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From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.

COVID-19 Dominates News Cycles – What Does That Mean for All Other News?

COVID-19 is dominating all conversations. Like me, I’m sure most people are lucky if they make it a full hour without talking or reading about COVID-19.

Though my PR career isn’t decades long, I can’t think of another time when something has so clearly dominated the news and for such a long time – with no end in sight. Additionally, because the situation is constantly evolving and varies largely by country, county or even city, there is always new information to report.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve assisted with building several new press lists for organizations in different industries, targeting very different sets of reporters, yet nearly every single reporter I looked at had covered COVID-19 in some capacity.

So, it’s left me and my colleagues wondering: What does this mean for all other news and activity? Do we halt other activity? Will other news even be heard?

In one of our virtual team meetings this week, we discussed this topic and how to best navigate it on behalf of our clients. Below is an overview of our PR approach during this unprecedented time.

Evaluate Each Announcement and Pitch

It is important to evaluate each pitch and announcement on a case-by-case basis. For example, when there is an announcement that’s been in the works for weeks, maybe even months, it likely doesn’t make sense to hold the story. Chances are, it’s a bigger business move that can’t go on hold for an indefinite amount of time. In that case, it probably makes sense to distribute the announcement, just know it may not have the results you were initially planning on securing.

With proactive pitches, it may be the time to hold. With proactive pitches, we’re often trying to spark a particular conversation in the news, shed light on a new trend, or share our clients’ expert opinion or unique perspective on a popular topic. Currently, the only topic making headlines is COVID-19. Developing and distributing a proactive pitch that doesn’t relate to COVID-19 in some capacity would likely make little to no impact.

Set Expectations

With announcements that you can’t push, recognize that it may not have the same impact or secure the same amount of coverage it would have three weeks ago. It’s important to have conversations with all involved that set expectations around what is realistic given the current climate. We’re in uncharted territory. While I would venture to guess that traditional news and stories unrelated to COVID-19 are not going to have much of an impact, maybe some reporters are looking for a welcomed break.

Look to the Future

While the future looks somewhat bleak and there appears to be no end in sight, there will be an end to COVID-19. Begin to think of creative ways to weave messages from announcements that will be overshadowed by the current news cycle into future activity, such as proactive pitches, bylines or blogs. Consider how you can leverage it in a larger story arc or future campaign.

These are uncertain and unprecedented times for everyone. All we can do is our best and take it day by day. Stay safe and wash your hands!

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Working From Home? 6 Tips for Staying Productive

With COVID-19 in full swing, everyone is feeling the impact. And those of us fortunate enough to be able to work remotely are balancing being productive without losing our sanity from isolation. As I write this, I am sitting in my makeshift home office – which, thankfully is a quiet space secluded from my 3-year old, with dual monitors and an endless supply of coffee.

There are many unknowns with COVID-19 – from a health to an economic perspective – but if you’re stuck inside and still need to do your job, it’s important to setup a productive shop. Here are six tips I’ve gathered from work-from-home veterans and workplace experts.

Location, location, location
Having a separate workspace is a bonus, but not always feasible. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated office with a door that closes, but it should be an area that mentally prepares you for work mode, whether it’s a separate room, a small desk setup in a corner of the living room, or a laptop at the end of the kitchen table. If a separate space is not an option, map out an area that can be clear of clutter, or at least allows it to be out of sight. This may mean sitting at a specific chair in your dining room, so you don’t see the chaos in the kitchen, or pulling out a folding table in your bedroom, if it’s the cleanest spot in the house.

Put your pants (or a bra) on
While Instagram memes glorify the ability to answer emails in your robe all day, being overly comfortable will tempt you back into your bed, or to your couch. It’s important to still do your morning routine as you usually would if you were commuting into the office, since it signals to your brain that it’s time to work – not to lounge. While a three-piece suit and fully done hair/makeup is not necessary, the simple stuff makes a difference. Several work-from-home veterans have cited this tip as the one that has had the biggest impact on their ability to work effectively.

Focus on output
As a PR pro who is accountable to billable hours, utilization rates and results, this is a no brainer. However, for the average person working from home it can be challenging to maintain productivity – especially when working remotely for a few weeks, or more.

As Kari DePhillips, the fully remote CEO of The Content Factory and cohost of the Workationing podcast explains, many people will try to hide from their deliverables since they don’t feel accountable in the same way. But, she says, it’s not enough just to “be at work” with a body warming up a seat. “In a remote work environment, you’re entirely judged by the volume, quality, and timeliness of your output. In this way, remote work is a great equalizer, and you may find it gives you an opportunity to shine—and snag that next raise or promotion,” she says.

