Thursday, July 21, 2016

3 ways you could be harming your career

You have big aspirations for your brand and career. Could you be derailing your goals without realizing it? Here are three subtle mistakes communicators make every day:

1. You focus communications on your department or organization, not your audience. You want to get your messages across? First, you must show audiences you understand their needs.

2. You take orders; you don’t allow yourself to have ideas. You have a valuable perspective on stakeholders and the business. Entice execs to notice and respect your ideas.

3. You sometimes secretly think content doesn’t matter. You bring a voice to your brand. You inspire audiences to take action. Give yourself and your work more credit.

Find out how to put yourself back on track at “The Influential Communicator” on Sept. 26-27 in New York City. Learn from industry experts how to craft content programs that irresistibly push business goals and make you an indispensable C-suite partner. Take control of your content and career!

Register here, and save $100.



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5 compelling openings for your next presentation

Can your audience form an accurate impression of you in just two seconds?

The late Nalini Ambady, a professor of psychology at Boston’s Tufts University, was fascinated by that question. To answer it, she and a colleague designed a study to test whether such “thin slices” of an impression could truly be accurate.

She filmed 13 instructors teaching their classes throughout the semester and, at the end of the term, collected student evaluations of those instructors.

Later, she edited two-second clips of those instructors and showed them—without volume—to students who weren’t enrolled in those classes. The students were asked to evaluate the instructors using several criteria, including overall competence.

Her findings were remarkable.

Students who watched only a two-second video clip of the teachers formed similar impressions to the students who were enrolled in the classes for the full semester. (Ambady’s work made its own impression, serving as one of the main sources for Malcolm Gladwell’s business bestseller “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.”)

Other studies have found similar results. Some show that first impressions are formed within seconds, while others find they take just a few minutes to solidify.

Whichever studies you believe, the end results tell a similar story: People will form opinions about you quickly and, once they do, those opinions can be difficult to reverse.

My newest book, “101 Ways to Open a Speech,” is intended to help you take advantage of your next presentation’s opening moments. In this article, you’ll find five opens from the book that will help you grab your audience from the start:

1. The unexpected definition opening

In September 1980, just two months before Americans were to choose their next president, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan and incumbent President Jimmy Carter found themselves deadlocked at 39 percent apiece, according to a Time poll. The United States was mired in an economic recession at the time; inflation was in double digits, and unemployment was at near-record levels.

In an effort to paint Carter as out of touch, Reagan cleverly redefined three terms during a speech in New Jersey:

“[Carter’s] answer to all this misery, he tries to tell us that we are only in a recession, not a depression. As if definitions, words relieve our suffering…If it’s a definition he wants, I’ll give him one. A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

Rather than offer a classic dictionary definition of those terms, Reagan redefined them in an unexpected way that delighted his audience and earned enthusiastic cheers.

Redefining terms can have an oversize impact on your audience. If you’re speaking to a group of “stay-at-home” parents, for example, you might redefine the term like this:

“Unlike most people, you know exactly what it means to be a ‘stay-at-home’ parent: driving to the park so your little ones can run around, taking them to the doctor, going grocery shopping, stopping at the art supply store so they have a project on a rainy day. When you think about it, I’m not sure why we’re called 'stay-at-home’ parents—we’re rarely home! It would be far more accurate to call us what we really are: 'on-the-run’ parents.”

2. The newscaster 'tease’ opening

News anchors are experts at keeping viewers tuned to their programs. Before tossing to commercial breaks, newscasters often deliver a compelling “tease” intended to hook people and prevent them from flipping to a different station.

Unless you’ve consumed unusually little mass media content, you’ve probably heard thousands of news teases:

“Did the local sports team win tonight’s big match against their rivals? We’ll tell you, next.”

“A well-known politician got into a screaming match with reporters today. The video, after this break.”

“Which movie just earned six Academy Award nominations and leads this year’s pack? Our film critic has the rundown, right after the weather forecast.”

This opening borrows from that technique by adding similar teases to the more traditional “summary open.” For instance, you might begin a talk about the overall performance of the U.S. economy in the last quarter by saying:

“The market sent mixed signals last quarter. Today, I’ll talk about why the stock market was up, why the housing market was down, and why consumer spending hasn’t budged in almost a year. Along the way, you’ll learn why Ford can’t seem to sell big trucks this year, why France will have more homeless retirees in five years than we have here in the United States, and why one unusual but reliable signal tells us that the same stocks that led the recent rally may soon go bust.”

