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.
On December 1, Ward’s Dealer Business published an article from Jennifer Gehrt titled, “5 Tips for Better Brand Building.” This article provides insight on how auto dealers and auto makers can leverage digital assets to build brand awareness and increase loyalty with consumers.
Many dealers are striving to differentiate themselves and want to encourage consumers to purchase vehicles from them. It is now more important than ever for dealers to positively position themselves as the ideal place to shop for and buy a new vehicle.
Jennifer shares examples from companies including Volkswagen, General Motors (GM), Carter Subaru in Seattle and Honesdale Auto Mart in Pennsylvania.
To read the article online, click here. If you have questions about how to build brand awareness and leverage digital assets and social mediums to reach target audiences, contact us at [email protected].
We are pleased to share some exciting news. Attachmate has become one of the first application vendors to achieve Common Use Passenger Processing Systems (CUPPS) certification for its INFOConnect Enterprise Edition for Airlines Print and Transaction Router (PTR32) solutions.
Airlines around the world are working to replace the Common Use Terminal Equipment (CUTE), the current check-in and boarding standard, and are migrating to the CUPPS platform. Attachmate has long been committed to the development of technology to support the CUPPS platform and is helping customers such as Continental Airlines easily upgrade to terminal emulation solutions that complement the new platform.
To learn more about INFOConnect Enterprise Edition for Airlines Print and Transaction Router (PTR32) solutions, visit www.attachmate.com.
You can also read the full press release by clicking here.
The dragonfly has been long praised for its ability to help control populations of harmful insects. But could this nimble insect with its multi-faceted eyes, elongated body and two pairs of powerful wings, also hold the key to controlling harmful threats to public safety?
We recently reached out to a number of journalists to let them know about research that is being done on the flight dynamics of these four-winged insects. Researchers at Wright State University have been studying dragonflies with the ultimate goal of developing quad-winged micro-air vehicles (MAVs) that mimic the flight of dragonflies.
Quad-winged MAVs are being developed to monitor activity in public places, such as sports stadiums or public transit stations, to help detect biological or chemical weapons. The vehicles will also be used to search for victims of fires, bombs and other threats in spaces that are unsafe or too small for people to enter.
Led by Dr. Haibo Dong, graduate students are using computer models to study the movement and physics surrounding dragonfly flight. With the help of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) visualization tools, such as Tecplot 360, Dr. Dong and his team are able to examine and analyze the dragonfly flight under a variety of conditions and create still images that allow them to scrutinize the actions frame by frame.
Communiqué PR is publicizing the work of the researchers and helping journalists understand how theyíre using Tecplot. On Nov. 18, Red Orbit, a Web site devoted to science news, published a case study about the research. To read the case study online, click here.
We also have received interest in this story from journalists with Discover magazine, Science magazine, R&D and Desktop Engineering. We will keep you posted when additional articles on this subject appear.
I recently came across an interesting article in BusinessWeek discussing the importance of incorporating social media training into today’s higher education curriculum in order to adequately prepare the next generation of employees.
The article titled, ’Teaching the Facebook Generation by Dr. Elaine Young, an associate professor of marketing at Champlain College reveals that broad skills particularly in marketing, advertising and public relations used to be sufficient, but the rise of social media has forced recent graduates to demonstrate a set of concrete technology skills in order for them to succeed in the workplace. These skills include basic knowledge of HTML, search engine optimization, Google Ad Words, ADOBE and strategically leveraging social networking platforms on behalf of an organization.
While it’s no secret that today’s students are well versed in social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, these mediums are primarily being used for personal use. Dr. Young stresses, ’Professors need to lead students by example by knowing the mechanics of social media and showing our students how to use them strategically for the good of their employers.
She also says, ’The reality is that many businesses are struggling to wrap their arms around these developments as well. They actually are looking to new graduates to help them manage their digital strategies for them, with the assumption that because they are young they are familiar with the social media world. But our students cannot know how to leverage these tools professionally unless we teach them how.
When I first started in PR 11 years ago, the most critical skills I needed to posses to land a job were solid writing and verbal communication and a basic knowledge of Microsoft Office. Everything else I learned on the job – including technology. As social media becomes more and more relevant for organizations, the next generation of our workforce has to bring a more comprehensive skill set to the table in order to be successful in their careers.
If youíre looking to strategically leverage social media within your organization, drop us a line at [email protected], weíd love to share our ideas with you.
There has been and continues to be significant discussion about the ownership of social media strategies and activities within an organization. As a PR professional with some social media experience, let me add my perspective to the debate.
I believe social media should be owned at a strategic level by the top corporate communications or public relations officer or manager in any organization. Here’s my rationale to support this statement:
1. Corporate communications and PR own the organization’s external communications and oftentimes the overarching positioning. This puts them in an ideal position for understanding how the company brand should behave on social media platforms. With this insight, the corporate communications / PR department is well equipped to develop and deploy the right social media strategies and tactics.
2. Social media is about engaging and developing direct one-to-one relationships with individuals. Typically, the PR and communication teams in an organization are already doing this with many audiences (e.g. journalists, analysts, investors and other influencers). Given this, the communication team already has many of the skills and expertise required to build relationships via Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.
3. Corporate communication / PR needs to have a direct handle on how the company is perceived. Social media provides immediate access to this information. Thoughtful and well-managed engagement on social media platforms can provide tremendous positive PR for a company.
4. Corporate communications and PR often own content that is ideal for sharing on social networks. For instance, these departments will have news they can break to their online communities, they’ll know about informative articles they can link to, or they’ll be involved in the creation of video.
Of course, ownership does not mean that corporate communications has to do it all. It may make sense for corporate communications or PR to involve other groups within the organization (such as HR, legal, customer service or product marketing) in the development of the social media strategy or even in the execution of the strategy.
But the ultimate responsibility and accountability for social media needs to rest with the communications department. After all, good governance requires clear, decisive and insightful ownership as well as a thorough understanding of each department’s roles and responsibilities. Corporate communications and/or PR, if they’ve done their homework, should already be poised and well-versed to handle these duties in the social media realm.
For additional insight on social media, please see the following links to past articles written by the team at Communiqué PR.
I was reading the New York Times and came across an article entitled, “How to Market Your Business with Facebook.”
As we work to help our clients reach the right audiences, we are increasingly thinking about Facebook with its audience of more than 300 million active users. As PR practitioners, we are not so interested in the advertising opportunities, rather than providing our clients counsel on the following:
1) How to build online communities of fans;
2) How to take advantage of the tremendous amount of demographic information available on Facebook; and
3) How to leverage traditional media and content on Facebook. There are tremendous opportunities to populate business Facebook pages with product reviews, photos, YouTube videos and more.
If you have a few minutes, I highly encourage you to read the New York Times article. It provides some excellent examples of how other businesses are using Facebook. For instance, a popular cupcake bakery called Sprinkles is using the social media site to drive traffic to its retail stores. They do this by offering its Facebook fans a special code which can be redeemed in the store for a free cupcake. Today the bakery has more than 70,000 fans.
While many organizations are focusing solely on Twitter, I know Facebook will become increasingly more helpful to us as we work with an array of clients looking to seed product to people for their feedback and input. It is almost like a virtual focus group because it allows businesses to access people’s reactions and attitudes to their products.