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.
For PR professionals, identifying targets, aiming messaging, and directing distribution towards a particular audience is well within the skillset, but one key element of the content usually lands outside of the PR department – imagery.
Visuals, graphics and videos tend to be under the purview of the marketing, product or advertising team. Understandably, these visual assets are often created to highlight the most popular features or uses of the brand. However, those images may not resonate with niche audiences or match the messaging intended for those particular audiences. For example, the main users of crayons are children, but an artist who uses crayons as their main medium may not feel represented by the imagery of a child using the product.
Thoughtful and targeted visuals attach emotions to your content, and can often make your message easier to remember, like an image or video of an adult using crayons to create art is more likely to be remembered by an adult crayon artist.
To develop targeted visuals, first identify your goal audience in terms of their demographics, their relationships with others, any pre-existing relationship with the brand, and how they spend their time. Based on your research, create personas that represent the features of your data and establish a story arc around their interaction with the brand. The imagery should be created based on these elements, representing the personas in their lives and their experiences with the brand. These visuals will be more representative of the brand, the audience, and the relationship between the two.
There are many tools you can use when developing imagery, and this BusinessWire blog post has a good selection for PR professionals. These are some of my favorites:
- Canva, to help you develop posters and graphics
- Panopto Express, to easily record audio, video and the content of your screen
- Animaker, to create animations and videos
- Adobe Creative Cloud, a more complex but highly capable range of tools for many types of visuals
You can also create targeted imagery without taking the pictures or editing the graphics yourself. Communicate the personas, their stories, and the importance of their representation with whoever already handles the imagery. Or hire a creative agency to provide you with content, from raw images to finished visuals. Blend techniques and tools to find a balance between time, cost, and quality satisfactory to your organization.
Once you have imagery that matches your messaging and your understanding of the target, aim the package at the intended audiences. Authentic and contextual imagery with a good caption is more likely to be used by earned media, and unique images with SEO-based names allow you and your audience to find resultant coverage more easily. These images will better represent the experiences of your audience, celebrate niche markets, and generate new conversations.
Is your inspiration and motivational drive lacking this morning? Maintaining a positive and determined mentality while confined to working at home with the world in unrest can seem impossible.
Recently, I came across an article published by Forbes that stuck with me, as it succinctly summarized five key “power skills” to focus on during the pandemic. Reading this article, I felt inspired to reflect on my daily routine and consider how I could integrate these practices into my life.
Below are five inspiring takeaways from the Forbes’ piece. I hope learning more about these tips and tricks helps you find new motivation in your personal and professional life. Couple these “power” tips with a cup of coffee every morning and you’ll be on your way to excelling in your career.
Achieve Everything with Excellence
Taking on more than you can handle will leave you feeling stretched too thin. In addition, overcommitting usually does more harm than good and won’t position you to achieve long-lasting success. Instead, strategize and make certain you have the time required to deliver excellent work. This will enable you to deliver more valuable results and feel proud of the high-quality materials and projects you create.
One method I’d recommend implementing immediately to properly schedule your days is “timeboxing.” Check out Megan’s post, “The Art of Timeboxing: How Budgeting Time Can Boost Productivity,” to see how you can visually represent your schedule and plan your workload for the week.
Be Your Own Advocate
So, you’ve done an excellent job but haven’t received the recognition you deserve? Although acknowledgment at work won’t always appear in the form of a gold star, it’s important to recognize your own self-worth and advocate for yourself.
If you want to excel in your career, learn how to verbally advocate for your goals and the hard work you’ve put forth to achieve them. It can be hard to let go of preconceived notions that we sound arrogant or obnoxious when we advocate for ourselves, but once you do people will start acknowledging you for your personal drive and success. This can turn into a chain reaction across your team, establishing a work culture built on supporting and celebrating the growth of others.
You can take this a step further by communicating the different areas in which you want to gain expertise and how those around you might support you through, for instance, classes, reading or new assignments. Next time you’re in a meeting with your manager, come prepared with a few skills that you’d like to improve.
Grow Your Network and Connect
It’s crucial to build your personal network in today’s society. Eighty percent of jobs are filled through personal and professional connections. Spend time seeking out meaningful connections with co-workers and those who hold similar interests with you. It will not only be fun and educational but allow you to participate in relationships that can be mutually beneficial.
One easy way to grow your network with like-minded individuals is to look on LinkedIn, search for those in your area of expertise who have similar interests, and connect. With more than 610 million members, you’re bound to find someone who is looking for a mutually beneficial relationship in the same field. Having the skills and confidence to build and remain strongly connected within your network isn’t easy, but it will help you gain outside perspective and mentorship while opening new doors.
