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‘There is a tide in
the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in
miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the
current when it serves, or lose our ventures.’

Who can forget
Brutus’ stirring words to Cassius urging an attack on Marcus Antonius
and Octavian’s forces in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? Centuries
later, the passion infused in his speech still lights a spark in
perceptive hearts to grab opportunities before they flee away to
eternal regret.

I think such an
opportunity beckons to corporate communicators. Whether they recognize
that history is offering them an invitation card to move from the
tactical to the strategic is another matter entirely. Frankly, I think
they have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to redefine their role in the
hierarchy of corporate relevance. A perfect analogy would be with IT
professionals around the Y2K bug panic who leveraged a need for their
skills to rise on the pole of corporate value. Suddenly, these guys –
they were mostly male – who were seen as just geeks tinkering away in
poorly lit air-conditioned rooms came to be accorded the respect of
critical business infrastructure engineers.

Last year, I heard
the most scalding comment ever made by a CEO on his company’s
communications team. He said that they were ‘harmless data gatherers
and speech writers. I only employ them because they know the press
people.’ How insulting and unfair. When I asked him if he had ever
given them the opportunity to be anything more, he asked aloud ‘why
should I?’ I left his office in a daze. Yet I wonder how much of this
erroneous impression had been fostered by his communications people.

In spite of his
dismissal, I persist in the belief that his words reflect a deep-seated
frustration at the inability of that department to measure up to his
expectations of what it ought to be doing to support the business goals
of the company.

This week, Lamido
Sanusi, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, echoed some of those
views at 19th Financial Market Dealers’ Association (FMDA) Conference
in Abuja. Speaking of the performance of the Central Bank’s corporate
communications department, the governor recognized that ‘communication
is a big problem and it is something we are working on. A lot of what
we have said here should be something you click on the Central Bank
website and find easily. So what we are trying to do is to source a
communications adviser. I think what has happened is that a lot of
corporate communications at the Central Bank has been dedicated to
dealing with the press. . . Two hours after press conferences, I have
to check to see if the communiqué is out because somebody who is
supposed to do it automatically needs to be alerted before he goes and
puts it up.’ A case in point would be waiting for the CBN’s web
administrator to put up a transcript of the governor’s speech given at
the Professor Sylvester Monye Foundation on July 9, 2010 two weeks
after the event.

In this networked
age, when news travels across the world at the blinking speed and
virality of a 140-character tweet, the importance of a rapid response
corporate communications function has never been more urgent. No
organization, and that includes listed companies, regulatory agencies,
government departments, private companies and non-profits, can afford
to move at different pace in the on- and offline worlds.

In fact, to regard
the web as the ‘far and away’ and the 3-dimensional real world as the
‘here and now’ is as archaic as relics in the National Museum. The
Great Cyber Divide no longer exists. In responding to customers,
dealing with stakeholders, updating investors, communicating in a
crisis and reaching employees it is an own goal not to synchronize the
two acts.

Speaking of
web-lag, First Bank, which has been in the news lately over the
resignation of three executive directors on a single day, July 16th,
provided further evidence of the frustration described by Lamido Sanusi
at the CBN. For the full weekend after the departure of the executives,
First Bank did not put up the release on the Media Section of its
website at
http://www.firstbanknigeria.com/MediaCentre/PressRoom/tabid/371/Default.aspx
till July 19th.

I have cited the
cases of web usage, not because the speed of updating an organization’s
website makes a communications professional of great value in itself.
That would be too simplistic. Rather I used the web to illustrate that
if on a simple matter, and it really is a basic issue as logging in to
a content management system (CMS) and updating information, they are
found wanting, then they still have a long way to go. I cannot recall a
time when the fates of organizations depended more on the competence of
their communications officers. They will have no one else to blame if
they do not rise to the challenge.

The writer is the managing director of a full service investor relations firm based in Lagos, Nigeria.