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.
Many know Shonda Rhimes as the creator of hit TV shows that include Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy, and How to Get Away With Murder. She is also the architect of her own production company, Shondaland that is responsible for nearly 70 incredible hours of prime-time television a season.
It is often difficult to relate with or consider a celebrity as a “real” person, much less accept their advice on success. However, Rhimes’ TED Talk from TED Dream in Vancouver this past February, truly touched me because it directly addressed something we all feel at times – burnout.
The 46-year-old Rhimes, challenged herself to a year of saying yes to everything. I was skeptical at first because it seems impossible, but stay with me. In her TED Talk, she explained that during this year, she forced herself to face monumental fears such as public speaking, live TV interviews, and even acting. In saying yes to these difficult and scary tasks, she “undid” the fear. But it wasn’t until one question – and one “yes” – that really pulled her life into clear focus.
The Hum
As a mother of three children and creator, writer and source of genius for a significant number of hit television shows, Rhimes clearly has a passion for her work. She calls the feeling she gets while working, “the hum,” and she lives for it. “I am the hum,” she said. So when the hum stopped for Rhimes and her work started to taste bitter, she felt lost, overworked, burned out, and with no sense of purpose.
It wasn’t until one day when one of her daughters asked her to play did Rhimes slowly start hearing a hum again – and not the hum, a hum – and it felt good. Although it was not the same work hum that had filled her with passion before, it was a hum she had missed, the feeling of living for a passion that was greater than her work. Where before she would have rather been at work than home, this new hum brought a fresh love and passion back into her life, with family as the priority. She began to dedicate 15 minutes every day to focus on this new hum and in doing so, she discovered she didn’t need the old hum to survive. It did not define her anymore. She became this new kind of hum—an embodiment of the joy and passion she felt outside of her work playing with her children once again.
So how can we find our hum?
Confronting stress and the feeling of impending or inevitable burnout is terrifying, regardless of age or occupation. When you get to a point in your career, relationship, or life where you must ask, “Who am I?” it can bring unfamiliar emotions and change the way you once viewed what you love. So how can we –employees, business owners, heads of the household, managers and supervisors – find our hum?
Do what Shonda Rhimes did.
Despite our levels of success or accomplishment, we are human and are likely to suffer from stress. Take 15 minutes to pay attention to yourself. Read, go on a walk, take a nap, play with your kids, draw a picture, knit. Put down your phone and dedicate 15 minutes to finding your life hum. In doing so, slowly but surely, you will create a new passion for yourself, outside of the work that once ran you. You will find that saying yes can be daunting; especially saying yes to 15 minutes of what scares you, like saying no to work. Like Rhimes, you may hear more than one hum, but deciding which hum runs your life is where the real challenge lies.
Communiqué PR recently started working with Versium, a Redmond, Wash.-based company that provides automated data technology solutions to enterprise and agency marketers. Versium delivers predictive scores that are built from the company’s proprietary LifeData® platform, which contains over half a trillion data attributes sourced from publicly observable and commercially available means.
In a nutshell, Versium and its suite of marketing solutions tackles one of the most challenging problems in business: making big data understandable to ordinary business people.
Earlier this year we were tasked with launching Versium’s Predictive Lead Score service.
Being in a space that is widely covered and top of mind with media can be both a blessing and a curse for PR professionals. On one hand, reporters are writing lots of stories about your industry (in this case, predictive marketing, predictive analytics, and big data), but on the other hand, that means the need for differentiation and credibility are paramount in order to break through the noise.
The fact that Versium’s solutions aligned with a number of broader industry trends frequently being discussed in the marketing trade press was an instrumental factor in our ability to secure briefings and coverage. For example:
- Unprecedented growth in data, driven by growth in mobile, social, interactive websites, government third party data and more. In addition to being inundated with data from these disparate sources, many marketers are unsure how to derive actionable intelligence from it in a timely manner.
- Increasing pressure to leverage big data – driving the need for new solutions that capture, curate, manage, and process this data in real-time in order to back real-time decisions.
CPR positioned Versium, and its CEO Chris Matty, as a thought leader in the big data/predictive marketing space, able to provide commentary on industry trends and market dynamics. Doing this elevated a stand-alone product announcement as an opportunity to talk about not only Versium’s news, but the overall direction of the industry – providing value to reporters and keeping Versium top of mind with them for future stories.