Embrace a Helpful Mindset to Support Your Team
All too often we can find ourselves limited to a self-centered lifestyle. Broadening the horizon to see how your skills, abilities and time can support others will take your career to a whole new level. Try to make it a habit each day to listen to the challenges your team is facing and consider how you can help find solutions. While you don’t want to stretch yourself out too thin – as I spoke to in the first tip – always think about how you can support your team. In turn, you’ll boost your confidence and direct your attention to challenges that allow you to build a problem-solving reputation.
Step Out of Your Comfort Zone
As the wise Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” Although it can be easy to stay in your comfort zone and cruise through each day, not learning will hold you back and affect the trajectory of your career. Instead, spend time each day to determine what you’ll do to get out of your zone and into the uncomfortable.
Whether it’s asking for a new project or learning a new technology, be willing to become a student and learn new skills. Check out the thousands of online classes available on Coursera or edX to advance your career. It’s in the challenging moments when true growth and development occurs.
While adopting these five tips won’t automatically have your manager knocking at the door with a promotion in hand, it will move your career forward. By being consistent and thoughtful with your actions, you’ll begin to improve your work, develop new skills and advance your career. Life is never predictable but focusing on continual self-improvement will pay off in the long run and pave the way towards a successful career.
Acumatica CEO Jon Roskill. Image credit: Acumatica
The past week has been a busy one for our client, Acumatica, the world’s fastest-growing cloud ERP company. The industry leader announced the release of Acumatica 2020 R2, the second of its biannual product updates. The release comprises a significant number of updates, many of which were community suggestions on the Acumatica Feedback Site subsequently vetted and selected through focus groups.
The release comes at a time of increased demand for cloud and mobile business management solutions. According to CEO Jon Roskill, “Digital transformation has become a requirement. With so many businesses operating from remote locations and home offices now, it’s more important than ever to have a single source of business truth that is accessible to anyone, anytime, from anywhere, which can also integrate easily with mission-critical applications.”
What’s unique about this update?
- Integration with leading eCommerce application Shopify
- Automated AI/ML-enabled Accounts Payable document creation, which simplifies how users prepare data that can be visualized on dashboards, analyzed in pivot tables and used for real-time notifications.
- Up to 500 recently viewed records are instantly available.
- A fully native POS software solution that provides retailers with real-time inventory availability, multiple locations and back-end warehouse management with barcode scanning. Now, users can manage a complete omni-channel experience without having onsite staff.
- AI/ML-enabled Advanced expense management, which incorporates electronic banking feeds for corporate cards and automates receipt creation to streamline processes for ordinary mobile users as well as back-office accounting personnel.
Acumatica also added several vertical-specific features and end-user productivity aids to all its Industry Editions. Taken from Acumatica’s website, its features include:
Financials:
- Boost cross-company sales by enabling related companies to buy and sell from each other
- Manage customer visibility with centralized account management
- Streamline monthly tasks with intuitive bank reconciliation improvements
Commerce:
- Boost B2C commerce with our powerful Shopify integration
- Simplify the buyer experience with improved shipment tracking, refund processing, and buyer notifications
Manufacturing and Distribution:
- Track production outputs and get your products to market faster with an embedded third-party quality module
- Reduce bad debt and simplify collections with streamlined payment and credit card processing
- Prevent overpayment by validating bills against purchase orders
Field Service:
- Enable appointments to span days and record travel and break time with multi-day appointments
Construction:
- Maximize billing accuracy with pro forma workflow enhancements
- Ensure the accuracy of contract caps with retainage allocation enhancements
- Improved AIA processes
- Enhanced integration to Procore’s construction management software
Acumatica also announced strong adoption rates and sales for Acumatica Construction Edition – complete, cloud-based construction software for general contractors, home builders, subcontractors, specialty contractors and developers.
The product has experienced notable growth, including 200 percent adoption and sales growth each year since its introduction two years ago.
The rapid uptake of Acumatica Construction Edition is due to:
- It being a true cloud offering, which allows contractors to easily share data between the office and the field.
- Construction, which has seen an inflow of a younger workforce and builders who want to utilize integrated, automated, and innovative cloud and mobile technology to meet their needs.
- The need to transition and adapt to remote workforces due to Covid-19.
We are excited about Acumatica’s innovation in delivering on consumer demand for cloud and mobile business management solutions. We are impressed with how Acumatica continues to deliver solutions to customers that will enable them to adapt and tailor Acumatica’s solution to meet their unique business needs.
