Why introverts make great publicists

I’ve just made a career shift from a large organization to a small tech company. After years on a PR staff of 10, I’m now the solo communications representative.

Startup culture requires you to take initiative, work on multiple projects at once, be assertive, innovative, creative and ready to handle change at any moment. This has been a most challenging environment for me because I’m a textbook introvert.

Yet, I’m thriving. Why?

I recently read Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a passionate and persuasive look at the value of the introvert. She examines how and why American business culture prizes the extrovert, and she uses social, psychological and scientific research to explain the difference between the two personality types.

The traits and characteristics of an introvert are so valuable to communications and PR. I’m good at my job because I’m an introvert, not in spite of it. Inspired by Cain’s book, I’ve outlined five traits that make introverts better publicists.

1. We prefer listening to speaking

Whether your job requires you to deliver your key messages, or prepare someone else for remarks or an interview, this skill is vital for communicators.

To properly respond to your audience, you have to hear them first. Introverts assess a situation carefully and think before we speak. This allows us to present a succinct message, and stop talking once that message has been delivered. We do this naturally and can train our spokespeople to do it too.

2. We are amazing at solving complex problems

Introverts are more likely to be motivated by diving deep into a project for hours on end. So much of our role is based on research, problem solving, foresight and preparation. We are more likely to ask “what if” and assess every possible outcome of a situation.

Whether we’re in crisis mode or are planning our next campaign, being analytical and thorough are cornerstones of a top-notch strategy.

3. We are keen observers; we are the canaries in your coalmine

Introverts are acutely aware of the world around them. We will spend time in meetings watching the body cues and reactions of those around us. Because we’re not busy talking, we’ll pick up on non-verbal communication.

Careful observation can reveal important clues about the tone and reception of your message. How useful could this be if your main role is internal communications? Consider, for example, the value in surveying staff while your CEO delivers a speech at a town hall and what that could reveal.

4. We are great writers

Remarks. Press releases. Pitches. Tweets. Emails. Copywriting. Blogs. Articles.

All of these require great writing. Most communications-style writing is persuasive and succinct. Because we think things through more carefully, observe our world and love to work through complexity, we are able to synthesize detailed or dull information into a compelling messages for our audience.

[RELATED: How to eliminate corporate jargon and drive business performance with improved communications techniques.]

5. We prioritize our socializing

I expel significant energy socializing and I need to recharge afterward. So I carefully select the events and meetups I’ll attend, which helps me better manage my energy and my time. This makes me a more efficient networker. It might take me a moment to think about what I’m going to say and to whom, but I’ll be sure to speak to the right person in the room. Teaching yourself how to use this to your advantage can make you a superstar in your community.

Hire an introvert

I don’t need to be the loudest person in my office to succeed as a publicist. I need to listen to what my audience is saying, write persuasively without errors and consider risk before I take action. I’ll see problems before they arise and I will manage them—and my time—effectively. Maybe your next hire should be an introvert.

To hear more about Cain’s research, including her arguments about why creativity and productivity will be squandered if we don’t tap into the power of the introvert, you can find her book online, and check out her TedTalk here.

Nicole is a communications manager with a FinTech in Toronto called RateHub.ca.

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Infographic: How to write an internal communication strategy

Internal communicators, do you often feel like an order taker at a fast-food restaurant?

See if this sounds familiar: As you walk into the office one morning, your CEO meets you on the way to your desk and directs you to send an email about his latest initiative.

When you open your inbox, you see a message from the finance department entreating you to post an article on the intranet reminding employees about the new way to file expense reports.

After lunch, an executive says he wants you to make a brochure about his new, big idea.

By the end of the day, you realize you haven’t even begun tackling your to-do list because you’ve spent the past eight hours taking orders from everyone else.

It’s time to stop being an order taker. It’s time to create—and stick to—an internal communication strategy.

[WHITE PAPER: Today’s internal communications challenges and how to remedy them.]

This infographic from All Things IC can help you create one. The infographic lists what your strategy should address and include, as well as how long it should be, who should write it and more.

Take a look:

(View a larger image.)



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Merriam-Webster declares ‘hot dog’ a sandwich; Twitter users bite back

What began as a harmless ode to some common Memorial Day cuisine quickly turned into an array of angry and confused tweets aimed at Merriam-Webster’s social media team.

Here’s how brand managers wished their Twitter followers a happy holiday:

Have a great #MemorialDayWeekend. The hot dog is a sandwich. https://t.co/KeNiTAxPAm

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) May 27, 2016

Merriam-Webster defines “sandwich” as:

1. Two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between.
2. One slice of bread covered with food.

Here’s how its editors define “hot dog”:

frankfurter; especially: a frankfurter heated and served in a long split roll.

The word hot dog refers either to the sausage that you buy squeezed in a plastic package with 7 or so of its kind, or to the same sausage heated and served in a long split roll.

When it’s served in the roll, it’s also a sandwich.

Pretty close, right? For some, maybe not.

Many people who follow Merriam-Webster for the latest word-related news made their stance on the encased meat definition abundantly clear: A hot dog is not a sandwich.

Twitter users aired their grievances where the debate began—on Merriam-Webster’s profile. Some went as far as to say they no longer trust the dictionary as a resource, or that Merriam-Webster was ruining Memorial Day:

GODDAMNIT @MERRIAMWEBSTER WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? HOT DOGS ARE NOT SANDWICHES. https://t.co/o3rTBvLFn9

— Andrew Husband (@AndrewHusband) May 27, 2016

*Throws out Merriam Webster and buys Oxford* RT @MerriamWebster Have a great #MemorialDayWeekend. The hot dog is a sandwich.

— G (@garrettp63) May 27, 2016

Yes, I will tell Merriam-Webster they are wrong. A hot dog is just the piece of meat & thus cannot be a sandwich. https://t.co/IPrs5eocGn

— Kanye East (@Danmaynard81) May 27, 2016

Authority: (rhetorically) is a hot dog not a sandwich?
Me: (bravely) a hot dog is NOT a sandwich! I will not give in!

— Hermit Thrush (@Hermit_Thrush) May 20, 2016

Others relished in taking Merriam-Webster’s side:

C'mon. Everyone knows that a hot dog is a sandwich.

