Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
Most people have more power than they realize. Organizations that help the individuals on their teams identify, harness and effectively use their power are more likely to achieve business success.
To identify their own power, employees should ask themselves, “On your very best day at work – the day you come home and think you have the best job in the world – what did you do that day?” according to Facebook’s Global Head of Recruiting, Miranda Kalinowski.
Facebook is an example of what’s known as a Strengths-Based Organization – a company that harnesses the power of its individual employees’ strengths. By helping employees identify their individual strengths where they align with company objectives, Facebook empowers its teams to do work that is meaningful and positions the company to meet its business objectives. But leveraging individual team members’ strengths isn’t solely the work of billion-dollar companiesThe gamut from small family run businesses to global enterprises can each work to harness individuals’ strengths by following a few simple principles.
The first step is helping individual employees understand their power and how to use it effectively. It’s a valuable skill and one that should be fostered and developed – personally and professionally. (See also “Understanding Power Dynamics Can Help You Lead More Effectively.”) By helping individuals understand their power in the workplace, they are better positioned to contribute what others can’t and to complement others’ strengths.
Unlocking individual talents is a two-pronged process: 1) Observe what employees get excited about and where they see success and 2) engage in a discussion with them. Ask what they enjoy and what helps them find meaning in their work. Harvard Business Review offers fantastic tips to get team members to speak up and share their strengths. Helping employees align their work around projects that are meaningful to them will drive results for the company.
Second, transparency about business objectives is critical to empowering the team to act on their individual power. By being transparent about our business objectives and how our business model functions, for example, each individual on our team is empowered to think creatively and present ideas that help the company meet its objectives, as well as ideas that help them meet their individual objectives and goals. We recognize that great ideas can come from any level within the organization – but only if everyone knows and understands the objectives. With a team comprised of individuals with different perspectives and experiences, the way each of us approaches a problem and the solutions we propose may vary widely. Soliciting a variety of ideas increases the likelihood we will get to the optimal solution versus having it dictated from the executive team.
At Communiqué we recently revised our approach to an aspect of our business based on a suggestion from a member of the team, and additional tweaking by the group. The change resulted in renewed energy due to a stronger alignment of personal interests with business needs. It was a great idea that wasn’t evident to me but the impact even in a short window of time has been significant.
Lastly, aligning professional development and growth around individual interests and talents is critical. In terms of an employee’s individual needs and interests, it may not be realistic for a manager to know what an employee is looking to achieve or experience. That employee is better positioned to come up with creative ways to meet their own professional goals/interests, while also demonstrating how it would benefit the business and other members of the team.
Last fall when one of our team members approached us about taking two months off to travel, she was able to articulate how it could work for the business and our clients, as well as how it would make a difference to her. It was a persuasive proposition, which we were willing and able to accommodate. As a result she was able to achieve a lifelong dream and we were able to retain a valued employee, one who returned to work with new experiences that translate into her contributions for our clients and ultimately our team and the company.
As an employer, I want my team to feel empowered, be solutions-oriented, and to be focused on the same organizational objectives. While this can be a scary prospect for some leaders, having an empowered team is more rewarding – emotionally and financially.
Empowered employees also add value to your business: They are more committed, deliver better results, take less sick time and foster a positive and proactive spirit within the organization. In the article, “The Importance of Empowering Employees,” Beth Williams, CEO of Forward Focus outlines five specific benefits of empowered employees:
- Quality of work produced
- Satisfied employees
- Collaboration grows
- Productivity increases
- Employee empowerment reduces costs
Of course with that power comes some responsibility – not to misuse or abuse that power. Ultimately fostering a culture where employees know and understand the power they have to help an organization achieve its objectives and to achieve their individual objectives is a win-win for the company and the individual. It is a lot more fun to be part of a team where we are all working toward the same business objectives, everyone is empowered to contribute to achieving that goal, and everyone shares in the success!