Establish a routine
It’s an all too easy habit to adopt sleeping in longer than usual and making up for lost time by working later. The issue is the tone you set for the day, and thus, your productivity. As leadership development and career expert Elizabeth Whittaker-Walker explains, when you’re away from the office, it’s more important than ever to set specific hours—and stick to them. One way to ensure you stay on track is to create time blocks, which Whittaker-Walker says could look something like this: checking email during the first and last blocks of the day, only holding calls between certain windows, and managing the hours when you feel the most alert. “If your freshest thinking is before noon, save meetings or intense work periods for the first part of the day. Cross off the day’s objectives as you complete them for an intrinsic motivation boost,” she says.

Repurpose your commute
One of my favorite perks about working from home is ditching the commute. That said, it doesn’t mean your workday should start earlier. “Use your commute time in the morning for self-renewal or family time, not work,” said Julie Morgenstern, an organization and productivity consultant and author of “Organizing from the Inside Out.”

Schedule more check-ins with your team
One of the hardest parts of being a leader – whether face-to-face or not – is managing your team. There is an added layer of complexity when you can’t walk over to their desk and check in on a project, ask a question, assign a task, or be sure they have the resources they need. Luckily, technology provides us with ample opportunities to bridge this gap. With Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype, etc., these apps provide another channel for connection. Quick messages feel more authentic than formal emails, and video calls are a bonus to see and hear your colleagues and help avoid the isolating feeling of working remotely.

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TL;DR: How to Make Your Writing More Readable for Your Colleagues

Confession time: I’m a serial rambler.

It’s true. When there’s a multitude of critical information to absorb and distill into communications messaging, my tendency is to explore the space, list all pertinent information, and leave no detail unaccounted for.

Trim the fat? Please. My concern is to provide more than enough substance to ensure everyone is nourished and satiated. I’m wordy and love to run on.

The problem is it’s easy to get carried away, and chances are your colleagues have neither the time nor the interest to read an email or cover note that’s rife with excessive information. In fact, it’s likely your colleagues don’t want to read anything you write. Not because they’re mean, but because everyone has busy schedules and workloads to manage. Brevity is key. Deep down, we’re all fans of practicing mindful word economy, whether we know it or not.

This recent article from The New York Times drives this point home and wonderfully provides tips on how we can improve our writing in the workplace to ensure colleagues will actually read and respond to it. These helpful tips, provided by author Aaron Orendorff, include:

  • Write less often.

Orendorff states that the less we write, the more valuable our writing becomes. Evaluate your writing accordingly, and make your audience miss what you have to offer.

“The principle of scarcity indicates that people want more of what they can have less of,” said Robert Cialdini, Regents’ professor emeritus of psychology at Arizona State University and author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.”

“Things that are rare, scarce, dwindling in availability become more attractive as a consequence of perceived value.”

  • Use fewer words.

Orendorff points out that literary greats such as William Shakespeare, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway all ascribed to the ethos that “less is more,” while more recent scientific research has supported this notion.

“We long for clarity, for other people to say what they mean in as few, short words as possible. Thankfully, there are a handful of easy ways to start mastering brevity,” Orendorff writes.

  • Put action words in your subject line.

For those needing to bring about action from an email correspondence, it’s important to first tell your recipients what’s expected right up front. This can be accomplished by briefly stating the desired action in the subject line.

For example, “Instead of, ‘Agenda for Tuesday,’ use, ‘PLEASE COMMENT: Agenda for Tuesday.’ Rather than, ‘Budget Attached,’ write, ‘APPROVAL FOR ITEMS 9-12: Budget Attached.’”

  • Invert the order; lead with the need.

Ever draft an email and leave the most important sentence at the end? I’m often guilty of this transgression. To combat this, Orendorff takes a page from writer Anne Lamott and suggests writing a few drafts of your email. Then, flip the order by taking the final sentence and moving it to the top.

“Rather than building to the request — and risk muddling the meaning — this inversion forces us to lead with the need,” he writes. “After that, you’ll often find much of the rest can be removed.”

  • Don’t make it about you, or “them.”

This last tip can be most critical. It’s easy to write an email while focusing on what you need from the recipient. But Orendorff encourages writers to pause and ask themselves, “What’s in it for them?” It can help to incorporate your recipient in “a shared identity.”

“When seeking assistance or buy-in, we typically ask colleagues for their ‘opinion.’ Turns out, that’s a mistake. Asking for an opinion produces a critic. It separates ‘me’ from ‘you’ by leading the other person to introspect alone,” Orendorff writes. “In contrast, when we ask for ‘advice,’ people see themselves as partners. And advice versus feedback significantly increases both the amount and quality of responses.”

