MBC Director

Ten years ago I attended a meeting organized by Dennis Todora as he attempted to bring together a “dream team” to start a software company.  He and I became partners with a handful of others and had a good little run, starting with microscopic investments and building on “sweat equity” and revenue (a story for an entrepreneurial blog, not one on communications).  Recently, Dennis approached me about investing a few hours in a “new” deal, qwik-keyz, with a completely different finance approach – Kickstarter.com .  If you aren’t familiar, this site creates a venue for people like artists and entrepreneurs to generate some funding via social networking to get a project done or business kick-started.  It’s worth a visit, just to see all the diverse projects.

The interesting difference from a communication standpoint (compared to his last venture with me acting as the communication/marketing guy): to get this deal cooking, we need to leverage social media.  Fortunately, this team includes T.J. McLeod, who plays social media director for CRAVE in real life.  T.J. believes that a big part of making a site like Kickstarter work is to get participating “project” leaders to build the initial momentum from their own personal networks. These efforts are coupled with a pre-planned online strategy.

According to Hubspot, research shows that Twitter and Facebook users are several times more likely to re-tweet and share – if you ask them to. T.J. strongly recommends asking upfront for the action – re-tweet, like, share, favorite, etc.  “The ask is an important part of the process,” says T.J.  He also feels that a lot of credibility for any corporate social media engagement, but especially in a Kickstarter situation, comes from transparency and a ‘likelihood to share’.  “People really value transparency, but ultimately content has but one goal – likelihood to share. Is your content something that others are inclined to share with their networks? Seventy-eight percent of people are likely to click on a recommendation from a friend, as opposed to only 14% from a paid advertisement. That’s powerful information.”

Another suggestion from T.J. relates to leveraging second tier networks within your own social connections.  “If you have a group in your network all connected to you in the same way, like high school friends or former colleagues from a company, Facebook allows you to create sub-lists so you can tailor messages for these groups based on the nature of your connection affinities – so you can make the right ‘ask’ for sharing your story.”  T.J. gets pretty enthusiastic about his work, and especially about infusing contests and giveaways – constantly – while you are running a campaign for any event.  He runs contests and drawings for gift certificates or small items “quite frequently, because it’s easy and fun.  People love winning gifts and prizes, or even just having bragging rights, i.e. naming a new menu item.” 

On the question of advertising on Facebook, T.J. points out, “People on Facebook typically don’t like to leave Facebook. I  recommend having a good strategy in place as to where your ad takes the visitor. It’s a safe bet to link to the firm’s Facebook page. If you decide to link to an external website, be sure to have a solid landing page in place to keep the marketing funnel as quick and painless as possible.”

While I have conversations all the time with people engaged in social media marketing, it has been a great experience being able to watch the process from scratch.  It will be interesting to see the process continue to evolve.  I’ll let you know about all the cool stuff.

This fall will mark 30 years since my first work in public relations, as an intern for the Bemidji Community Arts Council.  At the time, I was attempting to create a concentration in “PR” at a school that had only broadcast and print journalism options.  In truth, the only thing less impressive than the advice given the “client” proved to be my understanding of how the tactics of the field actually impacted an organization.  Unfortunately for the BCAC, the director didn’t know enough to demand anything more than what he got – a few pretty tactics that led to minimal strategic value. (Our recommendation on response to complaints about certain male anatomy in a photo exhibition did make a difference, however.)

Today, my understanding of the field can be considered a bit more robust.  In fact, the time has come to move beyond exposition of best practices and commentary on strategies.  There are clouds on the horizon for practitioners of this craft, and the sky is red.  It will be up to us to manage our industry to determine if that sky looms in the morning or evening of the near future.

If we allow perceptions of public relations to continue along the current path, practitioners must heed the warnings of a red morning sky.  Most average consumers believe public relations means dealing with people face-to-face (at best) or that the work of PR requires deceit, or at least half-truths.  Meanwhile, PR people often grumble about being distanced from the management decision-making table.  In the minds of senior managers, beyond managing publicity, PR often represents something of marginal value, only allowed genuine attention in crisis situations.  Practitioners addressing management with legitimate communication issues and solutions consistently do so from a position of low credibility and without sufficient business understanding or language skills to address that audience in terms that generate engagement.

By contrast, social media represents an opportunity – a powerful and deeply misunderstood font of hot messages rising into an auburn sky from a sea of information.  Senior managers salivate at the perceived potential for promotion in these new channels, but most have heard of sufficient crises raised in cyberspace to believe that each firm must establish means to defend itself.  In actuality, thoughtful and strategic engagement in online communities represents the new frontier of communication practitioners who once focused primarily on managing reputations through relationships with traditional media.

