Managing a Successful IPO – Tips From Zillow

Last week I had the opportunity to connect for lunch with Amy Bohutinsky, chief marketing officer for Zillow. Amy has a big job. She is responsible for all marketing and communications for Zillow including branding, public relations, mobile and social media marketing, email, business development and advertising. She is also one of Zillow’s earliest employees […]

The PR Agency of the Future

Yesterday I was reading PR Week’s 15th anniversary issue and came across an article entitled “What will a PR agency look like in 15 years?” It was a compilation of comments about the future from some of today’s industry leaders: Gail Heimann, president of Weber Shandwick; Kim Hunter, president and CEO, Lagrant Communications; and Patrick […]

Schnitzer West: Delivering Superior Quality & Returns

When I worked for Waggener Edstrom in 2001, I learned we were going to be moving into a sparkly new office building in the Civica Office Commons in downtown Bellevue, Wash. It was exciting. After all, how often does one get to work in a brand new office building? My anticipation was well founded. Civica […]

Biking & Business – Lessons From Backroads

My husband and I are into biking vacations. We find them to be an ideal way to see new countryside, meet the local people, learn about an area, and earn the benefits of exercise. When you are cycling 25, 35 or 65 miles a day, you can pretty much eat whatever you want! This year […]

Lean In – Practical Advice for All Genders

I recently finished Sheryl Sandberg’s provocative book, “Lean In,” about gender differences in the workplace and her perspective on how to help right the inequalities. I am about the same age as Sheryl, and while our backgrounds are different, many of her points resonated with me. I find it astounding that there are only 21 […]

What to Do With an Idea

Every so often, I get the urge to create a product and have even approached my husband with a variety of ideas. Inevitably, we discuss them for a couple of days and then fail to take any further action. Given my tendency, I was intrigued when I learned that Smartsheet was sponsoring a Startup Weekend […]

How to Measure PR Impact

Does it make sense to measure impact? This was the subject of a recent article in Harvard Business Review.  The article shares the stories of three organizations – Acumen Fund, Robin Hood Foundation, and Millennium Challenge Corporation – aiming to make a major impact on the lives of individuals, including reducing cases of malaria and […]

The Age of Big Data

Wednesday night we were pleased to attend the MIT Enterprise Forum Northwest event focused on Big Data in downtown Seattle. We were particularly excited to be there because we helped secure a slot on the panel of experts for Brian Lent, Chairman, CTO & co-founder at Medio. If you are a regular follower of our […]

The Importance of Word Choice

If you are passionate about writing, you understand the importance of word choice to convey the right meaning or evoke emotion. Recently, a friend introduced me to Visual Thesaurus, a wonderful subscription tool developed by Thinkmap, Inc., which I now find indispensable. The Visual Thesaurus is an online dictionary and thesaurus that displays the word […]

Smartsheet Announces $26 Million in Venture Funding

As anyone I work with knows, I am a huge fan of Smartsheet.com, Inc. and its cloud-based collaboration solution. Verdiem’s Chris Baker, vice president of marketing, and John Scumniotales, president, introduced me to Smartsheet in November 2011. John, one of the founders of Scrum – the most widely adopted method for agile software development – […]