Peter Panepento, the philanthropic practice leader and co-founder of Turn Two Communications speaks with us about the pillars of digital communications and the digital trends shaping how we connect in 2020.
How can you ensure your stories reach the right audience and have a good impact? Understanding the four pillars of digital communications is a great way to start. We speak with expert Peter Panepento about these factors and also about the upcoming trends in digital communications to look out for in 2020.
Elyse:
Welcome to Digital What?!, a podcast series where we join UNDP personnel and experts in conversation about the digital communications questions you’ve always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.
Earlier in this series, we discussed the meaning of Digital Communications and the elements that make up this vast digital landscape. Today, in “Breaking the Digital Bubble”, we strategize how to apply all this information so that we can confidently get our message across in this digital world.
Peter:
How do you build those personal connections and how do you get outside of your own bubble and have thoughtful conversations to those folks who aren't part of your tribe already?
Elyse:
That’s Peter Panepento. To try to answer these questions we spoke with him about the pillars of digital communications and about the upcoming trends that we can apply to our digital workflow this year.
Elyse:
Could you pronounce your name for us one more time?
Peter:
Absolutely. Peter Panepento.
Elyse:
Okay, Great. What is the origin of your last name?
Peter:
It's Italian.
Elyse:
It's Italian. It's funny. So I was wondering how to pronounce it. And I thought your last name sounds like a delicious pizza topping.
Elyse:
Peter’s the philanthropic practice leader and co-founder of Turn Two communications, a full-service content, digital, and social strategy firm that works with nonprofits, foundations, and socially-minded companies.
Peter:
The work we do is really helping organizations, primarily social good organizations tell their stories and inspire action among their key audiences through a number of channels.
Elyse:
Peter came to this work as a journalist.
Peter:
What I've tried to do is take the lessons I learned for many years as a journalist about what makes an effective story and apply that to the work I do with other organizations to help them kind of get out of their own bubbles and think about how their key audiences might want to better understand the work that they do. What the explosion of digital communications and social media has done is made it so that every storyteller is really engaging in conversations with their audience. And the more thoughtful they can be about those audiences and who they are and what motivates them, and the more engaged they can be, the more effective you are with digital storytelling.
Elyse:
When we asked Peter how he goes about engaging with his audience, he pointed to the pillars of digital communication. There are four main pillars: one, your content or story; two, your community or audience; three, your digital channels; and four, your cause. But he said, before you even get to the pillars, you first need to define your goal.
Peter:
I think it starts with your goal. And that's not really a pillar, but that is kind of what overarches all of these pillars. And then you start to think about who do we need to reach in order to achieve those goals? And in doing that, you start to identify who your core audiences are. And in terms of the work that you might be doing, those audiences may be potential partners. They may be the folks that you're working with to help try to inspire action. They may be folks outside of those areas, policymakers, business folks, whatever. You're thinking about how you want to engage with them, who those folks are. And then you start to kind of build your digital strategy off of those audiences and the goals that you want to achieve.
Elyse:
So once you identify your audience and your goal, then you can start to think about how you want to reach them.
Peter:
You can do that through a number of different pillars. One, is through the content itself. What types of communication and content do you want to create? You can create written content, which is more traditional storytelling. You can have video content. You can have multimedia content. You could also have content that really brings all of those together. So that's one key pillar. The next key pillar then is the channels to which you deliver that content. Those channels can be either channels that you own yourself, they could be your Website or blog or podcast. They could be channels that are owned by others, which are kind of earned media channels. So those would be a media outlet or a social media platform.
Elyse:
And then there’s the … last pillar, the cause, or the action you want to elicit from your audience or community. Think of it as the micro goal that you build your whole strategy around.
Peter:
That cause element is the one that you really need to think about first. And kind of think about how the other pillars support that. You're kind of reverse engineering the results you want. Rather than putting that cause or outcome at the end or as the final pillar, I think that's the primary pillar. I think that's the one that you build all of your other activities and actions around.
Elyse:
Once you know the pillars, you’re ready to reach out to your audience ….
Peter:
And then you build your storytelling and your digital outreach strategy around what's the most effective way to reach that audience. And in doing so, you pay attention to what motivates those folks and and what kind of messages they respond to and how they interact with folks in these different channels and start to find ways to kind of organically speak with them, not only through your storytelling, but in, in interactions on social channels or in the comments sections on blogs or news articles, things like that.
Elyse:
And when engaging with your audience -- whether its government officials or people on the ground, it’s really helpful of course, to stay up to date on the latest trends of how people are communicating in this digital world.
Peter:
There are actually a few trends that I've really been paying attention to and I think are really going to define how we communicate digitally in 2020 and beyond even 2020.
The first trend to really pay attention to is the increased personalization and almost one to one nature of digital marketing and communications. In the past, people were thinking about digital communications, about how do we reach the most possible people with our messages. So there was a lot of interest in like building up the biggest Twitter following you possibly could or getting the most amount of eyeballs on your website with the idea that that kind of those big numbers are what really drive action.
What we're seeing more of now is breaking down those mass communications approach to it. The goal now is to figure out how you can get access to individuals where you can be actually communicating much more personally one on one with individuals in their own personal channels. There are few tricky elements on this. One is you don't want to kind of come across as violating trust with folks by messaging them directly when they don't want it. So you have to kind of first build trust with individuals and gain their permission to have those conversations with them. So this is happening through social channels. It's happening through video streaming, where folks are kind of using the opportunity to kind of live stream what they're doing to build conversations with folks in real time and kind of extending those into more personal forms of communication later on.
So that's one. I think another is the mistrust of institutions and others that are outside of our ideological bubbles. One of the biggest challenges we're facing right now is trying to figure out how to have meaningful, thoughtful communications and conversations with folks who may disagree with us or who may feel like they disagree with us because they perceive us as being other. And that's a challenge for every organization, regardless of their ideology right now is trying to figure out how to not sequester and segregate our messages and our conversations so that we're actually talking to and listening to each other.
Elyse:
So, as Peter suggests, the key to digital communication really just comes back to the fundamentals of all sustainable relationships.
Peter:
Being authentic and being consistent about who you are and what you stand for and what you're working towards will ultimately win the day for you. So I think if you're you're kind of consistently, being honest and truthful about who you are and what you're trying to accomplish and doing so in a way where you're being respectful and thoughtful about others will ultimately shape how you're perceived and how you're coming across in all of these channels.
If you care about how the public perceives you, how potential partners perceive you. Or if you want to kind of bring people on the journey along with you in whatever work you do, being thoughtful about how you're talking and interacting with folks online and digitally is critical.
Elyse:
In our next episode, we’ll continue to refine how we present ourselves and our message when we speak with an expert about social media marketing.
Elyse:
This episode of Digital What!? is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Our theme music is by Lemon Guo, and additional music is by Chris Zabriskie, and sound design by myself. Special thanks to our expert Peter Panepento, of Turn Two communications for taking the time to speak with us. Additional thanks to digital strategist, Nilu de Silva, and to our colleague Aden Ali for contributing to our research and understanding on this topic. To listen and subscribe go to wherever you find your podcasts or DigitalNow DOT UNDP DOT org.
I’m Elyse Blennerhassett. Stay with us.