At the same time, many organizational leaders seem to be embracing the idea of “reputation management.” MBAs from accounting, finance and management, not to mention marketing, all understand the bottom line value to an organization of the goodwill and equity embedded in reputation.  Some traditional consultants and agencies appear to be shifting to promotion of reputation management instead of PR.  It works because it directly speaks to the understanding of the management audience, and avoids the baggage and stigma that has developed around the established name.

Plus, reputation can be a measurable objective…  “relations” is a nebulous tactic. 

One definition used in classes of the practice of my craft is: “The proactive management of stakeholder perceptions of an organization, product/service or individual.”  Hmm… seems like that works for Reputation Management. 

Seriously, it would be in the best interest of the field to consider a universal re-branding.  After all, who better to understand the damage that can be caused when most of the stakeholders misunderstand or have negative opinions of the deliverable?

This seems like a good evening to visit the courthouse and make a legal name change.

There’s an adage that a happy customer will tell one person and an unhappy customer will tell… anywhere from four to 10, depending on who uses the adage. In the 21^st century, this truism becomes even more powerful because an unhappy customer can tell literally thousands of people via a simple post – to a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp or any of the descendants of these yet to come.

Given that context, consider our “local” banks.  One of mine has been considered with great angst of late.  After 20 years of “totally-free checking,” the cost of maintain my account surged from zero to double-digits per month.  While branch tellers assure me announcements were included in recent statements, upon opening the ones from the past few months,none appeared to have been included.  (This account has very few transactions anymore, so I don’t reconcile every month.) 

As this change has surely raised ire beyond mine, the underlying message emerging from conversations with people on the front lines seems to be that the charges are my own fault.

Whatever logic fosters this tone is immaterial. Rule 6.5 of the Marketing Communication Code, Sub-section B, regarding customer service clearly states: “Never imply that the customer has brought increases in pricing or reduction in product quality or service on themselves… even if they did.” (Okay, there is no such code; I made it up.  But there should be… I’ll get started on one.)

 Clearly this bank wants to modify my behavior and offset costs it perceives are related to customers who use services in ways that appear less profitable, even after decades of loyalty.  Still, if the management wants certain customers to go away, why send anyone packing with chips on their shoulders?  Whatever attitude about these changes trickles down to the tellers will come out.  As a marketing communicator, I would advocate for presenting alternatives:  Create new offerings to accommodate “expensive” customers rather than “punish” them with new fees for old services.  New offerings come with new customer expectations; the old offering will always be tainted by the change. If you really want customers to go away, steer them to a competitor who will provide for the special needs required.  At least this way they leave with some impression that the bank cares… rather than going home and blogging about the negative experience.

Upon returning from the holiday break, the first order of duty was to conduct a survey of recent UST MBC “capstone” students.  Communication Leadership Priorities—usually taken during the last semester of the program—offers students the opportunity to coalesce their education into a final research project, among other things.  The group surveyed represented all the students that took this course in 2010 and 2011. 

The focus of the survey was to validate something that I had been noticing as the instructor of the course, and in the months following graduation as the program director.  It seemed as though many students finishing the program were finding new jobs or getting promotions, even though this period of time was particularly tough on that front.  The results both validated those perceptions and surprised me.

One hundred percent of students from the three sections offered the last two years participated.    Of those, about 25 percent indicated they were not seeking a job change during the eight months before and after taking the course.  Of the remaining students, those looking for new positions, 95 percent indicated getting a new job or promotion within eight months before or after completing the course.

While some specifically indicated the value of the capstone project or the MBC curriculum as factors leading to new opportunities, the consensus appeared to be that the combination of the degree completion, capstone and other factors associated with their education contributed to successful career advancement.

I wonder… if we surveyed a random sample of communication professionals who were seeking new jobs during the same timeframe, would 95 percent of them have reported similar success?  Probably not.

Thanks for participating,  congratulations to all those recent MBC grads and best of luck to the 25 new students starting the class this spring!!

In just a couple of weeks we enter “a New Year” and many people make resolutions to change something in the near future.  Beyond the fact that January 1 remains a fairly arbitrary time to resolve change (I vote for today, now, in this moment…), we tend to stay personal with these commitments.  When was the last year you, or even someone you know, resolved to solve a problem – at work or in the world?  Much less actually following through on the task.

In any business discipline, leaders face constant streams of action and therefore change, but only a fraction of that change is strategically driven.  Even in the best organizations, something could be refined. 

In communications practice, we do not always take time to audit our messages and materials.  Certainly we develop annual plans that should tier down from the business plan goals and strategies of the organization, but often this does not include a pulse taking of what we have been doing – in the context of all communications of a firm.  We naturally tend to deal with things on a more tactical level, addressing the ad, brochure, web page or other material in front of us at the time.  Even with a comprehensive and well nurtured communication platform and style guide, communicators easily migrate off message if they don’t make a commitment to regularly return to the source. 