— Kane (@Kaneshow) May 31, 2016

Spotted in Cuzco, Peru by @timcarroll66….so a hot dog is definitely a sandwich in Peru? http://pic.twitter.com/jup3gSP83c

— TOM Talks (@TOMTalksPod) May 19, 2016

The hot dog is a sandwich. Debate over. https://t.co/Y2Nh3RoEyN via @mashable

— Greg Wyshynski (@wyshynski) May 29, 2016

I can at least comprehend this logic. Just as long as Webster doesn’t advocate ketchup as permissible hot dog topper https://t.co/kiqAwAwg5R

— Chris Harris (@ChrisHarrisWSMV) May 27, 2016

Social media managers for a well-known Chicago eatery also served up their reaction:

Great…Now we can’t even trust the dictionary 🌭🙃 #hotdogisnotasandwich https://t.co/fAKYGLd8cr

— Superdawg Chicago (@Superdawg) May 31, 2016

Dictionary editors seemed to know that their, um, frank assessment would have users boiling over with confusion, and they addressed the imminent controversy in the article “10 kinds of sandwiches”:

We know: the idea that a hot dog is a sandwich is heresy to some of you. But given that the definition of sandwich is “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between,” there is no sensible way around it. If you want a meatball sandwich on a split roll to be a kind of sandwich, then you have to accept that a hot dog is also a kind of sandwich.

[EXECUTIVE COMMUNICATORS: Join our new LinkedIn group and get FREE tips and strategies to improve leadership communications.]

Whether you like your hot dogs grilled, boiled, broiled or charred, Merriam-Webster says to call it a sandwich.

What do you think,  Ragan readers? Should Merriam-Webster have bitten its tongue on this one? Also, where do you side on this culinary controversy?

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10 essentials for a memorable presentation

It’s easy enough to offer a list of don'ts for public speakers—I’ve posted my own peeves—but here I’m giving hints on how to improve your game with a positive focus.

1. Start crisply, use your time well, and end just a bit early. Good time management is an essential skill of the public speaker. Far too many don’t use the time well, especially running over at the end. Rehearse to find out how long you’ll go. Never, ever run long. Also, start well; don’t waffle at the beginning.

2. Find a positive message and a hero, even if you’re criticizing aspects of your field. It’s the duty of every public speaker to find something right with the world, your view of it, or at least some hero who has exemplified the positive attributes you’re extolling. Otherwise, save your doom and gloom for the bar. The public speech needs positive visions of the way the world could be, even if you don’t believe it is that way right now.

3. Have a clear attitude or viewpoint. A good speech is an assertion, not a report. It’s not a time to be fair to all competing points of view; it’s a time to put yours forward. If you talk about other positions, represent them fairly, but don’t duck your responsibility to have thought through the current points of contention in your area of expertise and to have taken a position on them. Besides, attitude is fun.

[RELATED: Executive communicators, join our new LinkedIn group and get free tips and strategies to improve leadership communications.]

4. Find one main point for your speech, and make sure everything supports that point. If it doesn’t, throw it out. A speech is an overwhelming and confusing informational exercise for the audience. Make it as easy as possible by keeping on point.

5. Don’t save your best point or story for last. Rather, begin with it. I’ve undertaken the exercise many times with my clients: We’ll take the big finishing story that is their pride and joy, and we’ll challenge ourselves to start with it. We ask, what comes next? How could we possibly top this? Surprisingly, we often come up with something that greatly improves the speech.

6. Don’t be afraid to risk your relationship with your audience by delivering difficult truths. Most speakers want their audiences to love them-naturally enough. You’re risking a good deal by standing in front of an audience; at least, it often feels that way. True change and authenticity require moving your audience with the truth about what’s going on-not just what you think the audience wants to hear. The latter is pandering, and it wastes everyone’s time.

7. Have an ideal audience member in mind. Just as you should stick to one main point-with supporting stories, information, facts, anecdotes and so on-you should also prepare your speech with one perfect attendee in mind. That way, your speech will focus on what it should: helping a real person think in a new way about something that matters. The only reason to give a speech is to change the world, and you change the world one listener at a time.

8. Don’t keep secrets from the audience. Ever since Steve Jobs and Oprah made fetishes—and successes—out of saving a surprise for the end, speakers have tried to imitate them. Everyone gets a car! Well, it has been done, and by two masters, so don’t end up making a lesser attempt. Instead, give the important surprises away as early as possible, and figure out what should happen next.

9. Use only one set of numbers. Too many speakers offer 10 rules of thumb for a given topic, and by the way, under Rule No. 2, there are six ways to improve your handicap, or whatever it is. The audience mind can only handle one set of numbers, lists or rules per talk. As soon as you launch into the first subset, you’ll begin to lose your listeners. Don’t do it.

10. Make your audience interaction real. I’ll forgive a certain amount of “By raise of hands, how many of you have two hands?” Maybe one-or none. Why don’t I like it? Because it’s treating your audience like children, reducing them to either/or voting ciphers. Instead, do the more rewarding work of asking open-ended questions and involving the audience in creating paths forward from your speech. If you’re going to change the world, you have to begin by trusting the people in front of you enough to make them part of the process.

A version of this article first appeared on Public Words.

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Cincinnati Zoo under criticism for killing endangered gorilla

A holiday weekend admiring animals at the zoo quickly turned into a PR crisis.

The Cincinnati Zoo is getting severe criticism for shooting one of its nine western lowland gorillas on Saturday after a 4-year-old boy fell into the animals’ habitat.

Videos of the incident abound online, with the following amassing more than 10 million views on YouTube:

Though the female gorillas in the habitat heeded keepers’ calls, its 17-year-old, 450-pound male gorilla, Harambe, would not leave the child. The zoo’s staff ushered visitors away from the enclosure before killing the animal.

The boy—who crawled over 3-foot-high steel bars, bushes and wire fencing before falling roughly 15 feet into a moat in the primates’ habitat—was released from the hospital on Saturday night.

Visitors and social media users were quick to call foul, taking to Twitter and flooding the zoo’s Facebook page with angry comments and criticism—as seen in the responses below:

The New York Times explained:

It seemed like quick thinking when the Cincinnati Zoo shot to death a gorilla that was manhandling a small boy who had fallen into its enclosure on Saturday afternoon.