In that example, the second sentence contains the summary opening, and the third adds the more engaging newscaster tease.

[RELATED: Speechwriters, join our LinkedIn group and meet the world’s best executive communicators. Get free tips and strategies, too!]

3. The show of hands opening

One of the most overused presentation starters is the “show of hands” question. The problem isn’t usually with the device itself, but with the ham-handed manner in which it’s used.

Too often, speakers ask a question that leads nowhere:

“How many of you have used this new product? Oh, OK, great.”

Worse, they ask a patronizing question:

“How many of you would like to earn more money?”

Audiences bristle at such condescension. Participation for its own sake isn’t enough.

The question you pose should challenge conventional thinking, lead to a counterintuitive conclusion or add an unexpected dose of humor. It should allow members of the audience to see how their answers compare with those of their peers, perhaps leading them to reconsider their previously held positions.

Great opening questions must lead somewhere, so connect the audience’s response to your next comment-and prepare several different transitions in case you receive an unexpected result.

For example, an expert in body image research might ask:

“If given a choice, who here would rather be completely blind-for the rest of your life-than obese?”

Assuming very few people raise a hand, the expert could connect the audience’s response to the main point this way:

“It appears that this audience would overwhelmingly choose the gift of sight, even if that means living as an obese person. But you’re not the norm. Research from Arizona State University found that one in seven women would prefer blindness to obesity. That tells you a lot about how much emphasis our culture places on physical appearance-and that comes at a high cost to our health.”

4. The rapid-fire statistics opening

Statistics without context tend not to stick, so you might be surprised I sometimes recommend “drowning” your audience with a rapid-fire series of statistics that individually don’t contain much context.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg demonstrated why that works when she opened her TED Talk with five quick statistics:

“The numbers tell the story quite clearly. A hundred ninety heads of states, nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats, tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 2002, and they’re going in the wrong direction. Even in the nonprofit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top, 20 percent. We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children.”

Sandberg’s quick succession of statistics doesn’t succeed in making any individual number particularly memorable-few audience members will remember the specific figures-but works for a different reason: Her drumbeat of data creates an overall impression.

For her purposes, it wasn’t important that people watching her speech remembered any particular data point. It was more important that they remembered her broader points—such as the fact that professional women are underrepresented at the executive level—and if her opening statistics communicated that message to her audience, they served their purpose perfectly.

5. The non-expert quote opening

In 2009, New York-Presbyterian Hospital ran a series of television commercials called “Amazing Things Are Happening Here.” The advertisements featured real people—including patients and parents of pediatric patients—who received care at the hospital.

Advertising Age called the campaign a “game changer,” writing:

“While testimonials are hardly a new idea in hospital advertising, New York-Presbyterian’s approach stands out. Shot in polished black and white, and lacking the tear-jerking background music that characterizes many 'testimonial’ style hospital ads, the films are unadorned, intimate portraits of real former patients…Not only do they…not feature actors, the ads are unscripted and their subjects appear real and natural. Heather McNamara, for instance, mispronounces the name of the hospital in a way that any nine-year-old understandably might; it wasn’t edited out.”

You can quote a patient, a janitor, a customer, a “man on the street,” a woman you once sat next to at a dinner party, your spouse’s college friend, a stranger who experienced the same situation the audience finds itself in right now, or anyone else who is unknown—but has wisdom to offer—to your audience.

This opening also works for another reason: “real people” often do more to sway audiences than experts. In “Influence: Science and Practice,” Robert Cialdini writes, “We like people who are like us, and we are more willing to say yes to their requests, often in an unthinking manner.”

Quoting a “real person” to whom the audience relates can help strengthen the audience’s bond with you; after all, you’re the person who had the wisdom to regard a person the audience deems trustworthy as deserving of mention, so you will receive the credit from the audience.

Brad Phillips is president of Phillips Media Relations, which specializes in media and presentation training. He is author of the Mr. Media Training Blog, (where a version of this article originally appeared) and two books: “The Media Training Bible” and “101 Ways to Open a Speech.”

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2016’s most powerful brands

It can be a struggle for organizations to get to the top. Which is the best of the best?

Tenet Partners has the answer. It recently released its annual list of the top 100 most powerful brands.