Storytelling is intrinsic to every culture. From creation myths to legends and folk tales, it’s at the core of what makes us human and how we relate to others and our world. According to the Evolution of Storytelling and Fairy Tales by Princeton Press, as soon as humans developed the capacity for speech, “humans began telling tales” and “may have even used sign language before speech originated.” Moreover, from an evolutionary perspective, “Telling effective, relevant stories became a vital quality for anyone who wanted power to determine and influence social practices.”
Storytelling is also at the core of effective public relations, as we seek to influence reputations, perceptions and behaviors. To meaningfully relate to journalists and our target audiences, we need to tell compelling stories. We can’t simply announce news or offer a quote – what we share with target audiences needs to be in the context of a larger story to help us connect with others and show why our clients’ news matters. Though plots may differ, effective stories tend to have the following narrative components, in varying order.
Exposition – Often the opening of a plot, exposition introduces the characters and the environment they inhabit. It’s the opening shot of a movie, where we see the Shire and Bilbo Baggins celebrating his “eleventy-first” (111th) birthday. Rather than explaining this information, effective writers bring the context of the story to life. They use a character’s actions to illuminate his/her traits and offer colorful descriptions to help the reader picture the environment, from its physical appearance to its social order. When we reach out to media, for example, we provide exposition when we share background information on our clients that demonstrates thought leadership in their respective categories. We also highlight the landscapes in which our clients operate to set up the conflicts of their stories.
Conflict – All gripping stories have conflict. The conflict drives the story and usually provides motivation for the protagonist to achieve his/her goal. The scale of a conflict can vary widely, from personal quests to societal-level issues of oppression. In public relations, we identify a compelling conflict and position our clients as the protagonist who’s actively working to resolve the problem. Conveying the conflict and positioning our client as the protagonist happens over a period of time, in what writers call rising action, as we conduct strategic media outreach and build up to the climax of the story.
Characters – Joseph Campbell, who studied and wrote about myths extensively, argued that we are each the hero of our own story. According to Campbell, “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” Compelling stories have a heroic figure who’s working to solve a conflict for the betterment of others. To tell stories people want to hear, we need to consider in what ways our clients are the heroes of their own stories – what problem are they solving, and why does it matter? Furthermore, who’s the villain in the story? The villain could be a literal person, but more likely the villain is metaphorical in nature – resistance to change, antiquated products, a crowded marketplace, or misunderstanding of the client’s product or service.
Climax – Imagine an action movie, in which a protagonist finally meets the villain to deliver one final, crushing blow. The knight slays the dragon, the big battle reaches its pinnacle, the guy finally proposes to the girl. This is the climax, and the story wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying without it. It’s the turning point in the story, when our hero finally confronts the conflict head-on and we approach resolution. In public relations, the climax of the story could be when our client achieves a certain momentum metric, beats a competitor on earnings, or achieves a successful exit. The key? The story builds up to this moment, making it all the more exciting once we reach it.
Denouement/Resolution – Denouement is derived from the French word “denoue,” which means to untie. Once the climax is over, we’ve reached the wrap-up portion of the story, where we “untie” a complex plot and the action comes to an end. In The Great Gatsby, for example, the denouement occurs when the protagonist Nick returns to Minnesota to seek refuge from the people he thinks are morally reckless and unfaithful. While the denouement serves an obvious function – to end a story – it also reinforces the themes of the story and allows it to resonate with the audience. In public relations, it’s crucial to consider what theme we want our audiences to walk away understanding after an important announcement.
Though it’s easy to get laser focused on a particular announcement or contributed article, effective public relations pros see the forest through the trees. What’s the broader story we’re trying to tell? And how can we use narrative elements to effectively tell that story? As U.C.L.A. professor Robert McKee said, “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”
Content marketing continues to be a top priority for B2B (and B2C) marketers. However, with often limited resources and subject matter, and experts to develop original content and repurpose it across multiple channels, many content marketing programs remained stalled.
Indeed, according to the “2016 B2B Content Marketing Trends – North America” survey report from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, the top challenges B2B content marketers face include producing engaging content, producing content consistently, and producing a variety of content.