But soon supporters of animal rights were organizing a vigil outside the zoo in remembrance of the gorilla, named Harambe, a male weighing more than 420 pounds. Online petitions circulated blaming the mother of the child for negligence. By Monday the chorus of outrage had reached such an intense pitch that the zoo held a news conference to defend itself.

The petitions demand justice for the primate by holding the boy’s parents responsible and enacting a law to punish zoo visitors to negligence leading to an animal’s death. One petition has more than 306,000 supporters at time of publishing.

The petitions—along with further outrage—are being shared through Facebook and Twitter under the hashtag #JusticeforHarambe. Along with criticism from visitors and social media users, animal rights groups and conservationists are doling out blame as well.

RELATED: Keep your cool during a crisis with these tips.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said the incident highlighted why the organization is opposed to zoo captivity, and blamed the zoo for the animal’s death. “The gorilla enclosure should have been surrounded by a secondary barrier between the humans and the animals to prevent exactly this type of incident,” the group’s statement said. “This tragedy is exactly why PETA urges families to stay away from any facility that displays animals as sideshows for humans to gawk at.”

Others, such as conservationist and TV host Jeff Corwin, blame the parents. In an interview with Fox 25, Corwin said, “Zoos aren’t your babysitters.”

Shortly after the incident, the zoo issued a press release, which read in part:

“The Zoo security team’s quick response saved the child’s life. We are all devastated that this tragic accident resulted in the death of a critically-endangered gorilla,” said Zoo Director Thane Maynard. “This is a huge loss for the Zoo family and the gorilla population worldwide.”

The zoo posted its press release on its Facebook page. On Sunday, it shared the following post:

In the post, Maynard said tranquilizing the gorilla was not an option:

“We are heartbroken about losing Harambe, but a child’s life was in danger and a quick decision had to be made by our Dangerous Animal Response Team,” said Zoo Director Thane Maynard. “Our first response was to call the gorillas out of the exhibit. The two females complied, but Harambe did not. It is important to note that with the child still in the exhibit, tranquilizing the 450-pound gorilla was not an option. Tranquilizers do not take effect for several minutes and the child was in imminent danger. On top of that, the impact from the dart could agitate the animal and cause the situation to get much worse.”

The zoo also highlighted that its dangerous-animal response team—which includes zookeepers, veterinarians, security staff and leaders of the organization—is certified every year by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office.

Though he did not bring up the criticism the organization is facing, Maynard said the zoo is “going through a painful time” and that its staff is “touched by the outpouring of support from the community and our members who loved Harambe.”

The director also said the incident is the first security breach in the zoo’s “Gorilla World” exhibit, which has been open since 1978:

“The safety of our visitors and our animals is our #1 priority,” said Maynard. “The barrier that we have in place has been effective for 38 years. Nevertheless, we will study this incident as we work toward continuous improvement for the safety of our visitors and animals.”

On Monday, Maynard held a press conference and told reporters that the people questioning the decision “don’t understand silverback gorillas.” He said he stands by the zoo’s decision:

We did not take the shooting of Harambe lightly, but that child’s life was in danger. People who question that don’t understand you can’t take a risk with a silverback gorilla—this is a dangerous animal. Looking back, we’d make the same decision. The child is safe.

Western lowland gorillas are a critically endangered species; there are fewer than 175,000 in the wild and roughly 765 in zoos around the world.

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4 qualities of expert communicators

Corporate communicators at the top of their game may be hard to identify at a glance.

They might drink coffee in excess or possess a dog-eared, Post-It-filled copy of the AP Stylebook, but they ultimately blend in naturally with society. Only by working with an expert communicator can you determine their true nature.

Here are four surefire ways to tell when you are in the presence of phenomenal corporate communicators:

1. They know what to look for, and then they dig deeper. A rave review on Yelp is not a story, but it could be the tip of a valuable iceberg. A truly seasoned communicator knows which key questions to ask: What circumstances made the customer write the review? Do we have a star employee or a completely unheard-of process hidden within our organization?

2. They consider multiple points of view. Whose perspective makes a story sing? It’s probably not the CEO’s. A seasoned communicator considers those closest to the story—the nurses, salespeople, receptionists or engineers—and then interviews them.

3. They write, rewrite and repeat. “ Moby-Dick"wasn’t written in one go.Rewriting a storyfrom scratch provides fresh breakthroughs and new angles, until the communicator arrives at the most effective story possible.

4. They know how to take criticism. Nearly every communicator is subject to review by executives, legal counsel or other stakeholders.Though a novice might be reluctant to let go of an eloquent passage or clever turn of phrase, doing so is simply the nature of the job, and the end product will be stronger for it.

Want to hone your corporate communications skills? Veteran communicators Mark Ragan and Jim Ylisela will be touring the country, working with small groups in a workshop setting to address common writing challenges, from finding good stories to getting readers’ attention to matching words with images.

This workshop is designed to produce practical storytelling and writing solutions from which participants can benefit immediately. We encourage communicators of all levels of experience to attend.

Find a destination for our Advanced Writing and Editing Workshop in your area.

This event is usually held within a day of our Brand Journalism for Corporate Communicators workshop. We welcome all those who dare to attend both!

Follow this event at the hashtag #RaganAWE.

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There are now nearly 5 PR pros for every reporter

As I’ve spent the last several months looking for a full-time journalism job, I keep noticing something depressing.

When you search job sites for “journalism,” “reporter” or other similar keywords, what you’ll find is a whole bunch of roles that have nothing to do directly with producing the news.

For every one job result for a reporter, photojournalist or TV producer, you’ll get 10 results for jobs available to people with journalism backgrounds or degrees to switch careers toward marketing, advertising and, most of all, public relations.

I dug into the numbers and found a media landscape that has seen a huge rise in pitchmen and a big drop in news reporters, at a rate that surprised even a jaded newspaper reporter such as I.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, here is how the total American job numbers looked 15 years ago, and today:

2000: 65,900 news reporters, and 128,600 public relations people

2015: 45,800 news reporters, and 218,000 public relations people

So 15 years ago, there were about two PR people for every reporter in the country. Now there are 4.8 public relations pros for every reporter.

This is a huge change, as companies and organizations are seeking to bypass a shrinking new media industry and tell their own stories. This means people are getting less objective news and more biased content.

When I tweeted those stats recently, a lot of reporters chimed in, including former Baltimore Sun staffer and creator of the HBO series “The Wire,” David Simon.

