Strategic Communications

Effective communication is critical to your organisation’s success. Many corporate and government organisations are excellent at taking action, but less confident about communicating with their various audiences.
A Strategic Communications Plan helps by organising your communications with a written blueprint for actions and activities: what, how, when, where, and to whom you should be communicating. From my point of view when communication is properly done, strategic communications planning takes into account all aspects of your organisation’s public image. It provides criteria for making day-to-day decisions about communications, and a template against which all such decisions can be evaluated. This leads to greater focus and effectiveness.

Strategic Communication is used to create awareness on HIV/AIDS epidemic
The communication channels used are radio for distance learning of health personnel, e-mail, telemedicine for providing support to practitioners in the field, text messaging as reminders to patients to take medicines
Information taken from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3867/is_200501/ai_n11850221

When I was working in ITC Sheraton group of hotels, the training department used to conduct departmental meetings which inturn used to convey hotel goals and targets to the employees. This shows they had a strategic communication plan to convey their vision and goals to the newly recruited employees. By having a separate training department the management used an effective channel for communication.

The Changing Environment for Business

In a rapidly changing business environment, Corporate Communication plays a vital role in the growth of the company. Advancement in technology has helped the companies to grow into multinationals it also had their anti-corporate opponents coordinated campaigns having negative impact on them. So corporations have to communicate strategically to gain competitive advantage over others.

McDonald’s was accused of wrongfully selling its French fries as 100% vegetarian products when they contained beef flavoring. This led to the company's reactions and allegations. There was a settlement of the lawsuit. The company paid the damages to vegetarian groups and accepted that they had gone wrong. In the courtroom McDonald's announced that it would issue a new apology and pay $ 10 million to vegetarians and religious groups as a compensation for the lawsuits. By using the Media, McDonalds overcame this issue creating a trust to the Indian Consumers by posting ads in its outlets which said “We use pure Vegetable Oil”.

Link: http://www.icmr.icfai.org/casestudies/catalogue/Business%20Ethics/Business%20Ethics%20-%20The%20McDonald%20Beef%20Fries%20Controversy.htm