If a company is limited in the internal resources it can dedicate full-time to content marketing initiatives, a viable option is to leverage your PR agency team to drive content development and repurpose that content for a variety of audiences.
The benefits of working with your PR agency to draft and develop content are manifold. As columnist Rachel Lindteigen writes in MarketingLand (“Who should create your content?”), agencies can often scale production and have multiple resources working on your account. Further, agency personnel frequently have the backgrounds in PR, journalism and English to get the job done efficiently and without requiring extensive training. “It’s this combination of the number of team members and the educational/background mix that can make your agency a great asset for content development,” writes Lindteigen.
For example, Communiqué PR is assisting our client EMC Isilon by conducting a number of interviews with business unit CTOs to get their perspective about industry trends and issues facing their target audiences. From there, we draft content that is utilized on the company’s blogs (EMC Emerging Tech and EMC Pulse). We also use the information from these CTO interviews and blog posts to pitch and develop contributed articles, proactive pitches, speaker proposals and award submissions. In one case, we were able to take a series of blog posts that weren’t yet published and pitch them as an exclusive three-part contributed series to TV Technology magazine for EMC Isilon’s CTO of Media and Entertainment Tom “T.V.” Burns.
Below are some suggestions for PR agency teams to help support content marketing programs:
Utilize in-house experts. Work with your primary client contact to identify subject matter experts and conduct one-on-one interviews with them about their roles and their experiences interacting with customers, partners and other key stakeholders. For example, who better to talk about the challenges that customers are facing than a customer service executive who speaks with them every day? In just an hour or so, interviewers can access valuable insight and perspective for blog posts, social media channels, infographics, case studies and more.
Consider briefings with C-level executives to get a view from the top, but also try and meet with contacts across all levels, including engineers involved with product development, customer service representatives, or those contacts involved with partners or strategic alliances.
Put your journalist hat on. When conducting interviews, think like a journalist and make sure you get the right information you need for the content. Don’t let them rely too heavily on acronyms or jargon– ask for details and specifics. Recording the call is highly recommended since conversations can easily go off track and it can be difficult to remember details several weeks following the interview.
Here are five sample questions to consider:
- Is there a common pain point you hear about frequently from customers or partners?
- What are the biggest changes coming in your industry over the next 2-5 years?
- What issues/trends are your customers not paying enough attention to? What needs more noise?
- Other than your company, is there someone whose approach in this space you really like and respect? Why?
- What publications/websites/blogs do you read?
Banking on content development and repurposing. So you’ve got your PR agency involved with drafting content and supporting your content marketing initiatives – great! The next step is to get the whole company to access and leverage that content. In a column for Forbes (“60% Of B2B Content Sits Unused, Here’s the Fix”), contributor John Hall discusses the importance of corporate knowledge banks, which are centralized content hubs where sales, social media, recruiting, employee training and other team members can pull content and incorporate them into their own initiatives. As Hall writes in an article for the Content Marketing Institute, these hubs create a single location for employees to find internal knowledge, industry knowledge and data and opinions. The key is making sure it’s updated frequently and accessible to all employees.
Does your company have a content marketing program? Have you used a PR agency or other contributors to develop content? If so, what were the results? We’d love to hear about your experience in our comments section.
I’m admittedly a little too into HBO’s Game of Thrones. Through the months of March, April and May you can find me around the office discussing new theories and predictions and analyzing characters’ developing personalities. With the recent finale and the laundry list of Emmy nominations, I was inspired to take a closer look at four strong Game of Thrones characters and think about what we could learn from them and how we could apply those learnings to our daily work in the PR world (admittedly a far cry from their home of Westeros).
Jon Snow: Jon Snow is undoubtedly one of the most beloved characters on television, but that’s not necessarily the case in the world in which he lives. As a leader, Jon is often faced with tough decisions yet what he sees as right (and his ultimate decision) is often against what others want.