“This is how a republic dies. Not with a bang, but a reprinted press release,” Simon tweeted with a link to the stats.

Many other reporters lamented the stats as an explanation for why their inbox is full of endless pitches for things that aren’t newsworthy. Or they bemoaned that a good number of the new PR people are ex-reporters. Those in public relations were quick to point out how much of the “media relations” portion of their job has shrunk recently.

As you would imagine, newspapers have been hit hardest.

The American Society of News Editors found that the number of U.S. newspapers staffers has dropped 40 percent in just eight years, from 55,000 journalists in 2007 to 32,900 in 2015. Because newspapers are typically the starting point for original coverage that gets picked up by other media outlets, the drop in newspaper reporters means the amount of real news out there has taken a wallop.

It’s not just the availability of jobs; the PR industry has won the battle for compensating people, too.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2000 the average journalist made $37,510 and PR people made $43,700.

Now, journalists make $50,970 and PR people earn $65,830.

When you exclude broadcast news analysts from that total, pay for just news reporters (a job that typically requires a college degree) now falls slightly below the average for all American workers.

[FREE DOWNLOAD: 11 Essentials for a Stellar Online Newsroom]

Overall, the pay gap between flacks and hacks has nearly tripled from about $6,200 to nearly $15,000 in just 15 years. That means over a career of 20 years, the average PR person will make about $300,000 more than the typical reporter, and as anyone in either industry knows, the benefits will be much more lucrative at a public relations firm.

To recap: On one side, you have an industry shrinking rapidly, with little job security and pay going down relative to inflation. On the other is a booming field valued by companies big and small, with salaries rising.

So my experience looking for a full-time reporter job and seeing only PR gigs is fairly typical today. One of the scariest responses I’ve received to these stats is from two separate professors, who tweeted to me that not one student in either of their most recent journalism classes was actually looking to get into journalism.

It’s tough to blame them.

Mike Rosenberg is a former San Jose Mercury News reporter working as a freelance reporter in Seattle. Follow him on Twitter at @RosenbergMerc. A version of this article first appeared on Muck Rack, a service that enables you to find journalists to pitch, build media lists, get press alerts and create coverage reports with social media data.

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3 LinkedIn directives your company handbook should include

Are LinkedIn guidelines provided in your employee handbook?

A company handbook is an important and effective communication tool between an employer and employees, and it sets forth the company’s expectations.

Even though its content might vary from business to business, it often includes a welcome/mission statement, company overview, policies and procedures, holidays, dress code, benefits, legal obligations as an employer and employees’ rights.

More recently, social media policies have become part of employee handbooks, detailing acceptable and unacceptable work behavior or Internet use. Unfortunately, the social media policies too often contain a long list of things that employees should avoid doing and don’t provide clear direction on how employees should represent themselves or the brand online.

The professional network

Nowadays, what’s one of the first things people do when they start a new job? They update their LinkedIn profile. If we give five new employees an employee handbook with no clear direction on how to approach updating LinkedIn, we could end up with five different company name variations, five different company descriptions and roles that are in paragraph form, when the employer actually prefers them in bullet point form.

[ATTEND FROM YOUR DESK: Learn social media “next practices” from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.]

According to an employee activism global online report conducted by Weber Shandwick and KRC Research, employers are not effectively communicating to employees. The research revealed that only four in 10 employees can confidently describe to others what their employer does.

That’s an issue. So, why not provide recommendations in the handbook? Sure, we can’t tell employees what to do on their profiles, but we can definitely make suggestions to encourage consistency.

What to emphasize

Here are a few LinkedIn recommendations that should be added to an employee handbook under the social media policy section:

• Headline. Among the most prominent parts of a LinkedIn profile, headlines show up in LinkedIn’s newsfeed and in search. Simple missteps often occur: We’ve seen @ symbols instead of at, the wrong variation of a company name, and even phone numbers (which I despise and which go against LinkedIn’s User Agreement under the LinkedIn “DOs” and “DON'Ts” section). As a best practice, “Title at Company Name” works just fine for a headline.
• Company name. You’d be surprised how many variations of a company name are on LinkedIn. Let’s take Starbucks, for instance. Some Starbucks employees on LinkedIn refer to the company as Starbucks, Inc., while others refer to it as The Starbucks Company, Starbucks and The Starbucks Coffee Company. Which is correct? No one knows. Also recommend that the company name under the Experience section links to the correct company page.
• Role and company description. Under the Experience section of a LinkedIn profile, we recommend adding a summary of an employee’s role and an approved description of your company (think boilerplate).

Once the employee is properly onboarded, you can start empowering them to become brand ambassadors and share company content on social media.

A version of this article first appeared on Identity PR.

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Let's talk about you

Custom content is hard to pull off. It can be messy and time-consuming.

It’s like the guy in front of you at a busy deli who orders a Reuben sandwich, sliced diagonally with a green toothpick through each half and exactly three pickles; hold the sauerkraut.

The payoff, though, can be huge: a delicious sandwich or, better yet, a congratulatory phone call from the CEO.

Ragan’s custom workshops cater to corporate communications teams in need of individualized guidance. Mark Ragan and Jim Ylisela put their decades of experience to work by analyzing your content and leading an ultra-focused workshop on your turf.

That’s right, Mark and Jim come to your office to talk about your work and your goals.

The custom workshop themes revolve around your business needs, including but not limited to:

• Communications strategy development
• Crisis communications plan development
• Custom communications training
• Communication audits
• Crisis communications plan development
• Data visualization training
• Editorial coaching, training and consulting
• Executive communications strategy development
• Infographics development
• Intranet consulting
• Media training
• Storytelling with data training
• Web development and construction

These workshops involve intensive, hands-on analysis from Mark and Jim, who’ve coached more than 10,000 communicators over the past decade.

Here’s just a sample of what you can expect when Mark Ragan comes to town:

Develop a custom workshop for your whole team by emailing Keri Gavin at kerig@ragan.com.

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5 common PR rookie press release blunders

If you’re new to marketing your business and have heard that press releases are the bee’s knees, keep reading.