The firm uses the CoreBrand Index to determine its list and surveys roughly 10,000 opinion leaders on familiarity (awareness of a brand) and favorability (a brand’s perception). They then measure how each organization performs in terms of its overall reputation, the perception of its management, and its investment potential.

[RELATED: Join us McDonald’s HQ and learn how to use storytelling to drive employee and customer engagement.]

You can check out the full list here, but 2016’s top 10 are listed below:

1. Coca-Cola

2. Hershey

3. Bayer

4. Walt Disney

5. Apple

6. Microsoft

7. PepsiCo

8. Johnson & Johnson

9. American Express

10. Google – Alphabet Corp.

Surprisingly, Google hadn’t made the top 10 list until this year. Several other organizations experienced brand boosts as well. “Since 2011, Google’s BrandPower ranking has been on the rise - improving their Familiarity and Favorability metrics every year for the last six years in a row,” Tenet Partners’ press release read.

Amazon, which came in at No. 54, rose 15 positions year-over-year. The company, along with Bank of America (No. 68, rising 12 positions from last year), Macy’s (No. 95, rising 12 positions), eBay (No. 29, rising 11 positions) and Clorox (No. 47, rising 11 positions) were all the most improved brands that the survey found.

However, not all brands fared as well.

Eastman Kodak (No. 59) fell 12 positions from last year, and was joined by Nintendo (No. 94, falling 12 positions), General Motors (No. 74, falling nine positions), Walgreens (No. 41, falling eight positions) and Western Union (No. 84, falling eight positions).

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A guide to better video marketing

In marketing, effective storytelling is essential to reaching audiences.

What makes certain stories more effective than others? It has to do with drawing a special “something” out of the reader, listener or viewer.

The goal for many of today’s marketers is to inspire their audiences and elicit an emotional response to their content. What’s the best medium to do that? Many marketers would suggest video.

According to data from VidYard’s Video Marketing Handbook, more and more brand managers are presenting powerful themes through visuals. A recent report even calls video “the storytelling format to rule them all.”

Thinking of adding a video component to your next marketing campaign? Have a story to tell, but you’re not sure whether a visual element is the best way to tell it?

If you seek to share your organization’s values and message with your audience through a brand-focused video, here’s how—along with highlights from the report:

Make people feel something

Engagement often starts with a desire to “strike a chord with your audience” or “better understand your customer.”

Tapping into your audience’s mind, body, soul (or wallet) begins with a feeling. To break down your target audience’s emotional wall, you must elicit inspiration, humor, happiness, sadness, anxiety or fear.

From VidYard:

It doesn’t really matter if your audience is laughing, crying or feeling inspired at the end of your video, but they better be feeling something or you’ll be easily forgotten. Your goal is to convey an implied voice or brand persona and have people resonate with it. Whether it’s your on-screen talent’s wit, the language you use to speak about your brand’s beliefs, or even the topics you choose to cover, you’re trying to create content that triggers targeted emotions and trying to tie these high-power feelings to a specific action you want your audience to complete.

The way your brand delivers its message—and when—requires the ability to persuade.

If you seek to sway consumers and direct them toward your brand, VidYard suggests adopting an all-hands-on-deck approach.

The report says, in part:

There’s no doubt that video can now be used for much more than brand awareness. Video is no longer a marketing-based silo and can actually involve every business unit from your creative team, to your demand generation experts and your sales reps.

Here’s more:

Video stories can be sourced from all parts of the business. From R&D to your interns, there are tons of stories to be told, it’s just a matter of finding them. To encourage employee advocates to contribute stories, the culture must clearly support risk-taking and failure.

How can you unify departments and get everyone working toward the same goal?

Hone the emotional aspect of your campaign; then refine your strategy.

Here’s more fom VidYard:

One glance at the types of videos brands are releasing these days is enough to see that there’s a huge trend toward content that makes people feel. Times are changing and gone are the days when creating an especially impressive video was the only piece of the puzzle. Today you need to refine your video strategy and start monitoring your performance as it relates to ROI. Marketing technology has evolved to fit the bill and you can now track exactly who’s watching your video content, and for how long.

Find out what drives consumers

Depending on your brand’s product or service-and its price-VidYard data suggest digging deeper into your customers’ decision-making processes.

Jacqueline Jensen, a community evangelist at Piktochart, says customers’ overwhelming response to certain videos is simple science.