Conducting a communication audit should be a part of annual planning, but periodically revisiting the concept when working on individual tactics helps keep things from migrating to an “auto-pilot” mode.  More importantly, taking time to put tactics into context should ultimately raise the caliber of work.  Further, the activity has the potential to keep the message managers more tightly tuned to the organizational leadership – assuming you are all sticking with the plan – or at least evolving that guide in parallel.

So, as you approach the future, whether between December 26^th and January 1^st or Thursday the 5^th of whatever, consider what issues might be solved, resolved or evolve by taking a little time to think about the drivers and context of the work at hand.  Basically, forget the resolving part, because it makes the effort a win-lose proposition.  Just do it.

Wow, that was a little preachy.  Maybe I’ll resolve to do less of that next year…  nah.

About 25 years ago I became familiar with White Castle through a friend from out East who called the small, square (…. greasy, salty, oniony, and a bit mushy…) burgers “sliders.”  Cheeseburgers were “sliders with vinyl.”  Every other product on the menu seemed to have a nickname, most not fit for this venue. 

Note, that at the time, if you walked up to the counter and ordered “10 sliders with vinyl” you would receive a very dirty look, and a curt correction about the product name. A few decades later, not only can you order sliders by the suitcase load, but White Castle has co-opted the colloquial name.  It has also become trendy to offer small, moderately greasy burgers as “sliders” at happy-hours, in spite of White Castle’s trademarking of the name.

In his book The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki would call this move by a burger chain “flowing with the go.”  If the market gives you lemons, and you make lemonade, which they in turn use as battery acid, you are now in the battery acid business. 

Somehow, after much pain and suffering, White Castle bowed deeply to the concept that the very people who referred to the product in what was perceived as derogatory fashion were the most passionate about the product.  (Before going gluten-free my record was 17 in one sitting – plus onion chips and fries, of course.)

In the White Castle case, marketing management finally came to the conclusion the terms had become mainstream enough, with an ultimately positive edge, that embracing sliders made good marketing sense.  A few years ago, McDonalds briefly toyed with “Micky D’s” to chase the youth market, but this appeared to be short lived – at least as the promotion seeped into mainstream media.  The company may still be using it in youth-oriented programing or media beyond the radar of us older folks.

Meanwhile, all this has made me hungry.  Maybe I’ll go see my buddy James at the grill in Food For Thought to get a burger on gluten-free bread… but it won’t be the same.

Scary, but true: Because of the inefficient use of electronic media of all kinds over the past two decades, the world will likely face a pixel shortage in the near future.

What, you may be asking, can be done to avoid this minor catastrophe?  Consider yourself called to action – Be more effective in your use of precious pixels by reducing the length of website content, emails, blogs, and even try to shave a character or two off Tweets (Who really needs all 140 characters to make a point?).

How might this be done? According to COPS (Citizens for Optimizing Pixel Strategies), the single habit change that will immediately reduce wasted pixels is…  editing.  According to this group’s estimations, 25% of all electronic communication would be found redundant, incomprehensible or otherwise useless if only people would take just one minute for every 10 minutes of writing time to read their own material.  A second minute to make edits could alter the history of the world… or at least help people keep their jobs.

Additional benefits: clear and concise writing is more likely to be read and understood, and therefore potentially more persuasive… 

(COPS members also express concern over the potential overuse of passive verbs, but found it hard to come up with a cute acronym using P and V.)

In my own effort to preempt the impending pixel shortage, this month’s note will be closer to 250 words than 400.

Not long ago I connected with Jim Lukaszewski on LinkedIn.  Within an hour I received a LinkedIn request from someone on his network list – whom I had never met.  Collector!

More recently I got an “add” request from someone whose LinkedIn introduction said, “LANCE (XXXXX), has indicated you are a Friend.”  Not true.  I have never met Lance.  After looking at Lance’s profile to see if I truly do know him, it was clear why he would like to be my friend… but he is not.  He will not be anytime soon.  He has managed to conduct anti-networking by misrepresenting himself in an attempt to garner some miniscule benefit from association with me.  Who else on his list of contacts constitutes less than an acquaintance?  Who has he duped into thinking, “Maybe I met Lance at that conference last month, it would be rude not to add him to my network…” Is this kind of “connection” why LinkIn exists?

You are collectors!  You are hangers-on!  You are attempting to create the appearance of substance with a “network” of names.  But a working network requires a network that can be worked. 