Newbies make several fatal mistakes that can cause you to wonder why anyone recommended publishing press releases in the first place. Not to worry; they’re all 100 percent remediable with the solutions I provide below:

1. Your headline isn’t interesting enough to get clicks.

For some reason, a lot of people think press release headlines should be stiff and robotic. Not so. People would rather get their teeth pulled without anesthetic than click on a snooze-worthy headline.

The cure: Ask yourself: Would I click on this headline? If not, why would anyone else?

2. You don’t have critical answers.

You have to answer five essential questions before publishing a press release. Knowing the who, what, when, where and why behind your press release can help you focus on writing it for your audience.

The cure: Be able to answer those questions for each and every press release you write.

Free download: 11 Essentials for a Stellar Online Newsroom

3. You have no goals.

Why are you writing a release? If you don’t have an answer, you’re wasting your time. Having goals will help you know how well you’re doing with each press release and pitch.

The cure: Decide what’s important to you. Number of reads? Clicks back to your site? Set objectives, and then measure results.

4. You don’t warm up before the pitch.

You think something significant is happening, so you look up journalists and immediately start pitching. Guess what kind of results you’re going to get. That’s right; not good ones. The PR pitch begins long before your news happens. Otherwise you look like someone who showed up to a party uninvited and started taking advantage of the free bar.

The cure: Identify the journalists who cover your industry and make contact with them now, not when you need them. Connect via social media. Comment on and share their articles. Once you’ve built a relationship with them, your pitch will be more successful.

5. You think, ‘the longer, the better.’

Another newbie gaffe is writing a tremendously long press release; nobody wants to read that. If journalists need additional information, they can ask you for it or visit your website.

The cure: Keep your press release to 300–400 words, including your boilerplate. Make your contact information prominent so people can easily find it to get more details.

Knowing these common mistakes may help you avoid them. If you do make them, use the cure to remedy the error.

A version of this article first appeared on Cision’s blog.

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Why internal communications should think like marketers

I served two years of my career in marketing, and l didn’t like it one bit.

I lived in a sea of numbers, managing a small profit-and-loss team. Nearly every week we presented multi-page PowerPoint slides on how we would increase revenue and what we were doing to mitigate losses.

What on earth was a former internal communicator doing here? I didn’t fit; I was Oscar in a room full of Felixes. Fortunately, I was blessed with a patient and supportive boss, who educated me on the marketing process and tried to get me to understand a balance sheet. He even helped me navigate my career path back into communications.

The gift of that challenging experience was the value of a marketing mindset in my communications world. Since then, I’ve often asked my fellow communicators how we’d operate differently if we reframed employee communication like this: We are no longer internal communicators. Instead, we are marketing experts asking our employee/consumer base for their support and discretionary effort.

What would we change?

Research employees’ thoughts, habits and affinities before we communicated. Would a marketing team ever launch a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign without talking to consumers first? Of course not, but how often do communicators send out information without conducting internal audits? In this new mindset, we’d pay attention to what employees say they want and what they couldn’t care less about. We also wouldn’t send any message without baseline research.

[WHITE PAPER: Today’s internal communications challenges and how to remedy them.]

Dig (and dig into) data. Recent studies show that more than 60 percent of internal communicators still are not measuring. That’s at once amazing and bewildering, considering how much there is to measure—and the volume of data sitting un-analyzed. Imagine all the information HR has about employees-and the good we could do if we accessed and analyzed it to customize messages and channels that would spark action. HR knows employees’ ages, years of service, location, who’s excelling, why people leave—and much more. HR also has reams of feedback through annual employee health surveys. What if we could combine our employee research with HR data and find intersections that help improve employees’ working lives?

Stop all mass emails. That goes for generic e-newsletters, too. Because we are data- and consumer-driven, we should customize our messages according to our employee audiences. Then, using market research tools such as A/B testing, we can determine what works, including which headlines garner more engagement, and run more of those. Why wouldn’t we?

Be more creative. If we’re thinking like marketers, we’ll be far more creative, because our employee audience demands it. If we’re doing our jobs the right way, we’re more storytellers than project managers. We don’t want to make employees yawn when we used terms like “leverage,” “paradigm” and “synergy.” Instead, we’ll engage them by identifying heroes in our organization and where the company is heading—all in plain terms.

Go from two-way to 360 . Most communicators seem to understand the need for two-way versus one-way communication, but a marketing mindset forces us to think in 360 degrees. We should examine every channel, surrounding employees with information when they want it, how they want it, where they want it.

Edelman’s Trust Barometer consistently says employees are among the most trusted and influential resources for speaking to consumers—more than the CEO, and more than the company spokesperson.

What do you think? Isn’t it time to embrace our employees as the most persuasive brand ambassadors they can be?

A version of this article first appeared on AndThenCommunications.

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Zappos embraces brand storytelling with #ImNotABox campaign

Zappos customers will soon have more reasons to be excited about receiving one of the company’s packages than just the shoes it contains—thanks to the #ImNotABox campaign.

Starting in June, the company will ship its shoes in limited edition boxes that feature template designs that customers can fashion into things, including a smartphone holder, shoe sizer, planter and standup llama.

[RELATED: Produce content that boosts lead generation, brand awareness and reputation.]

Kelly Smith of Zappos THINK said in a statement that each box “has a unique story and purpose”:

The Zappos box is our way of being there for our customers, wherever they are in life, as we provide them with the things they need and love. Every box has a unique story and purpose. Not only do we want customers to know we genuinely care about their needs, but we also hope to inspire people to become the best version of themselves and to see the world with a new perspective. We want people in the end to say, “I’m not a box.”

Zappos’ marketing team also released a short film titled “Box Home” to coincide with the campaign:

Brand managers should take note. It’s an interesting move toward brand storytelling—and a compelling piece of content marketing.

“By shifting the focus away from shoes and clothing, Zappos.com and Variable created the film to challenge viewers to not only ‘open up and look inside’ the Zappos.com box, but also themselves,” the company’s press release states.

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17 tips for a wildly successful PR career

PR veterans amass wisdom over the years if they pay attention to the lessons all around them.

For younger communicators and graduates embarking on a career in the PR industry, these insights can help you navigate the sometimes-bumpy road of media relations, campaigns and networking events.

Make sure your seatbelts are fastened and your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position. Prepare yourself for takeoff: Here are 17 chunks of wisdom I’ve learned over 30 years in the PR industry.

1. Make enough mistakes to succeed. If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not taking enough foolish risks. There is no shame in making mistakes if you learn from them.

