Archive for the ‘Public relations’ Category

Facebook does not allow specific calls to action in the banners on business’s Timelines. Facebook may remove the offending image at its own discretion, with little explanation or recourse. In a recent meeting, one of my marketing peers complained about Facebook’s failure to clarify this policy. I directed him to this infographic at memebase.com. Here’s what it says:

If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer. You’re the product being sold.

On March 30, I was one of three panelists providing an overview on social media for Commercial Real Estate Women of Detroit (CREW).  Joining me were Kelli Herman of MICCO Construction and Heather Greene of Neumann Smith.

 This web document contains links to resources we introduced during our presentation.

Kelli’s topic was Facebook business pages and Heather covered Twitter. I spoke on corporate social media policies and blogging.

 Social media policies

There oughta be a policy — There are two kinds of companies in the world: Those that embrace social media and those that avoid it. No matter which one you are, you have to have a social media policy. It should be part of your employee handbook.

In the links document you’ll find two websites to help you. One engages you in a dialog to help you write your policy on the spot. The other links you to the social media policies at nearly 200 companies and organizations.

Social media R U: I believe that every company should embrace social media. You can use it to help employees and customers more easily collaborate with each other and/or to move from a marketing campaign to conversing with your customers.

For example: When I was buying a used car, the salesman at the dealership was blocked from using the Internet. I could compare prices at other dealerships and he couldn’t!  He had to use his smartphone. (That example isn’t necessarily about social media, but it does show how bad communications policies can hurt sales).

Embracing social media must go beyond a policy. It means training, supervising and measuring results. It means you trust your employees to represent you.

 Blogging

People freak out at the idea of blogging.

“I don’t need to tell everybody what I had for breakfast,” they huff.

Don’t think of it as a blog. Think of it as news. This is especially true if you’re in a service business. You’re selling yourself  – your wisdom and creativity. Show it off!

Blogs posts don’t have to be weighty tomes. A couple sentences about a creative solution to a problem will suffice. Repurpose other people’s content. When you see an interesting article in an online publication, write a sentence about why it’s relevant, include a one-sentence quote from it and provide a link to the body of the story.

There are tools that allow your readers to subscribe to your blog posts, but don’t stop there. In the digital marketing world there is no pull; there is only push. Today’s best practice is to send a regular enewsletter with headlines about recent blog posts and links to the full article. This puts control into the hands of your readers, using their time in a respectful way. (In fact, that’s probably how you wound up reading this article: Because you receive MY monthly enewsletter).

But sorry, that’s not enough: You must share, share, share! Remember, this is SOCIAL media. Go beyond Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Use social bookmarking sites to expand the influence of your product, company or brand: Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious.

You can start a blog right on one of websites for popular blogging platforms, like WordPress and Blogger.com. There your blog will have a domain like

Douglascommunications.wordpress.com. But why should wordpress get all the credit? You would do better to work with your website manager to integrate the blog into your existing website: Douglasgroup.biz/newsletter. That way your analytics will measure blog traffic along with the site’s other stats. (You do use analytics, don’t you?)

Once again, click here for the list of links on these and other subjects. You’ll also find my updated list of favorite smartphone apps, including the guide to finding all the Angry Birds golden eggs.

Despite being a child of the 60s and 70s, I didn’t read Saul Alinsky until recently. I did so after several pundits (Salon.com, New York Times, Politico.com) suggested that the Alinsky, so vilified these days by Republican presidential candidates, provides a playbook for the tea party. (Interesting observation, that.)

So I read “Rules for Radicals.” Alinsky spends the first third of the book establishing his philosophical principles. The final third is all about his legendary community organizing tactics. Unfortunately there is no middle third. We know that Alinsky’s acolytes sought racial and economic justice for those denied it, but Alinsky only hints at who organized and funded them and what their strategies were.

But this is a blog about communicating and what I took to heart was Alinsky’s demand that people not shy away from simple words with big meanings; that they not dissemble but say what they mean.