As PR professionals, our clients are seeking our counsel and looking to us to lead them through the media landscape to help them achieve their business and communication objectives. More often than not, they trust our suggestions, however, they occasionally may disagree with our recommendations or request we move forward with an activity that we believe won’t hold much value. Part of our job as the hired experts is to have the hard conversations and inform them what is realistic and what we believe the results will be.
Like Jon, it’s important that we explain the rationale behind what we think is the best course of action. But unlike Jon, at the end of the day, the client has final say, and if it is something that is important to them, then we will do everything in our ability to achieve the best results possible!
Peter Baelish/Little Finger: Most Game of Thrones fans are probably thinking, what could we possibly learn from the manipulative Lord Baelish? Well, it’s true, he is sneaky, devious and betrays one person after another. But the one thing that he knows how to do and to do well is address his audience. He knows exactly what people want, what interests them and usually presents them with a way to get exactly that.
Please note: I am not recommending you operate in a way that is manipulative. Rather, I recommend you take the time to truly understand the audience your pitch or story idea will reach. Know the journalist—consider if what you are sending will be something they are interested in and if it is something their audience will be interested in. Lastly, is this audience the audience that your client is hoping to reach? If not, then rethink your idea or find a new target.
Arya Stark: Over the last couple of seasons, Arya has been on an interesting journey, essentially learning how to be an assassin. She spent time and energy studying the way this group of assassins operates and practiced and perfected a set of skills. But after a couple of mix-ups she decides to return home, bringing with her a completely new set of skills that can be applied regardless of where she is. Arya shows us that skill sets are versatile.
While you may be an expert in PR in a specific field – retail, technology, media and entertainment or consumer products – that doesn’t mean you are limited to one area. The skills you learn while doing work for one company can almost always apply to another industry, and may even give you a unique perspective. To find success, you simply need the skills as a foundation and a creative mind set to apply them.
Daenerys Targaryen: All good things take time. Dany has spent six seasons building an army of loyal followers, gathering ships and conquering cities in preparation to take the iron throne. She’s had her frustrations and setbacks, but with determination, passion and an unwavering focus on achieving her goals (and with the help of three dragons), she is finally headed west, something she has been working towards since we were introduced to the character.
The takeaway is results don’t always immediately present themselves. A major funding story may garner significant coverage with less effort, but getting that feature or trend story may take months of cultivating a relationship and providing countless ideas and updates. These profiles or trend stories aren’t going to happen every day, but if you put significant thought into the idea and meaningful effort into the presentation of it, the results will eventually follow.
This is only a brief overview, by way of Westeros, of some of the qualities we can work to implement into our daily duties as PR professionals. Being confident in your recommendations and expert knowledge, understanding your audience, growing your skill set and having the patience and resilience to build key relationships (journalists can be tough!) are all critical to finding success as a professional and on behalf of your clients.
And as Game of Thrones fans know, I’ve barely scratched the surface with the lessons we could learn from key characters. What other lessons have you learned or what other character qualities can we apply to our role in PR?
In a recent NPR podcast, David Greene and Shankar Vedantam discussed the pros and cons of having a work-based friendship. They challenged the common belief that having friends at work is solely beneficial to a working environment. In reality, they argued, there are mixed blessings. The study confirmed that those who have more friends at work tend to be more productive and happier. However, having friends in the workplace can lead to more interruptions, be emotionally draining, and be extremely stressful and uncomfortable when friends there are competing for the same position. The Rutgers study found that when friends are involved in the same kinds of activities, the success of one person may be painful for the other person.
After learning about some of the concerns of having work-based friendships, people might be thinking that they need to de-friend everyone. However, before taking an oath of silence at work, do keep in mind the benefits of being more productive and having more fun typically outweigh the challenges. This is likely a situation where simply being aware of the pros and cons and taking the time to be thoughtful of your situation and putting up the necessary boundaries can be beneficial.