Fortune reported that workers in the space shuttle program “not only learned more from failure than from success, but also retained the lessons longer.”

2. Don’t make the same mistakes twice. Are you making the same mistakes over and over? Feh, you’re a schlemiel (it’s Yiddish; look it up).

3. Learn from other people’s mistakes. Apply them to your own career. Bridge player Alfred Sheinwold said, “Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won’t have time to make them all yourself.”

4. Never lie. You know what lying feels like. Don’t lie to clients, co-workers, journalists or bloggers. Promise yourself that you will never, ever make stuff up.

Instead, become legendary for your integrity. It’ll set you apart from 80 percent of the people you meet in business.

5. Guard your reputation. Your resume is one of the least important documents in your career. Your LinkedIn profile is more important than that, but your reputation and character is paramount.

What will people you’ve worked with say about you, in private and in confidence? Nothing affects your career more. To establish that reputation, see No. 4.

6. Eliminate your ego. Recognize the narcissist in you and fight against it. Nothing is more career-corrosive than being someone out only for him or herself.

Generously share credit. Embrace humility and let graciousness flourish. What could be more attractive in our business than a humble PR genius?

7. Always help your co-worker or client during crises. Make it clear you have their back. If a client or co-worker is fired, be the first reassuring voice they hear and the first to take them out to coffee. Let them know that your network is their network.

[JUST ANNOUNCED: The Employee Communications, PR and Social Media Summit at Microsoft headquarters]

Marketing guru Don Peppers told clients if they ever lost their jobs, his agency would have an empty office with a phone waiting to support their search. You’d be shocked how many people won’t even return the calls of someone who just lost his or her job.

People never forget their guardian angels. Your wings are waiting.

8. Mourn with your colleagues. If a co-worker or client is grieving the loss of a family member, be there for that person. Few others will.

When in doubt, attend the funeral of a client or co-worker’s loved one. Author Harvey Mackay recalls standing outside the synagogue after the funeral of his father, imprinting the face of every person who cared enough to attend his father’s ceremony.

9. Avoid non-compete agreements. Never sign an employment contract that contains a non-compete clause.

10. Quickly return phone calls. Few communicators do this—but if you do, it’ll make an impression.

Former Minneapolis Star Tribune business writer Neal Gendler told me about trying to reach Edina Realty CEO Ron Peltier, only to be told that Peltier was in an airplane going to a business meeting. Minutes later, Gendler’s phone rang. Incredibly, it was Peltier. Gendler retells that story with reverence.

11. Read. If you’re not reading 100-200 pages a week (from blogs, books, newspapers and magazines) about developments in PR and marketing, you’re falling behind. Mashable, Social Media Today, Ragan Communications and the HubSpot blog are essential reading—along with Hemingway, Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, Bradbury and Norman Mailer.

12. Be happy for everyone. Find satisfaction in the success of competitors. Challenge yourself to rejoice in the triumphs of your archrivals. A big-time theatrical producer once joked, “It’s not enough that I succeed. My friends must fail.”

I think he was joking, though I hope he was. Become a cheering squad for your peers. It will unsettle your enemies and charm your competitors.

13. Realize the power of names. Try hard not to misspell people’s names. It’s one of the few minor transgressions that people never forgive and forget.

14. Say thanks. Master the exquisite art of the personalized “thank you”—individual expressions of gratitude (not a mere email) to anyone who helps you.

When I was young and foolish, I innocently neglected to thank a business executive who had been enormously helpful when I was networking, and he remembered that slight for years. Be young, but don’t be foolish.

15. Mind the details. The shine of your shoes, the firmness of your handshake, the steadiness of your eye contact, the crispness of your shirt or blouse—all the things that should not matter in business end up mattering enormously.

16. Be engaged and committed . Don’t let yourself become someone who takes orders. Train yourself to be proactive. Be an initiator. Go three steps farther than anyone expects. Be committed.

Lee Aase, director of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, recently underwent a live broadcast on Periscope of his own colonoscopy. That’s commitment!

17. Connect with people the right way. Networking is not mining business associates for client leads, your next job or other prizes. Networking is getting to know a human being so that you can learn how to help him or her.

Check out more career advice for PR pros in my latest SlideShare.

Paul Maccabee is president of Maccabee PR, a Minneapolis strategic PR and online marketing agency. A version of this article originally appeared on the MaccaPR blog.

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5 essential skills for communications entrepreneurs

Starting any business entails a few key challenges.

In turn, those challenges require essential abilities—sales and coding among them, as Jeff Kerr outlined in “Lessons from a Lawyer Who Started a Tech Company.”

Beyond those, there are basic skills every communications entrepreneur needs. Here are five:

1. Networking. This goes to sales, for sure. You can’t create word-of-mouth and referrals unless you network. That means going to industry events, having coffee dates with people who want to pick your brain, speaking at conferences, joining groups and associations and attending city events. You never know where business is going to come from—especially early on—so do as much as you can.

[RELATED: Earn recognition and accolades for your PR and internal communications efforts. Enter the Ragan Awards.]

2. Financials. Every communications entrepreneur I know will give you the same advice about starting a services firm: Learn as much as you can about the financial side of the business. Because most of us are liberal arts majors, we didn’t take business classes. Knowing how, exactly, to set up and manage a balance sheet—and what a potential lender or investor will look at there—is extremely important. So is knowing the difference between cost of goods sold and expenses, as well as understanding what your net margin is and what EBIDTA means to your organization.

3. Constant learning. It might be learning basic accounting, how to develop new business, computer coding, or perhaps a new skill that you can eventually sell to clients.

4. Estimates. Nearly every communications entrepreneur over-services clients. It’s easy to do. You want to do a good job. You want to show results, so what’s one more tactic to help get there? My good friend Darryl Salerno recommends that you look to see how much you’re over-servicing each client. If it’s 25 percent or more, you are working for free the entire last quarter of the year. Learn how to estimate your time appropriately, and require a new scope of work if a client wants additional services.

5. Negotiations. Things cost what they cost; there is no getting around it. Just like a widget or a meal or a cab ride, there is a baseline of costs. If a client wants A, B and C and they can afford only A and B, you can work with the smaller budget, but they cannot have C. If you give them C, you’ll never make up the work, and you’ll always be behind. This means you must learn how to negotiate so you can expand your business and make money, and so your client sees real value from the work you do. You can always add C and D and E in later, after your efforts do make them money.