Three other “Invitations” appear in my queue at LinkedIn that seem to be a new form of spam.  Each of these requests comes from a “person” with little or no profile information and none have more than 5 connections.  One wonders why I am among the first 5 people they contacted? None have any connection to: me; firms for which I have worked; or the fields of marketing or communication in which I have practiced.  Do these poor souls know so few people in business?  Will no one they have met be in their networks?  You can understand my skepticism. 

Just for fun (Okay, this may only be fun for the likes of me…), if you have a LinkedIn account, look through your list of connections at the number of “links” people have.  How many of those with the “500+” mark do you believe really know all those people?  How many would return an email?  Or a phone call?  My list has a couple. 

Now, I am sort of the antithesis of a collector.  Rarely do I send a request to “add you to my professional network.”  If you ask to add me, the “Accept” button only gets pressed if: we are actually associated personally; we have met recently through work; or if you are a student of alumnus of the UST MBC Program.  According to LinkedIn, I was among the first 100,000 people to set up a profile, so my “network” may appear a little thin after five or more years… but it’s real.  I will return email and phone calls from anyone on the list… even those I met only once… How can anyone do that with 500-plus names and get any real work done?  They can’t.

On August 11^th, a celebration of sorts returns to Minneapolis.  The Alphabet Bash, brainchild of four bright young communication professionals six years ago, will turn the Epic Center into a temporary Mecca for the movers, shakers and wanna-bes of the Twin Cities message machines.  The evening, while formatted as a loosely scripted mix and mingle, takes a tremendous amount of organization and planning – particularly coordinating the efforts of the eight associations now involved.  The “Bash” always promises and delivers great food, a fun atmosphere, and most assuredly the best networking in the professional communication community calendar.

I’m not just touting the event because the UST MBC program is one of the two primary sponsors.  We are engaged because this event brings together local business communication professionals from multiple disciplines on one night.  It’s imperative that we are there, and should be for anyone interested in building a network of like-minded professionals – for fun and profit!

For those who don’t feel like they know many people, and worry about meeting new folks, here are a couple of tips.  First, find someone who has been in the market a while and ask them to go with you – you won’t have to be alone, and with a wing-person, you’ll meet people they know.  When you meet those folks, break away from your “buddy” to follow the new acquaintances to the buffet or bar – you might meet some of their friends.  Most importantly, if you don’t know anyone, talk to people who look like they are in the same boat.  Next year, you will at least know each other.

Plus, the great thing about Alphabet Bash is that everyone has some connection to communication work, and at least one of the organizations behind the event.  So you have a conversation starter with everyone – “So, in which organization are you a member?”  Further, you can bet that nearly a third of the people in the room have been out of work recently (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 30% of people in advertising, public relations and related services lost jobs in the downturn.), and the market is starting to come back.  So even if you meet a few people that are not in new jobs yet, by next year they may be… and in five years, you will be the ones getting calls from less connected individuals looking for a wing-person.

A million years ago, while attending junior high (that’s like middle school, if you were born in the ‘80s), if students saw two people whispering to one another, someone would start yelling “Secrets are lies!”  Recently, Burson-Marsteller (“part of Young & Rubicam Brands”) found out the hard way that keeping secrets isn’t good public relations practice. Essentially the case boiled down to a couple of media relations hacks who started pitching negative stories about Google to select media, but without being willing to reveal the identity of their client. In fact, keeping a “secret” client represented the lesser of the ethical evils displayed in this case, since the material being promoted to the media turned out to be patently false (lies – but not secrets). To learn more about potential ethical pitfalls in the practice of public relations, read the Public Relations Society of America’s Code of Ethics.

Even though B-M stands among the largest PR firms in the world, it may not come as a surprise that the firm isn’t listed by PR industry pundits at O’Dwyer’s in the top 150 PR Firms in the U.S., because being listed requires disclosure of information to verify billings, etc. 

But before you come to the conclusion that B-M should be considered a den of unethical practice, let me suggest that the firm may simply suffer from a couple of perennial management problems that ended up manifesting in unethical behavior. First, let us assume that the organization’s leadership believes in its own vision, mission and ethical standards.  This set of standards was clearly not sufficiently communicated to the personnel involved in this incident.

Second, consider the personnel – a former CNBC anchor and former political columnist. These individuals likely spent years fielding calls and emails from “PR people” who behaved in marginally ethical ways. One wonders if there was ever any specific training for these journalism types on the ethics of public relations practice.  Training, or retraining in this case, would also be a management responsibility – a responsibility that assuredly fell to the wayside in this instance.  

To return to the secrecy bit, of course some information should remain private (such as choosing not to reveal your revenue numbers to O’Dwyer’s, unless you are a publicly traded firm and the SEC requires it), but the name of the organization you serve as a communication practitioner must never be a secret. And lies… well, even small ones can come back and give you a sturdy bite in the behind. I’ll stick with the truth.