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.
My colleague Beth Mayer recently wrote about our experience at “Managing Yourself & Leading Others,” a professional development workshop we took through the Harvard Division of Continuing Development. Her post focused on the importance of flexing one’s leadership style and it was a part of the session that I found to be most helpful. However, another valuable part of the course was learning more about organizational culture and the importance of working effectively within the context and norms of the company.
Oftentimes when people think about corporate culture, they want to know what an environment is like. For Instance, sometimes people will ask what kind of culture does your organization have? Is it heads down all the time? How frequently do you meet as a team or have team lunches? These are valid questions, but culture is bigger than just the fun stuff.
Ed Schein, a former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, defines culture as “a pattern of basic assumptions, invented, discovered or developed by a given group, as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that worked well enough to be considered valid, and therefore is to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”
So let’s break this down and look at this definition using an example with our team.
For instance, at Communiqué PR, we have certain processes that we routinely follow when we receive a phone call or an email from a potential new client. This includes learning about the company’s business and communication objectives, and asking a host of other questions before moving to the next phase of developing a proposal. We consider this methodology to be valid because we have an excellent track record of winning new business. Therefore, when new members join the company or team, they are taught our process of approaching business development.
According to organizational development experts, the more thoroughly a person understands an organization’s culture, the more effective he or she can be. Research has also found that there are some common characteristics where groups form cultural norms. These include the following:
- Innovation and Risk Taking: Does the group have a high or low tolerance for innovation and risk?
- Attention to Detail: How much attention to detail is expected? Is this of high or low importance to the group?
- Outcome Versus Process Orientation: Does the group care more about steps to take or the outcome?
- People Orientation: Does the group care about people’s individual preferences?
- Team Orientation: Does work get done in teams or by individual contributors?
- Aggressiveness or Competitiveness: Does the group value competitiveness or is this frowned upon?
- Stability: Does the group have a preference for maintaining the status quo over growth?
When you’re leading a group or team — or interviewing to join a new company — you might want to think about your own biases in relation to the cultural norms. For instance, do you have a propensity to innovate and take risks? Do you have high or low attention to detail? Do you prefer more outcome-oriented work or process-oriented work?
One good way to getter a better understanding of your personality and preferences is to take the Myers-Briggs personality test. This will help you better understand your personal preferences and style so that you have a better understanding of how you get energized, how you take in information, how you come to conclusions and how you approach the outside world — including your coworkers. Different personality types have very different preferences.
Finally, in our class we discussed how leaders create strong cultures. Researchers have found they are often a function of the stability of the group, the length of time they’ve existed, the intensity of their learning experiences, how they learn and are rewarded for learning, and how the strength and clarity of assumptions by founders or leaders of the group help. Rewards for learning might include positive reinforcement or avoidance conditioning.
In what kind of culture do you thrive?
September typically marks the return to school for children all over the country, but earlier this summer I had the opportunity to pack up my notebooks and pencils and head off to Harvard for a leadership workshop with Communiqué PR’s management team.
The session, “Managing Yourself and Leading Others” was packed into a solid two days of case studies, live group discussions, role playing and, of course, marshmallows (but more on that later).
I’ve managed people for almost 10 years now and, like a lot of people, didn’t go through much formal training to do so. I’ve tried to base my management style on those managers who have really affected my professional and personal development – those I loved and learned from, and others who I learned from in far less positive ways.
Understanding Motivations: Good Days and Bad
Some of the most compelling and interesting exercises for me during the workshop involved taking the time to reflect on both my personal and professional motivations as a manager, and those of my team and organization.
To start things off, the instructor asked us to think back to a day when we came home from work feeling truly excited and fulfilled about our job. Similarly, we thought about days when we came home feeling a little beaten down and discouraged about work.
Some of us are motivated by money, titles or promotions, meaningful work, or a public acknowledgement of a job well done. When you think back on an awesome, inspiring day at work, what about it made it great? Do you know what motivates your team and employees?
Going through this exercise helped us to not only identify our own motivations but to consider those of the people we manage – understanding that can help us to adapt the way we manage and mentor them.
Which leads us to our next point…
Flex Your Leadership Style
Every manager is unique and will bring their own leadership style to an organization, but staying in your management “comfort zone” too frequently can be a drawback for you and those you manage. Managers need to use a variety of leadership styles depending on the business situation and the people or teams they are managing.