What would you add?

A version of this article first appeared on Spin Sucks.

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30 jobs in the PR and marketing world

Marketing prowess and military skills are more similar than many might think.

To land communications positions, a CareerBuilder survey says, veterans should be more willing to highlight their service experience.

It’s essential that veterans “stress the strengths they picked up while serving,” Business News Daily reports. “The employers surveyed said the most important qualities members of the armed forces bring to organizations after leaving active duty are”:

• Disciplined approach to work

• Ability to work as [part of] a team

• Respect and integrity

• Ability to perform under pressure

• Leadership skills

• Problem-solving skills

• Ability to adapt quickly

• Attitude of perseverance

• Communication skills

• Strong technical skills

Do any of those abilities sound like they’d belong to a marketing professional? According to Business News Daily’s list of top-10 positions for veterans in 2016, the answer is yes.

Customer service was ranked the No. 1 niche for former military members to tap, followed by marketing at No. 8 and research and development at No. 9.

A CareerBuilder study found that one-third of veterans didn’t know which industries or fields would be relevant to their types of service. Instead of going after positions focused on communications or problem-solving abilities, veterans said they weren’t sure which jobs would complement their various skill sets.

CareerBuilder’s advice to veterans is that they shouldn’t be afraid to highlight their military service.

“Nearly half of employers said they pay more attention to the applications submitted by veterans,” the study states. “In addition, 69 percent said if given two equally qualified candidates — one veteran and one not — they are more likely to hire the veteran.”

RELATED: Leadership Communicators — Join our new LinkedIn group and get FREE tips and strategies on executive communications.

Professional services firm Deloitte made this year’s list of top 100 companies for vets and is looking for a Kansas City, Missouri-based digital marketing consultant .

Candidates for this role should have knowledge of marketing automation, customer data and customer engagement. You should also have at least four years of experience with marketing project implementation.

Not the job for you? See what else we have in this week’s professional pickings:

Digital marketing manager— Leslie Hindman Auctioneer (Illinois)

Public relations specialist— inSegment (Massachusetts)

Social media content writer— WGT Media (California)

Rolling Stone video editor— Werner Media (New York)

Web manager— Persyo Marketing (California)

Online copywriter— KLM (Netherlands)

Editor— The Wichita Eagle (Kansas)

Sales and marketing manager— LP Bronze Intl. (New York)

Senior account manager/vice president— Perry Communications Group (California)

Marketing representative— Diamond Resorts Intl. (Florida)

Social media manager— Social Vantage (Pennsylvania)

Home design writer/editor— Houzz (California)

Social media editor— Laundry Service (New York)

Public relations coordinator— Amain.com Performance Sports & Hobbies (California)

Senior digital and social media manager— American Marketing Association (Illinois)

Head of PR and social— New Look (United Kingdom)

Social media editor— Handmade Charlotte (Georgia)

Homepage editor— TheStreet (New York)

Social media and communications intern— Gonzaga College High School (Washington, D.C.)

Director of social media marketing— Tribune Publishing (California)

Copywriter— Blast Radius (Illinois)

Digital media coordinator— Jennings Social Media Marketing (Missouri)

Multimedia account executive— Free Press Media (Vermont)

Associate editor content marketing and social— Farmers Insurance (California)

Social media manager— WyzAnt (Illinois)

Integrated marketing coordinator— Taunton Press (New York)

Senior digital analyst— Pace Communications (North Carolina)

Marketing assistant— Simpson Housing (Colorado)

Senior marketing designer— SagaCity Media (Oregon)

PR manager— Fairchild Media (New York)

If you have a position you would like to see highlighted in this weekly jobs listing, please email me at clarel@ragan.com.

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Video team pays homage to Hitchcock, wins praise for creativity

Do you ever feel that your customer service team is a little too scripted—that they could stand a refresher course in listening to your customers?

Hey, I know—just send them a link to a 1,000-word entry in your employee onboarding instruction manual. Or shoot a video of one of your talking-head bigwigs mumbling for 12 minutes about your passion for customer care.

Then again, you might try what Home Instead Senior Care does: Make an entertaining internal video that your employees can watch in a minute before returning to work more mindful of the customer’s needs.

Home Instead’s communications videos have drawn raves from communicators. In a podcast last year, communicator Ron Shewchuk called Home Instead’s videos “the most creative and engaging internal video programing I’ve ever seen.”

Home Instead strives to make its videos fun while promoting its message, says Andrew Nelson, video creative manager at the company, a multinational network of franchises providing in-home care for the elderly.

“Our biggest challenge was to make corporate video that was interesting, was quick, was funny, was entertaining, but was able to get the point across,” Nelson says, “because so often corporate video—especially internal communications videos-can be kind of dull and not interesting and kind of long. Usually they’re just talking heads the whole time.”

[FREE DOWNLOAD: A communicator’s guide to crafting videos that captivate and engage employees]

Remodeling your approach.

Consider “The Remodel,” in which the company emphasizes the need for careful listening by staging a scene of a woman calling a contractor in the hope of getting her kitchen remodeled.

“You’ve come to the best place in town, lady,” the businessman tells her. “We do wonderful decks.”

“That’s nice, but I need a new kitchen,” she says, offering details on what she’s looking for.

“We can definitely remodel your basement,” the man says.

Eventually she hangs up on him. The video ends with the statement, “Remodel your approach to phone inquiries. Listen.”

The Home Instead team and its employee actors clearly are having fun, says Brian Malone, director of the Ragan Training video library for communicators.

“They are delivering the messages to their internal audience in a creative way instead of just a boring email, memo or some other correspondence,” Malone says. “They are doing what everyone should do when making these videos: Incorporate your own employees, not actors.

"This gets much more to the point of employees’ communicating to employees, and not top-down antiquated communication methods that either fall flat or disappear into the ether.”

An homage to Hitchcock

Last year Home Instead made a five-part movie for its annual convention, when awards are given out, and it chose a James Bond spy-thriller theme. A Russian-born employee gamely agreed to play the villain.

“It was a huge hit,” Nelson says.