“It is not just that, in communication as in thought, we must ever strive toward simplicity… It is more than that: it is a determination not to detour around reality,” Alinsky said. “To pander to those who have no stomach for straight language, and insist upon bland, non-controversial sauces, is a waste of time.”

Alinsky’s best example was the word power.

“Striving to avoid the force, vigor and simplicity of the word ‘power,’ we soon become averse to thinking in vigorous, simple, honest terms,” he said.

Words have power and there can be no substitute for the right word. So, inspired by “Rules for Radicals,” here are five “Rules for Writers.”

1.  Write in an active voice. Regular readers know how I’ve railed against passive writing, most recently here. The active voice forces you and others to be accountable for you actions.
2.  Spend the time to write tight. Clients sometimes think that, because they want me to write something short, it should take less time. On the contrary: Writing shorter is harder, because it forces you to examine every word. With fewer words, each one must be specific.
3.  Use strong verbs and don’t let vague qualifiers (“probably,” “maybe,” “often”) turn your intentions into meaningless mush.
4.  Count syllables. Prefer the words you learned in middle school over the ones you learned in grad school.
5.  Avoid jargon. People have used certain business-y words so much that they’ve lost their meaning. Really, what does “world class” mean? Can you prove that your product has fewer flaws than any of its competitors anywhere on the planet? Then say THAT. If you respond every tech support call within four minutes, say so; don’t just say your tech support is “robust.”

In a recent episode of the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” Queen Cersei threatened one of her minions by showing how arbitrarily she could order his death. “Power is power,” she said.

Words are power, too. Keep them as sharp as a knight’s sword.

In this earlier post, I referred to a New Yorker article about creativity by about  Jonah Lehrer. Turns out it’s part of the campaign supporting his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.” Here’s a New York Times review of the book and here it is at Amazon.com.

Do you struggle to keep people in your organization on message? Do you worry that news media questions will catch you off guard?

Political campaigns provide an entertaining and effective example of how to stay on message and what happens when you slip, as I wrote in this 2010 article. We offer training sessions for boards of directors and teams of business leaders, which may also include on-camera practice.

A professional association sought our help when they contemplated changing their management company and office location and wanted to communicate the options and reasons effectively to their members at an annual meeting.

“Your diligent work helped us to portray a strong message,” the president said. “The delivery felt quite easy actually, maybe because we were so prepared.”

Contact me now to schedule key message training for your organization.

With Mad Men back (hooray!), it’s time to look at a seminal publication in the world of advertising: “Your Creative Power,” published in 1948 by Alex Osborn, a partner at the advertising agency of BBDO.

Osborn pioneered the creative process known as brainstorming. When it came to ideas, quantity was more important that quality, he said. An unbridled team of people firing off one idea after another generated rich ore which would be mined to find perfect gems of creative concepts. Criticism was forbidden.

It sounds great, and I know I’ve spent a lot of time in my career grandstanding in brainstorming sessions. Only trouble is, they don’t work.

This New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer cites subsequent studies showing that individuals generating ideas solo came up with as much good stuff as when they worked in groups. The most effective structure was a team brainstorming session that allowed disagreement and debate. That format came up with the best ideas and participants had more good ideas in the days that followed.

In general, though, teamwork produces better results, Lehrer reports. Collaboration became more important as scientific knowledge grew because “interesting mysteries lie at the intersections of disciplines,” he said.

Northwestern University sociologist Brian Uzzi studied the teams that create Broadway musicals. He measured the connections between shows’ creative leadership and found that a mixture of social connections and newcomers worked best. Take “West Side Story.” Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Broadway Laurents were Broadway icons. Their creative shot in the arm was some kid who’d never worked on a Broadway show before: Stephen Sondheim. (I pause now to genuflect).

As a member of Commercial Real Estate Women of Detroit, I interact regularly with people who design office interiors. This field as much as any was changed by the concepts of teamwork. Lehrer gives many examples of prolific scientific laboratories and even Steve Jobs’ design on the Pixar movie studios, with an atrium whose geography and multiple functions forced everyone to interact.

