What is the daily life of press officers in the digital age? How are “Press Relations” going digital? In partnership with Wiztopic, innovative software designed for corporate and financial communication professionals, the We Are COM team met Anthime Caprioli – Press Relations and Public Relations Manager of Schneider Electric. An interview full of energy 🙂
Hello Anthime! To start, a classic: what is your definition of corporate communication?
Oops, I didn't review it... In my opinion, this is a "core" activity for the company. It allows him to make his strategy understandable to everyone. In a rapidly changing world, we can no longer do without institutional communication: it transforms business strategy into a communication message and re-contextualizes it at each epiphenomenon to stay on strategic course. This is the daily challenge for communicators in large organizations!
To be honest with you… we don’t know much about Schneider Electric. Can you enlighten us?
Schneider Electric is not the French company best known to the general public. However, it is listed on the CAC 40, achieved 24,7 billion turnover in 2017, employs more than 140 employees in around a hundred countries to respond to one of the great challenges of our time, how to do more while consuming less. of energy.
Over the last ten years, our Group has radically transformed : it tripled its turnover and doubled the number of employees thanks to strong organic growth and more than 140 acquisitions around the world. Beyond this rapid development and internationalization, our business model has also evolved in depth. Historically positioned on intermediated markets, we now also work directly with end customers.
Today a leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, our solutions respond to an environmental challenge: the energy transition. In short, we help our customers reduce their energy bills. We support them in the concrete implementation of a low-carbon strategy to control and reduce their energy consumption.
Public Relations takes on its full meaning: connecting stakeholders together.
And in this big picture, what are the major challenges for Schneider Electric communicators?
We must bring together the Group's employees – who come from very different backgrounds – by writing with them a new chapter in our history, explain our change in business model, show our ability to support the energy transition and the shift to an economy that consumes less energy. 'energy.
Public opinion is becoming increasingly aware of these issues and is addressing them. Although we are more audible than before, our jobs remain complex because they come from engineering and industry. We must develop a simple message to make Schneider Electric's solutions visible; without falling into obvious banalities or empty messages which will not bring anything new to our audiences, such as journalists, for example.
The Schneider Electric “Press Relations” community is made up of 6 employees at the Group Press Service in Paris at the Global level and at the Local level of around 50 correspondents spread across different geographic areas. They have varied profiles and not all are dedicated full time to press relations – some do 20% of their time and others do 100%. This depends on the country context: Press activity is significant in the United States and China, and much less in other countries.
In your opinion, what are the challenges of Press Relations?
The sector of communication has taken the full brunt of digital : the advertising cards were quickly redistributed between the historical players and the new entrants, the customer relationship was transformed establishing a new relationship, internal communication completely turned upside down, etc. The only citadel unreachable by these upheavals has long been Press Relations. This is no longer the case because digital technology is breaking down silos and requiring total decompartmentalization. The challenge for our profession is then to have a more integrated vision.
In this open, interactive world, the American term PR, Public Relations (relations with the public), takes on its full meaning. It is connect stakeholders with each other. We must therefore think with others, work with the professions, anticipate the path of dissemination of information from one channel to another – knowing that not all channels belong to the advertiser – to achieve ultimately to the final target.
We are at a turning point in the history of our profession. Digital doesn't kill it, it accelerates it. The basics remain: fortunately there will always be journalists and influencers, there will always be interpersonal relationships, there will always be press releases to write in different formats. Digital is just a way to do more, better, differently. It is a tool at our service. And as the saying goes “ there are no bad tools, there are only bad craftsmen » ; It’s up to us to invent the way we want to use digital intelligently.
Digital technology frees us from tasks with low added value.
You are exemplary in the digitalization of PR. How did you succeed?
To fully support the company's strategic challenges, our central question was: how to bring together and align the knowledge of Schneider Electric's Press correspondents in the simplest and most effective way? Two solutions were available to us, either in a fairly traditional way, by formalizing numerous processes and reports, often poorly understood and always complicated to use, or by asking ourselves what opportunities digital technology offered to rethink needs and experience. . Since 2015, we have made a resolute commitment to the digital transformation of our business. We forced ourselves to reimagine our role and how to play it. This is how, by relying on Wiztopic, we have created a digital space for mediation, training and support for our internal community, with profoundly transformed relationships. The pace of exchanges has accelerated, behaviors have changed towards more collaborative. Our interactions are no longer just top-down but also bottom-up and transverse. Exemplary local initiatives are promoted within the community and can be sources of inspiration or fully replicated in other geographic areas. These new collaborative practices appeared very quickly after the deployment of the Wiztopic solution.
Now, we are entering a new stage of our digitalization: like the transformation of internal relationships, we want to transform our relationships with our external audiences. We are also collaborating with Wiztopic to have an integrated management tool for our relationship with journalists, the administration of our newsroom, a CRM for managing relational aspects, a tool for analyzing press coverage and even their reuse on social networks. Concretely with Wiztopic, I can establish a selection of positive press coverage that I propose to Schneider Electric ambassadors to share as part of our program.employee advocacy via Elevate from LinkedIn. Our ambition is to lead a real information dissemination journey.
In a practical way, what are the big changes in your daily life?
We think differently! We now produce themed information flows, which are not just composed of press releases. The power of Wiztopic allows us to reference our content very well on search engines, including obviously Google, and thus to emerge in natural referencing on the themes that we want to pre-empt.
We focus on the essential: the relationship with our stakeholders, journalists or influencers. Digital technology allows us to assist our team in preparing a communication sequence, suggesting to us a communication channel that we were not considering activating for information. Likewise, digital technology frees us from tasks with low added value, such as carrying out press reviews. Where it took us several weeks and many small hands to gather the press coverage on one of our offers in each country; Today it takes us 30 minutes to make a request in Wiztopic, organize the results and edit the press book. In short, we will accelerate the information design cycle and gain efficiency.
I don't know if there is a classic path for Communication professions in general and Press Relations in particular. These are professions of passion. You need a lot of personal appetite: to be curious, to be “papid-loving” in the sense of devouring the news, to be interested in communication issues, etc. Then there are career opportunities.
For my part, I studied History then I started at Kantar where I worked on media monitoring and analysis in the energy, environment and construction sectors. Among my clients, I had the pleasure of following Schneider Electric, which I then joined.
3 things to know about Anthime:
- > He no longer uses Excel!
- > He is passionate about TV series. New forms of fiction inspire him in deciphering treatments of the news such as the phenomena of “serialization”.
- > He chairs the association PADAM NEZI, a theater company whose ambition is to combine live performance and memory. History does not leave him.
Get to know Wiztopic better
Wiztopic is the publisher of the new software platform for communication teams. Its business software has become a standard for the finance sector (AG2R, Allianz, Amundi, BNP Paribas, BPCE, Covéa, Crédit Agricole, Deloitte, Humanis, KPMG, La Française, Natixis, Saxo Banque) and listed companies (Adecco , Beneteau, Bic, Capgemini, Klépierre, Nexity, Schneider Electric). With Wiztopic, communications teams in finance and listed companies manage, distribute and measure the performance of their content. In all simplicity, security and compliance.
More: www.wiztopic.com