Some leadership styles are more authoritative and coercive, others more democratic or mentoring/coaching-focused. Part of our leadership styles comes from our personalities, our backgrounds, or the way we were managed previously. The reality is that none of these styles on their own are wrong, but focusing on one style too heavily can create challenges.
What works for a self-motivated, highly competent employee may not work with another that needs more development and coaching. In an emergency situation, a coercive style (“Do what I say!”) can be very effective, but it can also impact motivation long-term. An affiliative style, focused on team building, can increase morale, but has the potential to allow poor performance to go uncorrected. Daniel Goleman has identified six main leadership styles in this article from Harvard Business Review (registration required).
Goleman’s article underscores the importance of thinking outside our comfort zones as managers and adapting our preferred style based on the person and the situation. Being flexible to switching between styles, as the circumstances require, is an indication of both emotional intelligence and strong, adaptive leadership.
Don’t Eat the Marshmallow!
Then, as with all executive leadership seminars, we also discussed the power of marshmallows.
This stemmed from Walter Mischel’s work on impulse control and delayed gratification in the 1960s where he gave preschoolers a choice: You can have one marshmallow now, or wait a few minutes and then have two marshmallows. The results showed that those children able to wait for the second marshmallow (i.e., focused on long-term goals) were more successful later in life than those who immediately ate the first marshmallow (i.e., focused on short-term satisfaction).
As a manager – and a longtime PR agency employee – I found this analogy fascinating. Too often we focus on quick wins and short-term success that don’t connect to the bigger picture or objective. For our clients, we want to show value and results, especially early on in the engagement, but if those results don’t drive their businesses forward in a meaningful way, are they really worth it?
Perceived Versus Actual Rules
In another marshmallow-centric exercise, teams competed to build the tallest structure out of dry spaghetti sticks, masking tape and string that would support a single marshmallow (Spoiler alert: Marshmallows are surprisingly heavy!).
While this task seems ridiculous at first, it actually allowed our teams to put the workshop’s lessons into action. It presented an opportunity to collaborate quickly, understand each team member’s strengths and roles, test and re-test prototypes, and learn from those results.
For my group specifically, we learned the drawbacks of following perceived rules versus actual rules. Long story short, we assumed we couldn’t build the structure’s foundation in a certain way, and no one thought to ask the instructor or conduct competitive research to see what other groups were doing. We just kept plodding along assuming we were right. We lost the competition as a result.
The dangers of following perceived rules have huge repercussions when it comes to managing others and your own professional development. If you keep your head down, assuming you’re following the right path, you’re not guaranteed to succeed. There might be new and different paths to take, or even an escape ladder hiding in the corner that will take you to another destination entirely!
I realize it’s not always feasible to cross the country and head to Harvard for a two-day workshop, but I would highly recommend the power of external training for anyone who manages people, in any capacity. Getting outside of your day-to-day business routine and interacting with new people from vastly different backgrounds and professions was almost as helpful as the workshop’s lessons themselves.
What type of leadership or management training has been useful to you as a PR professional? Has any of it involved marshmallows? Tell us here, in the comments!
Would you believe it if you heard that nearly 11 percent of most marketing budgets are dedicated to social media? How about if you heard that among Fortune 500 companies, nearly 98 percent rely on social media for a combination of public relations, marketing, and customer service and industry insights?
While these statistics alone are not surprising, it is curious that despite the deep integration and heavy investment in social media activities, marketers are still facing challenges to deliver a strong ROI.
The 2017 biannual CMO survey, sponsored by American Marketing Association, Deloitte, and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, shines a light on the challenge businesses have converting social media investments into effective marketing. In fact, the survey found that 44 percent of CMOs said that social media’s impact was nonexistent or minimal.
With the impact of social media at an all-time low, and the investment of social media increasing (spending is expected to grow 19 percent over the next five years), how can companies better align strategies to create a social media plan that is both impactful and successful?
Cision recently published a white paper that taps into this challenge, providing six best practices for companies to consider when creating an enterprise-level social media plan. Checking the box on all six of these strategies will help maximize social media spending.
- Include all company departments. Taking a company-inclusive approach to social media will help create a plan that is authentic and maps back to the company’s overall business and communication objectives. A marketing department may not have insight into every subdivision, so getting feedback and including insight from different branches will help better define messages, accurately establish targets, select platforms and track results.