He adds to be mindful when it comes to pronouns. “You is selfish. So is them. But, we works together.”

Orendorff concludes that the chances of your colleagues ever wanting to read your writing will likely remain slim. Again, it’s nothing personal, it’s more indicative of the busy lives we all lead. That shouldn’t stop anyone from wanting to improve their writing and continue to get better. Ultimately, if you can make your writing more coherent and to the point for your audience, everybody wins – whether your colleagues know it or not.

Joe Livarchik is an account executive with Communiqué PR. He is likely writing a run-on sentence at this moment.

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A Snapshot of Bylines and Blogs Developed on Behalf of Flowroute

Communiqué PR has had the opportunity to work with Flowroute, now part of Intrado, for more than five years. Throughout these years we have supported a variety of company announcements including solution updates, new partnerships, as well as its acquisition in 2018. We also continue a regular proactive pitching campaign where Flowroute’s executives share best practices for decision makers around how to integrate and update current enterprise communication offerings to embrace new features and benefits of the cloud.

For background, Flowroute powers enterprise communication strategies providing a fully scalable, carrier-grade network to help cloud-based telecommunications companies build and deploy complex communications systems. The company continues to disrupt the telecommunications industry by delivering open access to telecom resources such as phone numbers, inbound and outbound calling, text messaging and advanced signaling data.

Flowroute recently expanded its international capabilities with its network providing extensive coverage in more than 160 countries. Through this expansion, the company offers domestic and international, cloud-based, local and toll-free inbound telephone numbers and allows customers to extend the reach of their networks without having to incur expansion costs.

As a result of our proactive pitching campaigns, we have secured a series of different contributed articles covering topics from collaboration tools, AI, intelligent devices, telecom APIs, SMS/MMS and many more. Below is a snapshot of some of the contributed articles secured and published over the past two years:

This past year, we also began developing ongoing content for Flowroute’s blog. Sometimes these posts will mirror and showcase proactive pitching efforts, but most often, these articles highlight Flowroute and Intrado’s enterprise communication solutions and share trends impacting key players in this industry. Below is a snapshot of some of the posts we have developed for Flowroute’s blog.

It has been a lot of fun working with Flowroute these past five years! As they continue to disrupt the traditional telecom industry, there continues to be new opportunities to help decision makers understand how to take advantages of the benefits and offerings cloud-based telecom services can provide. Further, as the global remote workforce continues to grow, facilitating collaboration through cloud-based enterprise communication tools becomes even more critical to long-term business success.

To learn more about our work with Flowroute and other support Communiqué PR has provided around blogging, check out the following articles.

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Business Communication During the Coronavirus Crisis

Unfortunately, over the past few weeks, the Seattle area has become the epicenter of the Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in the U.S. While the human toll of this crisis is at the forefront of our minds and our communications are focused on helping ensure safety, the economic impacts cannot be ignored.

Businesses have been forced to dust off their crisis communication plans for internal and external communication in the wake of the increasing number of confirmed diagnoses, employee concerns, supply chain disruption, office closures and event cancellations.

At Communiqué, we have been working with our clients on their communications with key stakeholders, whether employees, students, customers, investors, healthcare providers or patients. This entails gathering critical details that inform business operation decisions, evaluating how to proceed with events and activities, and developing media statements.

We also continue to actively monitor the situation and provide information and recommendations to our clients, so their business decision making is well informed.

A recent Harvard Business Review article “Lead Your Business Through the Coronavirus Crisis,” written by Martin Reeves, Nikolaus Lang and Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, offers useful guidance and initial reflections.

The article outlines “12 lessons for responding to unfolding events, communicating, and extracting and applying learnings.” We want to share a few of those lessons that we found most helpful. Below are a few excerpts from the article:

  • “Update intelligence on a daily basis.

Events are unfolding with astounding speed, and the picture changes on a daily basis….More recently, a number of fast-growing epicenters of infection have sprung up beyond China, signaling a new phase and potentially necessitating new strategies of mitigation rather than containment.”

  • “Don’t assume that information creates informedness.

In our connected world, employees have direct access to many sources of information. Leaders might reasonably conclude that there is so much information and commentary available externally that they don’t need to do anything additional. We have found, however, that creating and widely sharing a regularly updated summary of facts and implications is invaluable, so that time is not wasted debating what the facts are — or worse, making different assumptions about facts.”

  • “Prepare for a changed world.

We should expect that the Covid-19 crisis will change our businesses and society in important ways. It is likely to fuel areas like online shopping, online education, and public health investments, for example. It is also likely to change how companies configure their supply chains and reinforce the trend away from dependence on few mega-factories.”

