Medard Schoenmaeckers

Head of Media Relations at Syngenta

Well I think when you want to talk or communicate with the stakeholders you shouldn’t go and take blindly the toolkit that new media offer you but really think about ‘How can I reach my stakeholders in a meaningful way? How do they want to communicate with me? What’s effective and valuable?’

And there’s a lot of information out there but I thought, as the head of media relations in my company, that I’d better check with the key group of journalists that I communicate with myself rather than listening to others telling me what’s good and not good.

We did a survey amongst 40 key journalists and a number of things that struck me. To name a few examples, 60% of those journalists are using frequently podcasts, and that number is growing. And there’s a very simple reason for that I learned: podcasts are quotable, and they like nothing more than a good quote.

And another thing that struck me was that RSS feeds weren’t that popular. Most of the journalists said: ‘Well you know you send me the press release, we do our interviews, we have our regular contacts – the feeds I don’t need to get your information.’ So, I thought RSS feeds were more popular but they weren’t; and less than 30% are actually using them.

The company website really is important. 100% of the people say ‘That’s our basis to get information about your company’. So that really is a centre to me, where all the information starts.

And I think a final one, actually, would be online media. I mean I looked mainly, actually, at traditional media as that is still the core of our media, traditional business to business company. But online media are really important. Blogs are not. They are not seen as reliable sources. Financial newswires can’t even use them; it’s a policy to use them as a source. So blogs are not reliable sources.

Online media are though, because media have less and less time, editorial teams are getting smaller and smaller, so they need to research faster and faster and online sources are good as long as they are reliable. So blogs weren’t, but the media outlets online are.

And I think that in a nutshell sums up some of the elements I found in my survey which proved very useful. I should be doing this every year I think as this group is changing and the use of online media tools is changing rapidly. But it proved very useful to give us good insights and hopefully target our communications with this stakeholder group much better.

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