- Establish relevant, specific and measurable goals. Setting objectives you hope to secure from your social media efforts will lay the groundwork for future social activity. Without establishing an end goal, social media efforts can result in being too general and run up budget spending instead of delivering meaningful messages to your target audiences and creating impact for your company.
- Create target audience personas. A great way to establish and deliver meaningful content to your target audiences is by creating a customer “persona.” This can be done by identifying the character traits and spending habits of your company’s average and/or target customer. Combining characteristics such as age, gender, profession and income to create an “ideal” customer will help you understand the messages they want to hear, ultimately creating a more strategic social media plan.
- Identify the right platforms. Once you have firmly defined your target audience and established your persona, consider what social media platforms they would visit. What social media apps do they have installed on their smart phones? What platforms do they check at lunch? Depending on your industry and your persona’s demographic and profession, the answer to those questions and therefore the social platforms of interest will likely vary. Consider holding focus groups and issuing surveys to confidently detect your persona’s preferred platforms.
- Invest in the right technology. Investing in integrated social tools can help marketers monitor analytics around engagement levels and message distribution. A disconnect between social media spending and ROI can often occur when companies have not established an efficient and effective way to track their metrics. Marketing departments should vet multiple tools before making a purchase decision.
- Get internal feedback. Opening up the communication lines and welcoming feedback from the inner team will help in the brainstorming process and introduce ideas and strategies that the C-Suite may not have considered. Not only will this create opportunity for fresh insight, it may also filter and eliminate suggestions that are not ultimately structured for success and that will not resonate with your persona.
Cision’s full white paper can be found here: A Hub, Spokes & Technology: Social Media Strategy for Enterprise Businesses.
For many young adults entering the professional workforce, the ability to successfully manage email can be daunting. If not correctly managed, important emails can wind up at the bottom of one’s inbox, which may lead to a late reply or missed opportunity.
Managers, business partners, and customers also expect people to master email because so much business is conducted over the platform. According to Reuters, Adobe Systems, Inc. conducted a poll of 400 white-collar professionals and found that, on average, they spent 6.2 hours per day checking and sending emails, 3.2 of which were dedicated to work emails alone. Assuming that folks work 40 hours per week, this means they are spending an average of 16 hours weekly managing email. Because so much time is spent each week on email, developing good habits is exceedingly beneficial.
Given this, I decided to ask my colleagues at Communiqué PR for their tips on managing email. Here are their suggestions
Create and Use Folders
Folders are a great way to be organized in email. Some people prefer to create folders organized by subject, client or required action. For example, Zach Hanlon, a marketing and sales expert, was experiencing email overload. After speaking with his best friend (who works at a major consulting firm), he adopted a simple, yet effective strategy and set up just five folders: Inbox, Today, This Week, This Month/Quarter, and FYI. Then, he filed his emails into the various folders based on when he needed to act on them. (He details his approach in Fast Company.)
Personally, I’ve chosen to organize my folders by inbox and our list of clients. The bottom line is you need to come up with a system that best fits your needs and helps you to stay organized.
Respond in a Timely Fashion
Timing and organization are everything, and being responsive to email demonstrates you are punctual and that you view the sender’s email as a priority. Most clients and colleagues expect a response to their email within 24 hours, at the latest. Even if you can’t immediately start or respond to a request, it is a good practice to reply and let the sender know that you have received the message to avoid leaving people in the dark. By practicing good email etiquette, you are more likely to establish effective working relationships that are conducive to your overall success.
A popular tool to help you manage email when you’re out of the office is an automated response. An automated response may be used for certain occasions such as vacation days, sick days, or other blocks of time when you anticipate being unavailable. Communication is an important aspect of business, and by setting up an automated response you are still actively in contact with clients and colleagues even when not available. However, you’ll want to restrict its use because the recipient may perceive that his or her email is a lower priority or that communication with you may be difficult.
Another interesting idea is to put your out-of-office details, such as vacation days or meetings, in your signature so it is clear when you may be unavailable. This enables you to remind people in advance of your absence, which most people appreciate because it allows them to plan.
Be Concise
In the business world, time is of the essence, and maximizing your time and work output is paramount for success. When composing emails, communicating clearly while keeping the email brief is important, which is why the “One Thing” rule by David Masters, a professional blogger and writer, is so useful.