Laying the groundwork with analysts
Our first step in terms of media outreach was to set up some initial briefings and demos with industry analysts. For companies launching a product or entering a new market, analysts can be instrumental in testing out messaging and getting perspective about the strength of their offering in the competitive landscape. Within the first couple of weeks we had briefings secured with many of the top firms, including:
- Beagle Research Group
- Enterprise Management Associates
- Gartner
- Forrester
- IDC Research Group
Narrowing the focus to industry trade publications
Our next priority was to focus on news briefings with journalists around the product announcement. Versium’s main targets centered on the marketing trade press, so we narrowed our press list to those outlets and kept our attention there. We also gathered editorial calendars from these priority publications to make sure that we were pitching Versium for upcoming feature stories and special issues whenever there might be a good fit.
In total, we secured 13 articles for Versium’s product launch, and a total of 10 briefings with press and analysts. The full list of coverage is provided below:
- Marketing Land: Versium Launches Self-Service Predictive Lead Scoring With Automated Modeling, 1/27/16
- VentureBeat: Versium uses big data and machine learning to predict your best leads, 1/27/16
- IT Business Canada: Versium brings top-drawer marketing analytics to the masses with new service, 1/27/16
- Marketing Dive: Versium released a predictive marketing platform to spur conversions, 1/28/16
- Adotas: Versium Launches Automated Predictive Lead Score Service, 1/28/16
- 425 Business: Versium Launches LifeData Predictive Scores for Marketers, 1/28/16
- Inside BigData: Versium Launches Machine Learning Driven Automated LifeData® Predictive Lead Score Service, 1/29/16
- MarTech Advisor: Versium to Incorporate Over a Trillion LifeData® Business and Consumer Attributes Through the Launch of its First Automated Predictive Lead Score Service, 1/29/16
- SiliconAngle, 2/1 – What you missed in Big Data: Separating the signal from the noise
- MediaPost, 2/1 – Versium Automates Predictive Marketing
- FierceBigData, 2/1 – Versium launches automated Predictive Lead Score service for marketers
- The Redmond Reporter, 2/2 – Versium launches LifeData Predictive Lead Score service
- Marketing Land, 2/26 – MarTech Landscape: What Is Predictive Analytics?
Congratulations to Versium on its launch! We look forward to keeping the momentum going for this new client and securing more great stories in the months ahead.
PR professionals do a ton of writing every day. Whether we are developing a press release, byline article, award submission, blog post, speaking proposal, case study, etc., we typically communicate through written words. Luckily, I love to write. It’s been a hobby of mine ever since I learned how to hold a pencil.
Why I love to write and what I love most about language is that language is organic and evolving – and I find this fascinating. By organic, I mean language is free-flowing and it only exists/depends on the beings who use it, and the fluidity of language adapts to fit their needs. For example, in 2011 the words OMG and LOL were added to the Oxford Dictionary, which is one of the world’s principal English-language dictionaries. The authorities of the English language now approve such terms because of their frequent use today. There have also been numerous myths to never start a sentence with and or but, and that a sentence cannot end in a preposition – but all great myths die hard.
As you can see, language is indeed evolving but, it’s important to remember, it exists within a structure and set of rules. For example, we have to keep time elements aligned, differentiate from singulars and plurals, and tenses in a series have to make sense. Given that I work in the field of communication, I am constantly playing with words to positively influence people so that I can reach the ultimate goal with my writing – to generate results.
In order to reach desired goals, however, the piece has to be well written and properly structured or the audience may not trust the content or worse, the author. Would you trust the author of a poorly written article full of grammatical errors and confusing sentences? I know I would be skeptical about it. Without rules or structure, the world would be in disorder and chaos. Bad writing can lead to misinformation, ambiguity, confusion and distrust, so it’s important to be an effective writer, especially if you want a successful career in PR.
My PR mentor and I developed a writing checklist that I would like to share with you because it has helped me immensely with a lot of my work. Here are several ways you can start improving your writing today.
Phase I: Pre-writing
- Ask questions:
- What don’t I know and how can I find it?
- Do I need more facts/stats on this topic?
- Why is this topic important/why will people care?
- What tone should I employ for this piece of writing?
- Who is the audience for the piece?
- Do I have evidence to support my claims?
- Research the topic and collect facts related to the topic from a trusted source
- Develop a thesis/the main idea of the piece
- Develop an outline on what the content will explore or cover
- Secure outline approval before writing, if appropriate
Phase II: Writing
- Use a large font
- Question the facts and the source
- Pay attention to the little details (names, dates, format, etc.)
- Am I varying the structure and length of my sentences?
- Am I using a tone that is appropriate for the audience?
- Am I choosing words that accurately convey the meaning I intend?
- Am I writing in the active voice?
Phase III: Post-writing
- Allow time to pass before proofreading, if appropriate
- Print it out and read it out loud (at least once)
- Does the title/headline accurately summarize the content and can I shorten it?
- Am I using the right language associated with the topic/industry?
