Getting Started in CommTech: From Professional to Pathfinder

Just as our peers in Marketing have shifted to MarTech, communicators need to embrace new Agile teams, talents, tools and data analytics. In the beginning, MarTech was only the addition of technology to existing marketing tactics. Today, doing marketing without technology is impossible. MarTech is marketing, with the singular focus of being more accountable and efficient in driving sales.

Communicators have a similar imperative – but our opportunity is more extensive than for our marketing colleagues because of Communications’ broader range of goals and stakeholders.

This Guide focuses on what makes CommTech new for most CCOs – its capacity to turn communications campaigns from intuition into a science. At one level, this is the simplest and most directly measurable application of CommTech – structuring a journey from A to B to C. In the long run, however, CommTech’s deepest, most challenging and most impactful applications will be the ways CCOs use it to build a brand system, a culture system and a societal value system – systems of relationship and meaning that underpin the entire organization and enact its purpose, values and character.

Brand, culture, societal value and the relationships they build are complex, especially at the Internet-scale, and will only become more so in the coming era of deep fakes, “truth decay,” and assaults on trust in public communications. (For a fuller discussion of these challenges, see The CCO as Pacesetter.) CommTech’s methods and tools help deal with complexity, and only a mature, advanced CommTech system will equip organizations, public or private, to deal with these new threats and challenges.

Such a system is built on what we may call the CommTech Triad:

• The technologies available to us when they become more or less ubiquitous
• The skills necessary to make use of these technologies when the skills are known and acquirable
• The methods we must adopt in order to enculturate the use of the technologies.

For example, here are some of the technologies and approaches that Comms teams can adopt not just to personalize content but to drive interactions and deepen relationships:

• Rapid feedback gathering at scale through real-time interactions with crowds. A growing cottage industry exists of systems that dispense with focus groups and the annual survey and start to build interaction into face-to-face, digitally augmented experiences like townhalls, driven by Sli.do or PopInNow.com.
• CRM for Comms. This is a real business, with fierce competition among the likes of Cision, Muckrack, Public Relay, Social Chorus and specialty CRMs like Qwoted. For Comms, we might call this IRM (Influencer Relationship Management).
• Management of culture: A rich array of digital tools exists that Comms teams can use to create events and interventions into a culture. These include Slack, Yammer, Workplace by Facebook, and MS Teams. The relevant communications skills are less about Agility and more about facilitation.
• Presentation of data: The tools are now consumer-grade, yet few Comms teams have the skills to portray data visually. Tools include Canva, Tableau and Google Data Studio (which is free and powerful).

This guide doesn’t go that far. It focuses on the shift from basic, Professional-level CommTech to the Pathfinder stage described in the Page Progression Path developed as part of The CCO as Pacesetter. In doing so, we aim to build a foundation for CCOs to move from Pathfinder – the stage of shaping communications campaigns – to Pacesetter – the stage of ongoing organizational transformation.