It’s clear from the developing coronavirus outbreak that businesses and their communication teams will need to actively monitor, be prepared to adapt and change, react but not overreact, while applying gained knowledge along the way.

As Reeves, Lang and Carlsson-Szlezak tell us, “Unanticipated twists and turns will be revealed with each news cycle, and we will only have a complete picture in retrospect.” This makes ongoing reflection to extract lessons a learned essential.

Given this, when this crisis has passed, we’ll work with our clients to consider what was learned and what changes need to be made to existing crisis plans to prepare for the future.

For more information and guidance around crisis communication consider the following:

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My Experience of Starting a “Boss” Company in College

The past six months have been nothing short of a rollercoaster for me. Along with my regular class schedule and internship, I started a company through the Entrepreneurship Minor at the University of Washington. That’s right – I started a company as a college senior! How many college students do you know that have this type of opportunity with no financial risk? With this crazy experience under my belt I thought I’d share a few lessons I learned along the way.

My team, comprised of four women, came together under one mission: to empower women in Seattle. We went through dozens of ideas for how we could help women feel empowered and finally settled on a product that provided long-lasting energy with health benefits: ginseng-infused kombucha.

Our beverage, Boss Boocha, provided sustainable energy from ginseng and a low-sugar content while preserving the amazing probiotic benefits of kombucha. Our goal was to target the millennial women demographic and provide a healthy alternative to Red Bull or coffee, helping fuel their day naturally. We chose to compete with these drinks because they were on-the-go beverages that many people reached for when craving energy. Our beverage was different because of the sustainable energy from ginseng and the health-benefits from the probiotics. We knew we had hit the jackpot with this all-in-one beverage that naturally energized women to get work done.

Lesson 1: Don’t Be Terrified to Look for Outside Support

With a clear vision in mind, the next step was execution. Initially, we tried to create the beverage in my sorority’s kitchen. It did not take long for us to realize that we were not fermentation experts and lacked the ability to create a delicious beverage.

Miraculously, we found a local co-packer, Seattle Kombucha Company, to start producing Boss Boocha for us. Seattle Kombucha Company created our entire product—from creating the recipe to supplying our labels. He had perfected a mango flavor base and through testing, this was the best pairing with ginseng. This allowed us to fully concentrate on the marketing and financial side of our business. As a CFO and CCO with minimal accounting experience, I was grateful to lean on seasoned experts to focus on product development. Without the support from Seattle Kombucha Company we would have directed our attention to perfecting the beverage without spending the time necessary to research our target market. Our partner’s involvement was key to our success.

Lesson 2: Trust Your Gut and Run the Risk

There were many hurdles our team faced throughout the process of starting Boss Boocha. After conducting research and customer interviews, we decided to make working moms our target demographic. Through in-depth interviews, we learned that many working moms found a lack of appealing healthy energy drinks in the current market.

Although some experts said our target demographic was too small and, in turn, our product would not be profitable, our market research told us that there would be demand for a beverage like Boss Boocha. With the support of our teacher and co-packer, we continued forward. Having a support system was crucial to our success in the beginning stages of the company. That support encouraged us to trust our instincts.

Lesson 3: Learn to Communicate and Negotiate for the Success of the Team

Our initial concern before launch was the lack of sampling events we had lined up. We knew potential customers loved our beverage after trying it, but would they blindly purchase it? When we launched in January, we were relieved to see our sales skyrocket. We had a wave of customers who were willing to give our product a try and trusted in our brand.

With this high demand, we became wrapped up in pleasing our customers and developed blind spots when it came to communication within our team. My team back peddled, losing our powerful bond and sense of transparency. Each team member was running in a different direction, and we were no longer seeing eye to eye. We quickly learned the need for in-person meetings and communication on important decisions. Prioritizing this allowed us to rejuvenate our bond and align around a common vision.

Starting a business taught me lessons that will translate into any job as I enter the workforce full-time. As an intern in public relations, I see the importance of support, negotiation and risk. Having learned these lessons from personal experience leads me to believe anyone would gain substantial skills from starting a company. The benefits are lasting. I now think twice about every product purchase. Choosing to support local businesses rather than big businesses may seem like a tough shift, but once you’ve been a business owner you understand how each customer’s support can have big impacts. I have a much deeper appreciation for each business owner I meet, now that I have glimpsed the blood, sweat and tears it takes to run a successful business.

As I begin to wrap up my last quarter at the University of Washington, I am extremely proud to look back on my experience in the Entrepreneurship Minor. We beat our sales goal by four weeks and have gained a huge following on Instagram with over 300 followers in just two months. Even better, we were profitable! Although we have decided not to continue our company, I now know how to start a business. I am looking forward to the day when I can start another one, implementing the lessons I learned from this course.

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