Archive for Key Messages
Simplifying My Brand was So Easy – for Someone Else
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It took a perfect stranger to simplify my brand. I mean that’s what I do for a living: help individuals and companies with their brands – the words they use in telling their stories.
I was at a networking event last evening, and took the opportunity to do a little tweaking of my message as I circulated among the guests when I first walked in. I tried a few versions. Here is one of my openings: “Hi, I’m Jeannette Paladino. I’m a business writer. I help individuals and companies to sharpen their brands and shape the key messages they communicate to their target audiences.” Then I proceeded to tell the little group gathered around the bar that my focus was on writing web copy and blogs, branding and employee communications. Read More→
7 Steps to Making Your Employees Brand Ambassadors
Posted by: | CommentsYour employees can be your best brand ambassadors. What does that mean? It means you can mobilize an army of employees dedicated to communicating your company’s key messages and building your brand reputation online. First, it is essential to establish a positive two-way dialogue with employees so they feel involved in the process of promoting the company. They need to know management is listening to them and that they are important to the company’s success. The key is trust – companies can’t control what employees say but if you have good relations with employees you can trust they will represent the company well. Zappos, Intel, Comcast, IBM, Diamond Technologies and a host of other companies have done it. So can you.
Here are 7 steps to making your employees brand ambassadors that my colleague Amy Dean and I discussed today in a session entitled “Inside Out Public Relations.” You can view our entire audio/visual presentation at FreeWebinarWednesdays, or view the slideshow at the end of this post. This is what we believe you need to do to enhance your external communications:
1. Establish two-way dialogue with employees. Ask employees about their perceptions of the company’s strengths and weaknesses and the words they use to talk about the company.
2. Survey employees on social networking habits and interests. What social networks are your employees using and would they be willing to create branded accounts to serve as the company’s ambassadors.
3. Cherry pick a pilot group. Use the survey to identify enthusiastic employees and train them. Integrate the social networking inside out program with traditional marketing campaigns.
4. Craft information networking guidelines and incentives. Strike a balance between freewheeling and overbearing in advising employees what they can and cannot say. Incorporate responsibilities and goals into job descriptions and provide incentives and rewards just as you would for their other responsibilities.
5. Work Your “Wingmen.” Start first with senior executives, the lead pilots, and ask your brand ambassadors, or wingmen, to comment on their posts and RT their tweets. With senior executives setting an example, employees can create their own branded content within company guidelines.
6. Identify keywords to coalesce around. Establish the company’s keywords in priority order, with senior executives and employees using them as “smoke signals” to communicate with customers, partners and industry peers.
7. Establish metrics. Every company will have its own measurement systems, but it will be important to know if relationships are extending beyond social networks and improving business. Is the company moving up with search engine rankings? Are employees motivated and is customer service improving?
Engaging your employees as part of your Inside Out Public Relations won’t happen overnight. But who could better represent your company to the outside world than your employees, singing the praises of the company and what it stands for.
Inside Out Public Relations Slide Show
How Judge Sonia Sotomayor Mastered the Broken Record
Posted by: | CommentsIt is a rule of media training that despite the questions a reporter asks, you return or “bridge” back to your original point. Like a broken record, you repeat your message over and over again as a fact that can’t be disputed. If you stay “on message,” as they say in politics, eventually your point of view becomes embedded in the minds of your target audiences, moving them to your side of the argument (hopefully). Judge Sonia Sotomayor has learned this lesson well.
Taking a page from President Obama’s playbook – his message as a candidate was a consistent “it’s time for change” – she has deftly deflected the parries of Senators on the Senate Judicial Committee who are trying their best to trap her into saying she would allow her personal biases to affect her decisions if she were to become a Supreme Court Justice. She has basically repeated a variation of these words again and again, “”My record shows that at no point or time have I ever permitted my personal views or sympathies to influence the outcome of a case.” She has also followed the rule of not answering hypothetical questions. Senators have tried that gambit, but she has been up to the challenge.
You can only use the Broken Record technique if what you are saying is true. It does no good for a murderer to repeatedly claim, “I didn’t do it” when he is caught with a smoking gun standing over the victim. Conservatives and liberals who used a fine-toothed comb to pore through Judge Sotomayor’s decisions on the bench over the past 17 years have discovered, in fact, that in the vast majority of cases she has ruled against plaintiffs in affirmative action disputes.
Throughout today’s proceedings she has kept her cool. No doubt she will be glad to don her judicial robe and return to the bench where it will be she who is asking the pointed questions.