From Jensen:

If you aim to share a story that appeals to your audience, is easy for them to comprehend, and will be something they remember, we are finding that the science points to using visuals, including images and videos. Visuals and videos are recalled much more promptly than text or other sensory inputs—65 percent for visual content, versus 10 percent for pure text.

Most consumers don’t want to sit through a boring informational video, let alone associate that video with a brand they trust. To migrate away from yawn-inducing content, YidYard advises being realistic about your expectations:

There are only a few things you can actually achieve with each 90-second video spot. Consult with your team on the one essential point of the video (the main objective that aligns with the goals of the business). Remind them that you’re not looking to include all of the messaging points in your video, rather you’re aiming to create a provocative, entertaining spot that gets people talking about—and remembering—the issue that your company can help them solve.

Target your niche

If approaching your entire target audience with one video seems like an impossible task, take things one niche at a time.

From Jensen:

Great content isn’t always found in the same bucket as advertising-focused content. For example, with [a recent] Blab series, we talked to a PR professional, a well-known sketch-note artist, and the CEO of Blab. With each expert interview, we were able to target those in our community who are interested in those specific topics.

VidYard calls that “narrowcasting.” To do it properly, the report advises getting the quest for viral videos completely out of our heads:

“Going viral” is a naive approach to video marketing because, in reality, you can only secure millions of views if you have an audience with millions of people in it to begin with.

Instead, the report says to start here:

If you narrowcast a targeted message that capitalizes on the pain points of your ideal prospect, your video will retain viewers who are actually interested in what you do and likely have the budget to spend on your offering. In other words, you’ll attract and maintain the leads worth following up with.

Getting your video out there

Although marketers may thrive when conceptualizing a strong storyline and marketing strategy for their video content, that confidence can quickly turn to fear once production is underway.

From VidYard:

As companies get started with video there are always questions about budget, outsourcing, expectations around production value, and how to create great assets without breaking the bank.

Start here:

  • Determine whether your video will be produced in-house, or if you will outsource production. If your budget falls under $10,000, outsourcing might be more feasible. If the sky is the limit moneywise, perhaps it’s time to hire a full-time videographer. VidYard advises choosing someone with directing experience and a great sense of timing when it comes to editing.
  • Outline your expected output. Data say more than one-third of large organizations produce roughly 100 marketing videos annually. If you plan to use video marketing for the long haul, VidYard says to increase staff. Though many marketers might think in-house creative video teams are only an option for large outfits, any organization can hire or assemble a dedicated video team.

This VidYard graph shows how various organizations are approaching video:

(IMAGE)

Make sure it shares

Social media and video are becoming a marketer’s peanut butter and jelly.

If your target audience is on Facebook, post your videos there. If you want to expand your reputation with a variety of social media users, use your content to interact with them directly.

From Jensen:

[We started a] “User Stories” series using video because we’ve found a beautiful video is a powerful way to share a user’s story. For us, it’s about going behind the scenes and showcasing to our 5.5 million users worldwide how [our brand] has impacted one life.

We have found video to be one of the most transparent and powerful ways to take our community behind the scenes of the company and what we value. We are open to trying different platforms to see which experience resonates most with our community of users. As we explore, utilizing video, community interest and engagement guide us.

Here’s how VidYard’s report advises sharing your content and maximizing your video’s reach online:

  • Post your video on multiple pages on your brand’s website (blog, a resource hub, product page, etc.).
  • Use marketing campaign landing pages.
  • Insert or link to your visual content in outbound email marketing campaigns.
  • Establish a presence on social media channels. (Pay close attention to the sites your prospects use.)
  • Start a YouTube channel.
  • Create your own, dedicated video resource hub.
How do you use video in your marketing strategies, Raganreaders? What additional advice would you offer?

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5 lessons for communicators from stand-up comics

For those of you tired of tedious press releases…

For anyone who’s delivered a speech to a chorus of yawns…

To anyone writing those same stale articles you first wrote when boy bands ruled the earth…

Your audience is just as sick of your anemic prose as you are. It’s not your fault. Business messaging has been dry and boring for so long that it’s practically become background noise.

There is hope, though. Some communicators are so good at what they do, we hang on their every word. They can make anything interesting, from Hot Pockets to the stomach flu. They just happen to call themselves comedians.