Bob Thomas of the Michigan Association of Chamber Professionals and I have been connected through social media almost since it started. In 2009, a Twitter comment by Bob led me to an engagement facilitating an economic development planning session at the Tawas Area Chamber of Commerce. (Yes, social media ARE good for business!) We’re friends on Facebook, where Bob recently shared this informative perspective on how to be a strategic thinker. In summary, you must

• Anticipate
• Think critically
• Interpret
• Decide
• Align, and
• Learn

This article by Copyblogger founder Brian Clark use the influence of social media to demonstrate how to frame a message to change group behavior. It shows that the language you choose can actually make people do more of the bad thing that you don’t want them to do.

“You want the momentum of social proof aligned with where you want to go, not with where things are,” Clark said.

The National Park Service experimented with signage to stop theft of petrified wood scraps in the Petrified Forest park in Arizona. This message — “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time” – reminded visitors that “everybody does it.” This message – “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest” – resulted in fewer thefts.

So what did I do? I took one of their examples and shared it on Facebook like this: “Researching an article on social media, I stumbled across this fact: Four years ago, 22 million single women did not vote. To my young, single female friends: Your rights as a woman — rights my generation battled for and won 40 years ago — are under siege. Go to the polls in November and support the candidates who commit to protecting your freedom and health.”

D’oh! In that post, I reminded my single female friends that it’s a hassle to vote and maybe can’t change anything. I should have left out the statistic and just posted the last two sentences.

Many years ago a stand up comedian (Robert Klein? George Carlin?) had a comedy sketch in which he advised us how to ruin somebody: Buy his daughter a Barbie doll. With that $5 investment, your opponent would go broke buying clothes and accessories for the doll.

Razors are a little like that: Buy the handle and there’s only one set of blades that fit. For many years I used a Gillette Mach 3 man’s razor. Why? Because I got the handle free, tried the blades and liked them. Then, one day, I bought a package of Rite Aid blades, whose label suggested that they would fit in the Gillette handle. They didn’t, so I bought a Rite Aid handle to go with the blades. Gillette lost my repeat business while Rite Aid made certain that I had to come to their store whenever I needed blades, at which time I would also buy … whatever: Greeting cards, candy, sunscreen, lip balm.

The other day I went to Rite Aid to buy more blades. The package didn’t say what handle they’d fit, but they seemed OK. Nope. The alternative blades didn’t fit, either. Well, heck. If I’m going to buy a new handle, I’m going to buy a national brand, so I won’t be restricted to Rite Aid.

With that failure, Rite Aid potentially lost hundreds of dollars of my business.

It gets better. I started comparing devices and costs and discovered that the unit cost of a single, triple-bladed cartridge can go as high as $2.60, while a package of twin-bladed disposable razors have a unit cost of 38 cents each. Note that those were men’s razors. Those for women – pink instead of green but otherwise apparently identical – were 41 cents each. Are my legs more sensitive or complicated than my husband’s face? I think not. (The women’s razors with the Susan Komen brand logo were even more but I wasn’t going there!)

The lesson here is about preserving customer loyalty. You can never, ever let up. Of course you have to continue to provide value, but a satisfied customer will pay a premium to avoid having to shop around for a replacement. Remember, too, the adage that a satisfied customers tells three people while an unsatisfied customer tells seven. Look at me: I’ve just told 850 people about my dissatisfaction and how to find a decent shave for less than 38 cents a day.

There are trends in Internet design, and those trends are not driven by the fashion world; they’re driven by data. Web creators are all about what works. They are constantly testing and refining and they have discovered that readers are tired of visual noise. They don’t want flash, animation and intro pages. They want to get the information and get on with their business.

Website Magazine effectively made this case in this article. It says websites are getting quieter. It argues for clearer calls to action, simpler color schemes, better mobile compatibility, larger images, simpler typography, more video, more prominent social icons and shorter registration forms. Simply put, websites should be simpler. (Thanks to Kim Adams of Professional Pours for this tip.)