- Read the piece backwards sentence by sentence (this is important to catch new errors)
- Make a list of common/repeated errors so you are aware of your bad writing habits
- Review checklist and then ask someone else to review the piece
- Revise and finalize
- Applaud yourself!
South by Southwest (SXSW) – once a grassroots music festival with no more 700 attendees brought together by the passion for music, art, and ideas – is now miles away from the notion on which it was founded. In March 2015, more than 100,000 people flocked to Austin, Texas, to try and see as many of the 2500 artists, 2700 interactive speakers, and 555 tradeshow or 226 gaming expo exhibits as possible, party at the dozens of sponsored parties, watch the hundreds of streaming films, and contribute their share of the $317.2 million that the festival was responsible for injecting in the Austin economy. Overwhelmed yet?
Roland Swenson, South by Southwest interactive managing director, describes the juggernaut of techies, marketers, and entertainers that is SXSW Interactive as a crucial experience for creative innovators, bounded by the SXSW core values. The event helps further their careers through this diverse congregation of people from all over the world “to meet, learn, and share ideas.” However, anecdotes from festivals attendants seem to offer recurring themes of drinking and partying, with only the slightest bit of business on the side and regrettably an overall lull in innovation.
A recent article by PR Week article opened up the floor to two experts to gauge their perspectives on whether or not SXSW has “jumped the shark” with some of its seemingly desperate Happy Days-style hail-Mary gimmicks to try and pique audience interest and regain some momentum (cue the fully equipped 60-foot Doritos vending machine stage featuring a performance by Snoop Dogg). Have the founding principles of SXSW been left behind to rot in favor of a week of branding and booze overload, or are attendees heading to Texas with the wrong objectives? With the 2016 SXSW fest fast approaching, it is important to evaluate both the positives and negatives of the conference and assess your personal business objectives before heading to SXSW. The following are a few tips for staying on track and racking up more business cards than bar tabs.
Gear up for success – First and foremost, having the right supplies is crucial for SXSW success. Just as one would not go to an interview without a resume, one should not attempt SXSW without a packed bag complete with a detailed schedule of events, map, phone charger and business cards. And arm your social media accounts by following the hashtag #SXSW to ensure you are up to date on the who, what, and where.
Analyze your schedule – SXSW attendees are provided the entire schedule of events. It is a great idea to print it out and pay special attention to events that you know are going to be beneficial to your business objectives and that will lead in the right new business development direction. By mixing both networking events and interactive sessions into your bar-hopping and concert-going, you will find the perfect harmony between business and pleasure. Furthermore, many companies host their own networking parties. Remember, moderation is key and better achieved with a solid pre-game plan. It is also important not to over schedule yourself. An event as big and dynamic as SXSW will throw a few spontaneous opportunities your way. By failing to plan for this random serendipity, you are committing a networking crime.
Decide what it is that you want to get out of your time at SXSW – Although indulging in some of the best BBQ ribs and party hopping in the known world might be tempting you during your time at SXSW, remember you’re there for professional reasons. The vibe at SXSW can often be overwhelming. By having a clear mind as to what your main goals are, you will better suited to relax, embrace the surroundings, and socialize with some of tech’s greatest names. A great place to start is by researching who is going to be there and with whom you hope to connect.
Focus on the people – Gauge what kind of people are going to be where and when. If an event is marketed as a great networking event that shuttles attendees around Austin stopping at startup companies (OK and a few bars) there is a good chance it is going to be well suited for your long term business goals. Many Austin publications create helpful lists laying out events that are geared toward entrepreneurs and rising tech stars, and be sure to check Facebook for targeted groups. On that note, do not be shy at these events. Everyone attending is there to network. This is a rare chance to be in the presence of such a diverse melting pot of entertainers, technology entrepreneurs, marketers, and others. Tim Ferriss, SXSW 2015 speaker and author of “The 4 Hour Workweek,” encourages everyone to take a step back, slow down, and not dismiss anyone because, nine times out of 10, they are likely to help you achieve your SXSW objectives.
In today’s fast-paced, competitive business world, an emphasis is often put on earnings, return on investment (ROI), and the like. Many would argue that cash is a necessity and corporate culture a nicety. But what if culture and character not only improved morale, but also trickled down to earnings?
I recently read Fred Kiel’s “Return on Character” and found his research on the impact of leaders’ character not only inspiring but also applicable to businesses in any industry and of any size. Over seven years, Kiel studied 84 CEOs, their senior teams, and their organizations, and found that character not only matters, but that “good” character wins.
To evaluate character, Kiel and his team outlined four universal principles in their Return on Character (ROC) Matrix: integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion, and ranked leaders on a scale of superior character, or virtuous, to poor character, or self-focused.