According to Masters, when composing emails it is best to limit yourself to writing about one subject at a time. When trying to discuss multiple subjects, the email may become too long and confusing. By sticking to one subject, you can begin to take a step in the right direction toward brevity and clarity.
Another great tip is to follow the idea of five sentences or less in an email. Usually, anything under the five-sentence mark comes off as abrupt, while more than five sentences is deemed too long. In email, you should be able to achieve your overall goal within the five sentence limit. Within these five sentences, the main questions that should be answered, according to Guy Kawasaki, a chief evangelist for Canva and brand ambassador for Mercedes Benz, are: Who are you? What do you want? Why are you asking me? Why should I do what you’re asking? And, lastly, what is the next step? By sticking to these five questions, you will be able to write clear and concise emails, which is a valuable skill to have in the business world.
For more on how to craft a perfect email, check out this article: “The Experts’ Guide to the Ever-Elusive Perfect Email”.
Concluding Thoughts
There are many ways to handle a high volume of emails, and some methods may work better than others. For those who have not tried these tips, I recommend incorporating them into your daily email routine.
Influencer marketing has become an incredibly popular method brands use to reach their consumers—especially social media. A study conducted by Tomoson in 2015 proved exactly why this has become one of marketers’ favorite news tools, stating brands make $6.50 in revenue for every $1 they spend on average on influencer marketing. In fact, so many marketers are seeing the positive effects of this method that 59 percent stated they would be increasing the budget for this activity.
With such impressive numbers, and the added benefit of tracking the effectiveness (to a degree) with click-throughs and engagement, it is no wonder this method has become an integral part of brands’ marketing plans. So if you are working with an influencer, here are a few ideas around how to leverage them to connect with your audience and drive results for your brand.
Personal Branding
Any influencer a brand collaborates with will already have some sort of following – that’s what makes them an influencer. And with a following comes personal branding. They’ve already built a persona for themselves, whether they are a reality TV star, a makeup artist on YouTube, a professional athlete or a comedian. Their audience has an understanding of who they are and you want to ensure that their personal branding messages align with your brand’s messages.
That being said, as you begin working with an influencer, have a conversation with them to understand what messages they are passionate about not specifically related to your brand. Once you have a clear understanding of the messages they want to communicate, you can determine how to best align your brand and its messages with their messages. By working backward, you can authentically intertwine the influencer’s messages with the brand’s messages, making them more impactful and enabling them to better resonate with the target audiences.
Social Media
If you have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat, you’ve seen some form of influencer marketing. You may not always be aware of it, though many more influencers are adding “#ad” to their posts, but influencers are everywhere.
Of course, one of the most apparent ways to leverage social media when working with an influencer is to create social media posts that tie back to your brand. This could show the individual using your product or it could be an image of an activity with a description about how your product or service enhanced that experience. Images are a critical aspect of not only influencer marketing, but marketing in general. If you share a piece of information with someone, they will likely only remember 10 percent of it three days later. Add an image to that information and information is retained increases to 65 percent.
In addition to having the influencer post about the brand, its products or updates, you should also interact with the influencer from the company handles. Retweet or regram a post they have shared or comment on the post itself. This will reinforce the connection between the brand and the influencer. Lastly, create a specific hashtag for the influencer to use when posting about the brand. This will enable people who come across the post to easily find one centralized area with all of the posts shared by the influencer. It’s a way to create a story arc in the crowded, content-saturated environments created by social media.
In-Person Events
One of the reasons social media has become so popular is because it enables people to directly connect with others, especially those who once seemed out of reach, such as movie stars, models, sport icons, etc. Social media has provided fans and consumers with what feels like a direct line of sight into individuals’ lives, creating a behind-the-scenes look.
Consumers are often very curious to know what influencers do day-to-day, how their careers or fields operate, their personal interests and anecdotes, and what products they are using and enjoy. An in-person event is a way to enhance the connection between the audience and the individual and increase the number of messages the influencer can share with their audiences. Instead of having the audience’s attention for a matter of seconds as they scroll through their feeds, the influencer can captivate their attention for the length of the event and build a more meaningful, personal connection.
Influencers are becoming an integral portion of marketing campaigns and the number of brands leveraging them is growing. To ensure your campaign is successful in cutting through the noise, create authentic messages, encourage engagement, and create opportunities for your audiences to build personal connections.