If you work in public relations you’re likely learning new things each week. You might be getting educated about a new issue your client is facing, coming up to speed on an entirely new market sector, or learning how to help colleagues develop and expand new skills.
Continuous learning is one of the things I love most about my career in PR, so it was with great interest that I watched the video “How Practice Builds Our Hidden Learning System,” by Barbara Oakley, Ph.D., and professor of industrial and systems engineering at Oakland University.
The session, which took place during Course Hero’s 2020 virtual Education Summit, has some great insight, whether you’re a teacher, parent or working professional. I encourage you to watch it, but here are a few points that resonated most with me.
- Practice what you learn. When you learn, you create new neural links. Often these links are weak at first, but as you practice what you learn, these sets of links become stronger and broaden. However, if you learn something and don’t practice it, the neural connections won’t become as strong.
- Prioritize sleep. When you sleep, the neurons in your brain remain active by sending signals across these link sets. This helps you consolidate memories and make them stronger. This is one of the reasons that learning over several days is better than trying to cram all the learning into a single day.
- Recall the information. The most powerful technique for learning is to practice retrieving or recalling it. This is more effective than re-reading material, highlighting it or creating concept maps. When you retrieve information from the memory in your brain, you’re making the connections stronger and practicing remembering what you learned.
- Understand the systems. There are two systems of learning information and moving it to long-term memory: declarative and procedural. Both are necessary for learning but there are important differences between them. Below are some characteristics of each learning system.
| Declarative | Procedural |
| You’re mostly conscious of it | You’re not conscious of it |
| Develops through explicit instruction | Develops through practice, especially spaced repetition |
| You can explain it | You can’t explain it (or not easily) |
| Involves sequential tasks | Involves complex patterns |
| Fast to learn, slow to use | Slow to learn, fast to use |
| Flexible | Inflexible |
I’ve often wondered why I can’t explain the writing process more easily with coworkers and now I understand that writing likely involves both declarative and procedural learning systems.
When describing how to complete a writing project, for example, I can suggest a series of sequential tasks, such as beginning with research, coming up with a theme, developing an outline and then writing the article. These would involve the declarative learning system.
But organizing information and writing the article, depending on the topic, is likely to require the expression of complex patterns. This will involve procedural learning. I won’t be able to easily explain how to do the research or the best way to arrange the information, and these things will take more time to learn.
Dr. Oakley uses an even better example of the use of declarative vs. procedural learning in the course. She describes learning Spanish. You can learn verb conjugation fairly easily by looking at a chart and using the declarative learning system, but speaking and understanding it in conversation is learned through procedural systems.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch this video for some great reminders and tips for deepening your ability to learn and recall information.
Now more than ever before, companies are expected to establish a clear stance on important social and political issues. In fact, a 2018 survey from DoSomething found that 76 percent of respondents said they have purchased, or would consider purchasing, from a company to show support for the issues they back. The survey also found that 67 percent of respondents had stopped purchasing, or would consider doing so, if a company stood for something that didn’t align with their values. As a result, defining and establishing a stance on key issues has become a critical element to many business strategies.
Our team recently wrote about how brands can rebrand with purpose and the benefits of doing so in this blog post. But once brands establish their stance on issues, how can they ensure they effectively support them?
I recently came across an article in Harvard Business Review about how brands can follow through on the values they’re promoting to consumers. The author, Latia Curry, artfully outlines two key elements necessary to evaluate a brand’s effectiveness in navigating the complexities of social advocacy. The first element is understanding a brand’s “issue fluency,” which analyzes how authentically a brand engages with the public on an issue, and the second is the “depth of engagement”, which evaluates how much a brand is investing in a particular issue.
As you may imagine, the most well-received brands are ones that authentically communicate and invest in addressing issues that are important to their stakeholders.
A brand that is often used as a successful example of social advocacy is Ben and Jerry’s. The business “lives their values,” according to Curry. This is largely because the company actively shares its stance on social and political issues, including social injustices, racial discrimination and climate change. But it doesn’t only speak to its perspective, it also acts on it, investing in initiatives that support changes related to the issues it supports.
As communications professionals, we are often providing recommendations on how brands should respond to large social issues. PR professionals can craft effective statements that enable “issue-fluency” that communicates a brand’s perspective, but Curry’s approach raises an important question to ask: Is the brand also supporting the issue through its actions? Or in Curry’s terms, what is the depth of the brand’s engagement?
The answer to this question will influence not only the response, but the tone as well.