So read on to find out why you have stop thinking like George Orwell and start thinking like George Carlin.

1. Comics can make any topic interesting .

Comedians live and die on engaging their audiences. Take Brian Regan—he can talk about the serving size of Fig Newtons, and you’ll still want more at the end. Fig Newtons aren’t funny; they’re completely unimportant.

Brian proves it’s not what you say; the magic is in how you say it. Some call it delivery. Some call it style, tone, voice. No matter what you call it, it’s what you have to develop to captivate your audience.

Are you funny? You don’t have to be. Style can be anything that infuses you into your work. It can be quirky, erudite, colloquial, sparse—even wordy or snarky. As long as it’s authentic, identifiable and appropriate, you’ll move your story forward in a unique way.

2. Comedians practice and polish their craft all the time.

There are a rare few comedians who can get up on stage and improvise for extended periods of time or riff on audience interaction. It’s a gift, but even gifted comedians spend hours and hours practicing, polishing, tweaking and testing their material.

Too often, we work in a vacuum. How often does someone else look at your blog posts before you publish them, or listen to your speech pre-performance?

Unless you’re at an open mic night, or your comic tells you the material is new (and they do, sometimes), you can bet it’s already delivered thousands of laughs. Their goal and ours, too, is to make all this work seem fresh and new every time.

3. Comics know we have the attention span of—hey look, a bird!

People in my age group (nearly 40) grew up on television. We took in endless quick-cut, 30-minute shows interrupted by 15-second commercials flashing by at intervals. Millennials have lived most of their lives tethered to smartphones; 140-character tweets and even shorter texts come in, rapid fire, all day. It just gets worse for Gen Z.

To keep things fresh and interesting, you have to move fast; just ask TED curator Chris Anderson:

[Eighteen minutes] is long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention. It turns out this length also works incredibly well online. It’s the length of a coffee break. So, you watch a great talk, and forward the link to two or three people. It can go viral, very easily.

The 18-minute length also works much like the way Twitter forces people to be disciplined in what they write. By forcing speakers who are used to going on for 45 minutes to bring it down to 18, you get them to really think about what they want to say. What is the key point they want to communicate? It has a clarifying effect. It brings discipline.

4. Comedians speak like real people.

We know jargon is awful—but why? Jargon is poisonous because it’s abstract and cliché. Audiences, readers—everyone—wants details and concrete imagery.

Here’s a brilliant quote from Jerry Seinfeld: “Marriage is like a game of chess, except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke, and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.”

It’s all about painting pictures with words. Remember when your third-grade teacher used to tell you, “I want showing writing, not telling writing”? Well, it’s still true.

5. Comedians know that laughter equals agreement.

This is why so many comedians write jokes revealing a simple truth. George Carlin was the king of pointing out all the stupid things we do in life—and then making us laugh at them: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”

This is a powerful thing: getting people to laugh at their foibles by presenting them in a humorous context. Some think of this as translation. I think of it differently: When people laugh, they do so because at some level, they are agreeing with you.

It’s easy to see why you would want to use humor in your communication. If you get people to agree with you up front through laughter, the rest comes easy. It’s like a persuasive shortcut, no matter if you are candidly being persuasive or just selling an idea. You don’t have to work as hard when people are laughing.

The bottom line is you don’t have to be a stand-up comic to be a stand-up communicator. Humor is a great tool, but you don’t have to be a comic genius.

The techniques they employ can make you successful, too. They work hard. They’re not afraid to fail (failing on stage is a requisite experience). And they see perfection as a moving target—just as you do. That’s why you can take these ideas to the bank.

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Wednesday, July 20, 2016

PR Daily's CSR Awards deadline is extended…again!

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Time to get a dynamic visual communications strategy

Have you:
  • Created a powerful YouTube channel that brings new energy to your brand?
  • Integrated Snapchat into your social media strategy?
  • Strengthened your LinkedIn promotions with strong visual stories?

If your answers are no, no and no, fear not. Join us at Cisco for our Visual Communications Conference on Sept. 21-23 in San Jose, California. Let visual communication experts show you how to create a visual communications strategy that propels your organization to the forefront of your industry.

Images power the fastest growing platforms Snapchat and Instagram. Our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Millennials are more distracted than ever. Brand managers everywhere rush to follow this emerging trend. It’s time to let your visuals do the talking.

Register here, and save $100!

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