September has arrived in full swing with back-to-school preparations, football-related programming, and dreams of pumpkin spice lattes. One September event that I look forward to (more than any kind of latte!) is the release of the next generation iPhone. This month, Apple is unveiling a major redesign of the iPhone, but most importantly, this year marks the 10th anniversary of the device that has forever changed the way consumers – and PR professionals – are connected to a mobile device.
As a diehard iPhone user who has watched Steve Jobs’ iconic 2007 keynote address countless times, I recently took a moment to reflect on this ten-year milestone. Since its conception, the iPhone has been a catalyst for the widespread adoption of smartphones; it has also played a pivotal role in mobile app development and social media consumption. The opportunities to discuss the impact of the iPhone are endless, but I want to highlight three ways that the iPhone has changed the way we practice PR.
1. The evolution of the 24 hour news cycle.
Steve Jobs, in his 2007 keynote address, called the iPhone, “a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone.” As this device gained popularity, the smartphone industry exploded to challenge Apple’s quick tripling of its market share. It is no surprise that smartphones rapidly caught on with consumers, but even Jobs could not have foreseen the extent of its adoption. Indeed, according to Pew Research, 77 percent of Americans (roughly 242.3 million people) own a smartphone.
In the past, access to breaking news and information was limited to the evening news and newspaper printing press schedules. Now, there are 242 million people in the United States alone that have access to the worldwide web in their pocket. This means that there are 242 million people seeking the most immediate and compelling news from more publications, blogs, apps and online sources than ever before.
Journalists and PR professionals have had to drastically adapt their practices to cater to this demand for information as well as the vast number of news sources. Because news never stops in our digital age, reporters are in intense competition among other news outlets to be the first to report breaking news.
The constant, high demand for news means that PR professionals have to work harder to get their companies and clients to stand out from all of the constant, competing noise on the internet.
2. There are now incredible opportunities to form relationships with journalists.
The popularity of social media, undoubtedly aided by the development of smartphone applications, has created unparalleled opportunities for PR professionals to connect and form relationships with journalists.
Many reporters are plagued with hundreds of irrelevant emails and pitches every day. While there are still those PR professionals who won’t do their research, the advent of social media has made it easier to find the perfect beat reporter match for the story they are trying to place. Twitter can be an excellent resource to find out more about a reporter’s interests, which industries and companies that reporter typically writes about, and if you have any mutual connections. These three elements combined help foster that incredibly important and coveted personal connection. A 2014 PRSA study sums it up it perfectly, “Overall, social media helps you see what kind of person a reporter is.”
3. The rise of consumer co-created messages.
With a powerful, pocket-sized machine in millions of people’s pockets, the volume of user-generated content on the internet has skyrocketed. As digital marketing firm Brolik describes it, “…smartphones have allowed us to create that content (with cameras and keyboards) and post it to social media (with Internet connectivity) at almost any time. The result is an unprecedented ability to create and interact with content all day, every day for the over 50% of Americans who, according to the Pew Research Center, have a smartphone and use it for social networking.” Now, in our digital age, anyone can say anything about anyone. This is both a PR pro’s dream, and worst nightmare. The viral nature of social media makes it too easy for a worst-case scenario to become a part of the daily news cycle.
Take the NYPD, for example, when it attempted to leverage co-created content by encouraging Twitter users to send photos of themselves with officers using the hashtag #myNYPD. Unfortunately, a steady stream of photos demonstrating police brutality and racial profiling surged through Twitter in response. If the NYPD had taken the time to asses the risk of this kind of co-created content, the adverse reaction of the public might have been anticipated, and the campaign would either have been adapted or cut entirely.
With no control over the content of the message, it is the PR pro’s duty to insert his or her client’s point-of-view into the conversation. In the case of the NYPD, it was important for them to have already established a personality on Twitter, rather than blasting information and hoping for the best. Dan Tisch, chairman of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Management, shared some thoughts regarding smartphones and co-created content in a New York Times interview, “In a world where the ordinary consumer is walking around with global publishing power in his or her pocket, the role of public relations has shifted from creating content to attempting to influence the content that’s created by others.”
While you won’t see me camping outside of the Apple store for days prior to the release, you better believe I will be upgrading. The iPhone 8 is likely to have a radical redesign from its earlier counterparts, leaving new opportunities for society to evolve along with it. Who knows where this new generation of iPhones will take PR professionals – most likely somewhere unimaginable.