Last week, in my role as the 2023 Chair of the Global Communicators Collective, I helped lead a roundtable and workshop to kick off the new year. I was thrilled to share the stage with Michelle Russo, Chief Communications Officer for the US Chamber of Commerce. She is a stellar communicator because she is a sensitive listener, and she demonstrated this as she facilitated a substantive and inspiring conversation about trends in our industry.
I was also thankful for the extraordinary collection of communicators from a wide variety of sectors and backgrounds who attended and offered so many invaluable insights. Many complex issues surfaced in the conversation, but one call to action seemed to ring throughout: do not accept the status quo.
This was in the back of everyone’s mind as we surfed a few recurring themes:
Rising political polarity and cultural divisiveness. The participants grappled with the role of social media within this context, and reiterated how social media often fails to reward moderation or nuance, which are essential ingredients to healthy dialogue.
Digital engagement.“Is content king?” Several voices in the room agreed that conversation has dethroned content, and what were once platforms purely for presentation have now morphed into forums for discussion and debate. As communicators, we can’t move our work forward without acknowledging this shift. We must shape our communications strategy with this in mind and carefully consider the kind of discourse we want to promote with our messaging.
The precarious state of Twitter. In the event of Twitter’s collapse, what communications contingency plans do you have in place to retain your audience from the app? Some in the room offered solutions to this anxiety such as experimenting with smaller, emerging platforms. Overall, the consensus was that keeping and continuing to feed your audience is crucial because if you starve your audience, someone else will inevitably fill that role.
How professional environments demand we interact with difference, and hopefully in turn, develop more nuanced thinking. This is especially interesting to consider in relation to the pandemic and the large-scale transition to remote work. This insight left me wondering if we can virtually recreate spaces for these profound and transformative interactions to happen. Perhaps, this is just one of the many projects and problems that communicators can tackle collectively in the coming months.
Certainly, we had more to talk about than we had time for. We are communicators after all–we live and breathe for conversation. Despite the thorniness and complexity of the topics and trends we did cover, I felt extremely optimistic. These are the hands I want to place the world in–these are the communicators who put a message to the vision that will inspire the action necessary to transform the world. They are not trend-adopters but trend-setters.
Attendees were asked to take on three tasks after they left:
- Share with us the communications people and projects that deserve a bigger stage.
- Let us know what ideas, articles, new books or emerging thought leaders should be featured at future events.
- For the next event, bring someone you’re mentoring or that should have their voice amplified at the table.
As communications professionals, we are curious, clever, innovative, and agile. We have to be! The best of us tell the stories that need telling, point the way toward big ideas, and actively seek out the next big thing in the most unexpected of places.
We need to disrupt without rupturing—and perhaps most importantly, we should regard ourselves as virtuous disruptors who strive to foster unity and civility in the world through service, generosity, and empathy. As communicators, we are storytellers, and by weaving our individual chapters into a cohesive narrative, we can tell an even bigger story than we could tell alone.
