pressing the “receive” or “listen” button.

In fact, fewer than one out of four people actually opens marketing emails, while a scant 5.5 percent click through those emails to read more online. Businesses on Twitter also have a long way to go, with only around one-third having generated leads through their Tweets. (And with more people now getting their news from online/mobile sources rather than newspapers, traditional newspaper advertisements are quickly becoming dinosaurs.)

Life in comms today is more competitive and complex than ever before.

So if you are a big company, how do you attract people?

Conversation — not just broadcast. You can’t control it, but you can be in it and keep the quality high.

Now that makes a lot of companies very nervous because they feel they are more open to risk. And they are right to feel that. But it doesn’t change the fact they’re already facing it — like it or not.

So do more with less. Write ten words instead of 50. The appetite is no longer there for such big portions of information anymore. Think tapas — share small dishes.

Those days of huge meals are mostly over. People are more aware of what a good diet looks like today. And that makes life harder for people in comms, because they can no longer set the menu.

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