The truly fascinating finding through the research is the return on assets (ROA) of the CEOs at the top of the character curve versus those at the bottom. The virtuous CEOs created a ROA of nearly five times greater than did the self-focused CEOs.
As Kiel states in the book, “When an organization is led by a CEO and executive team of high character, on average it will produce a great ROA than organizations run by low-character leaders.” Additional benefits of this high character “ripple effect” within this research include highly engaged workforces, delivery of better value to customers, and strong customer satisfaction.
So how does this apply to the everyday professional?
Character is shaped by a mix of upbringing and personal experiences, but Kiel found that virtuous leaders continued to develop the principles and further honed leadership-enhancing skills through mentor relationships, meaning we can continue to develop our character throughout our lives. He suggests seeking guidance and counsel from mentors or advisors to aid in this development.
Further, character applies to more than just C-level executives. It’s inherent in every level of a business and not only will those around you appreciate your “good” character, but Kiel’s findings suggest that your business will also reap the benefits. There are a range of considerations for a business, however, looking beyond cash and ROI to character and company culture has a proven effect to not only improve business, but increase morale.
Possibly one of the most talked about event events of 2015 was the farewell to Bruce Jenner and the introduction to Caitlyn Jenner. Jenner has been in the spotlight for decades and is a household name to all generation because of Olympic achievements and reality television stardom. In April of 2015, the much-anticipated interview with Dianne Sawyer aired and in June of 2015, Caitlyn made her debut on the cover of Vanity Fair.
As a PR pro, I thought that the entire transition process went incredibly smoothly. To be honest, I hadn’t given much thought to it other than, “job well done” or “what an amazing story.” It wasn’t until The New York Times published “Caitlyn Jenner’s Secret-Sharer,” detailing the process, that I realized that the public transition was thoughtfully managed and well-executed.
Before the Kardashians dominated the world of social media and reality T.V., Bruce Jenner was a well-known Olympian, working with Alan Nierob from Rogers & Cowen to handle his public appearances, endorsements and image. According to The New York Times article, after marrying Kris Jenner, he stopped working with Nierob because Kris began handling his career. But in 2014, Nierob received a call. It was Bruce Jenner. He had recently divorced Kris and needed help from his old publicist. At this point, tabloids ran wild with the possibility of a gender transition and Jenner was doing his best to stay out of the spotlight. But with a transition in the near future, Jenner needed PR help.
From the beginning, Nierob knew that it was time they take control of the narrative and the first part of the process would be to let the public hear the story straight from Jenner. The Kardashians had a strong relationship with E!, owned by NBCUniversal. In order to prevent the perception that the interview was for financial gain, Nierob and Jenner chose to move forward with ABC. Next, they needed a reporter that would handle this matter sensitively, while still asking the right questions, the ones that people would want to know the answers to. Diane Sawyer seemed like a natural fit, and Nierob had experience working with her on behalf of other clients in trying situations and had seen successful outcomes. It also didn’t hurt that Jenner respected Sawyer.
Next, the introduction of Caitlyn. Knowing this would be a highly anticipated event after the interview with Sawyer aired, it was critical that her debut was handled thoughtfully. The publication needed to be well-respected and have connections with renowned photographers and journalists that would capture the essence of Caitlyn—this was the first time the public would get to meet her. Vanity Fair seemed to have everything Nierob was looking for, especially a connection with Annie Leibovitz, who would go on to produce an iconic cover.
One aspect The New York Times article neglects to recognize is that Nierob and his team also planned the launch of a Twitter account for Caitlyn to promote the Vanity Fair cover. Really, this was Caitlyn’s main introduction to the public. No one knew her name yet, when, where or how she would be introduced. But social media allowed for the cover to spread like wildfire. Within four hours, Jenner gained one million followers, breaking a record and beating out Barack Obama for the fastest accumulation of followers.
When Nierob began working with Jenner again, he did not have an easy task ahead of him. The tabloids were spouting rumor after rumor and most of them negative. As a result, the public had preconceived notions about Jenner’s transition that were fueled by tabloid gossip. There were family ties to broadcasting companies that had the potential to skew the public’s perception of Jenner’s motivation to do the interviews. And most importantly, this was one of the first highly public cases of a transgender person making her transition, and the public needed to be educated in the process. By approaching this in a couple of different stages, from Bruce’s perspective and introduction to Caitlyn, and conducting the process through multiple channels, broadcast, print and social, Nierob helped introduce the public to Caitlyn in a thoughtful manner. Not only that, but he has positioned Jenner remarkably well for the next stage of her career, an advocate and ambassador for the transgender community.