Workplace friendships can also lead to cohesive work teams that can be extremely valuable in industries that require creativity, collaboration and productivity like PR. Here at Communiqué PR we find that collaborating as a team is a huge part of our success and helps turn good ideas into great ones! It is fun to work in an environment where we have each others’ back and we feel comfortable taking creative risks knowing that we have good support and feedback from our colleagues.
Also, in PR no project is done by a single person. The entire team assists with researching, writing, editing and pitching. It is important for everyone to work well together as a cohesive unit. Another benefit of having friends at work is that we tend to be happier, which makes us more productive, which ultimately leads to stronger work and better results for our clients. Friendships definitely help the overall attitude of a company culture and make it a place where people are excited to be part of the environment. The friendships at Communiqué PR have led to creating a great workplace that was named no. 16 on 100 Best Places to Work For in Seattle 2015 by Seattle Business Magazine.
Some industries may require solitary focus and are not conducive to and don’t necessarily benefit from socialization. However, PR is an industry where creativity is critical to success, where feeling comfortable at work enables and encourages you to think outside of the box. Communiqué PR is a work environment that endorses friendships, which is probably the reason why we stand out as an extremely hard-working and innovative firm.
After surpassing the number of daily Twitter users, seeing more engagement than Facebook and becoming the biggest US mobile game in history, Pokémon Go undoubtedly has the world talking.
For those who have not read or heard about the game, Pokémon Go is a free mobile app that uses your phone’s GPS to enable the digital you to move around and find a virtual Pokémon. The augmented-reality aspect of the game displays the Pokémon on your screen on top of what is actually in front of you in real life. The interactive feature of the app allows individuals to engage like never before, all while operating wirelessly and integrating into players’ daily lives. Snapchat is another recent successful example of augmented reality. The mobile app’s new filters use augmented reality by locating an object in the real world, typically an individual’s face, and displaying a character on top of that object – as it appears in real time. If you open your mouth or lift your eyebrows the filter triggers a new display or special effect to appear on your face.
The success of Pokémon Go and Snapchat is no mystery, and we should anticipate more applications of augmented reality (AR) to surface in company marketing strategies and advertising campaigns. Oculus, with its virtual reality (VR) goggles, found early success and opened the magical door to the world of VR for many executives and gamers alike. Although VR and AR are not new concepts, today’s technology has increased the frequency of use as well as the potential of these realities to evolve outside of the gaming realm. This is spurring executives to take a hard look at the future of VR/AR in their companies and establish whether or not incorporating AR or VR will help them stay ahead of the competition.
In order to integrate virtual reality or augmented reality into your marketing portfolio, it is important to understand what they are and whether or not this strategy will help achieve your company’s communication and businesses objectives. Tech Times describes VR as the creation of a simulated world that users can interact with by wearing a special helmet or goggles; AR is the blending of virtual reality with real life, creating a hybrid world that anyone with a smartphone can access.
A more important difference between the two is that AR is a more social experience where users are able to interact with virtual contents in the real world. As illustrated with Pokémon Go and Snapchat’s filters, what you see on the screen appears according to where you are located and how you are moving. This ability to explore, experience and engage is where AR has an advantage over VR.
For many companies, increasing engagement with key audiences is a chief communication objective. Early adopters that integrate AR will not only innovate numerous opportunities for customers to interact with the company brand and product, they will also generate news opportunities to showcase the creative ways they are able to harness AR into their marketing mix.
Once companies catch on, the number and variety of AR apps will only continue to increase. In 2012, there were 118 million AR apps downloaded. By 2017, that number is predicted to jump to 3.5 billion. The potential is clearly there, but what remains to be seen are the ways these companies will choose to implement this booming technology. Aside from the Pokémon Go and Snapchat examples, additional usages of augmented reality are appearing in:
- Training courses and education
- Map services
- Digital museum tours
- Online shopping
Going forward, it will be interesting to see how companies implement augmented and virtual realities to create buzz around their products and engage with their customers.
Is your company brainstorming how to integrate AR and VR into marketing or advertising campaigns? What results do you anticipate from these efforts? We would love to hear about it in the comments section!