Living its values. Brands that dedicate time and resources to important social issues, both internally and externally, are living their values. It’s important to note that these companies aren’t just responding to an event, they are familiar with an issue and are committed to addressing it, regardless of the climate.
As such, these brands are often very issue-fluent and construct responses to major social events that demonstrate a clear understanding of the complexities and nuances of a specific issue because they have been working to address it for some time.
Owning its position. It’s important to understand that if a brand hasn’t been investing the time or resources in addressing a specific issue, it does not mean it cannot comment on it. But, if they do so, it’s important they own their current position in relation to the issue. This might mean acknowledging the fact that they have not dedicated time and resources. After that, they might want to commit to taking the necessary steps to enhance their depth of engagement. And finally, if brands are not experts on a topic but comment on it as if they are, it will not be well-received by the public.
Similar to a crisis scenario, brands should consider having a plan in place on how to respond to a range of issues so they can do so in a timely and effective manner. Social advocacy is becoming a critical element of business strategy and PR professionals play a large role in sharing messages on these topics.
Congratulations: You’re having a baby! Between reveling in the news, taking weekend power naps (while you can) and dreaming about your future mini-me, you might begin panicking about how your life will change — including your professional life.
Sure, you’ll probably take a break from late nights at the office and Friday happy hours, but having a baby doesn’t mean you have to put your career on hold. After all, more than 70% of mothers with children under 18 are in the workforce, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Whether you are carrying the babe, or your spouse is, here are some tips to prepare for your family leave:
Have a solid communications plan – starting with your manager
Similar to any job change, you’ll want to consider how and when to communicate your good news. As hard as it is not to share your exciting news with favorite work friends first, it’s best to start with your manager. By talking with your manager early on, you can determine the best approach for sharing the news broadly, when appropriate.
Share it like the good news it is
Sharing the big news with your manager and co-workers can be a stressful experience. Understandably, you’ll be wondering: How will people react? Will they be happy? Will this impact your career progression? While it can be daunting, share the news with confidence and excitement, knowing that what you say influences how people perceive the news and ultimately respond. This is another reason why it is crucial to have a plan in place prior to announcing it so you can provide specifics and instill confidence amongst your team as you lead up to the transition.
Determine the timing of your announcement
When you share your news is entirely up to you, and if you’re the one who is pregnant it may be influenced by how you’re feeling, how early you start showing and what your relationships at work are like. It’s best to assess the situation based on your workplace environment, individual manager and your level of comfort. In my case, I shared my news with my manager at around 12 weeks, but other coworkers and friends I know shared this information as early as six weeks. The difference? They had morning sickness and luckily, I did not.
The longer you wait, the more likely it is that you will lose control of your message. An equally important consideration is to move quickly – once you tell one person, tell the rest. While a phased approach is natural, expediting those communications will help colleagues feel well informed about the news and give them time to think about the coverage plan during your leave.
Develop a transition plan
To create a comprehensive coverage plan, you’ll want to make note of your responsibilities day-to-day and week-to-week. To do this, you can review your work calendar, long lead project plans, reoccurring tasks, etc. For each activity, clarify your role in the project and the responsibilities involved. Lastly, partnering with your manager, determine who is going to provide coverage in your absence and begin outlining a transition plan. Once a plan is in place, share it with your manager and discuss it as a team. Together, you can align how responsibilities will be covered and by whom.
Initiate the knowledge transfer
Consider the specific information that your colleagues will need as they take over projects. This is vital in making sure they’re set up for success while you are on family leave. I recommend outlining the projects or processes that you currently own, and providing links to relevant background materials, in a single document so everything is one place. This process can also help you identify where you might need documentation and supporting materials that may or may not exist.
Connecting for brief but regular conversations with those you will be handing work over to is also helpful. While documentation is a foundational tactic, 1:1 conversations are always helpful to provide dialogue and ensure you’re providing the right level of detail to adequately prepare your co-workers. Go with what works best with your team and company culture.
Get grounded in your benefits
In addition to preparing others for your leave, you’ll want to prepare yourself, too. Make sure you understand your family leave benefits. Start having conversations early about what’s included and what’s recommended. Talk with your HR partner and your benefits specialist, and also seek advice from those who’ve been through it before.
Prepare for departure
As your leave approaches, delegate more. This gives those taking over projects ownership while still working alongside you should questions arise. If you’ve been prepping in advance, you can make the gradual shift from taking on new work to providing final counsel, reassurance and comfort to those who are going to be leading the work during your leave.
Appreciate that your team is capable and that you’ve done everything you can to prepare them for the transition. And now, it’s time to prepare yourself for welcoming a tiny new addition into your family!