This time around, director Alfred Hitchcock provided the inspiration. The video even included a crop-duster scene reminiscent of “North by Northwest.” A Hitchcock-like figure touts awards for franchise milestones.

Nelson started out with the communications department but now works under the marketing aegis. He is half of a full-time video team, working with video production specialist Kyle Benecke. They get support from communications, marketing and other departments’ employees, who participate as actors and in other capacities.

Video is growing rapidly in internal comms; it’s ideal if you’re not trying to get across too much information, Nelson says. You can always build a story or context around a specific message.

Consider a video called “Message in a Bottle,” which highlighted the cry for help that many feel when trying to care for an elderly parent. It ends with the words, “Don’t leave the message in the bottle. Every inquiry needs our help. … Web leads, too.”

Most productions are done with no additional budget, but the company has put resources into major videos. Home Instead sent Nelson to Germany, Switzerland and Finland to record a project on people involved to its global operations. The video was shown not only in Europe, but also to the company’s North American franchise owners and the home office.

Similar trials and triumphs

“What struck people was getting to actually see and hear that these folks in the international markets in these different countries were having the exact same challenges and victories that they were,” Nelson says. “Language and culture aside, they were in the same boat. It was really kind of a unifying thing for everybody to experience.”

One short video, a scenario at the garage of a less-than-helpful mechanic, urges people to be bold enough to seek out customers. “Ask for the business. (It’s OK),” the video concludes.

The company also produces a monthly show called “Huddle Highlights"—much like a variety show, but with sketches that imitate commercials. Though Nelson and Home Instead generously shared several videos with Ragan Communications, the suits wouldn’t let them show us everything. Here, though, is a highlight reel that gives you a glimpse of their range:

Home Instead Video Creative Showreel from Andrew Nelson on Vimeo.

‘The Talk’

It’s not all fun and games in the videos. One hit was a segment called "The Talk.” Filmed for the year-end meeting, the bosses ended up sharing it with caregivers at their convention. The video portrays a senior struggling to stay at home and shows how that can stress out the rest of the family.

“I don’t know what to do,” Nelson recalls a woman saying. “I don’t have the answers. I just want to be a daughter again.”

When Nelson first started out, some leaders were dubious about the need for creative videos.

One person asked him, “Can’t I just step in front of the camera with a TelePrompTer and talk about this stuff? Why do we need the bells and whistles on it?”

All that has changed as he has built trust over the years. Nowadays the bigwigs say to the video team, “OK, guys, what you want to do with this?”

@ByWorking

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The 30 most annoying office habits

Millions of offices all around the world. Tens of millions of workers in them. They all have one thing in common: the annoying colleague.

You know the one. Or if you don’t, you might be the one who’s always:

1. Talking loudly on the phone or using the speaker phone to the annoyance of everyone else.

2. Sharing too much information about personal things.

3. Asking for help with the same tech problems again and again, instead of taking the time to learn to do it properly.

4. Walking into meetings late, so that things have to be repeated.

5. Leaving messes in the break room or other common areas.

6. Leaving passive-aggressive signs or post-its around the office, instead of speaking to someone to resolve an issue.

7. Using the last of the coffee or tea and not fixing a new pot.

8. Hoarding office supplies.

9. Gossiping about everyone and everything.

10. Listening to loud music, or worse, singing and whistling along.

11. Peeking over the cubicle top to start a conversation.

12. Sending “funny” emails constantly to everyone in the office.

13. Acting as the self-appointed office police (when you are not the manager or boss).

14. Bringing, preparing, and eating incredibly stinky food in the office.

15. Changing the heat or air conditioning with no regard to anyone else’s comfort.

16. Doing personal business at work.

17. Leaving your phone notifications dinging and pinging all day long.

18. Stealing food from the community fridge.

19. Coming to work when you’re obviously contagious.

20. Taking care of personal hygiene at your desk.

21. Or not taking care of personal hygiene at all…

22. Wearing too much cologne or perfume, or spraying it at work.

23. Organizing pointless meetings.

24. Not taking responsibility for mistakes—or worse, blaming others.

25. Asking for donations for gifts, charities, or selling your kids’ school-fundraiser stuff. (Girl Scout cookies usually excepted.)

26. Asking inappropriately personal questions as your version of small talk.

27. Telling inappropriately personal stories about what you did last night or last weekend or in Las Vegas.

28. Bringing treats into the office when you know your co-workers are on a diet.

29. Eating the last of the treats.

30. Agreeing with the boss, no matter what, to look better.

[FREE DOWNLOAD: 10 Essentials for Creating an Intranet Employees Will Love]

Most of these boil down to being inconsiderate of others. You probably spend more time with your co-workers than anyone else in your life, so it pays to be thoughtful and kind.

What are your biggest workplace pet peeves? (Come on, we all have them.) Let us know in the comments below.

A version of this article originally appeared on LinkedIn.

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How to use corporate social responsibility to attract millennials

Good: Corporate social responsibility

Better: Corporate social responsibility that attracts millennial staff and customers

BEST: Corporate social responsibility that attracts millennials and wins awards for your organization

If your organization seriously wants to attract millennial customers and staff, you already know that 80 percent of adults aged 20-28 are more likely to buy from a brand that supports a cause, and that 75 percent would work for a brand that supports a cause they care about.

How do millennials find out about your charitable ways?

They read about you—online. And that’s where you’ll be if you’re a finalist in Ragan’s CSR Awards.

Flaunt your good deeds by entering the Corporate Social Responsibility Awards. Eighteen categories mean 18 ways for businesses of all stripes to show their dedication to community.

The early-bird deadline is Friday, June 17. The final deadline is Friday, July 1.

View all categories and enter now.

You’ll earn the ability to transform your benevolence into a way to lure millennial customers and engaged, young, energetic staff. See how a few winners shared their accolades on social media:








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5 ways internal comms can elevate your organization

OhioHealth is consistently ranked among the top 100 places to work, and it scores in the 97^th percentile in physician satisfaction.

To win that level of loyalty, internal communications must step up its game. This begins with ensuring that your communications advance your organization’s business and HR strategies, says Aaron Gillingham, vice president of human resources at OhioHealth.

In the Ragan Training video “Winning the hearts, hands and minds of employees to inspire their personal best,” Gillingham explains how to boost your organization into the ranks of top workplaces.

OhioHealth is family of not-for-profit, faith-based central Ohio hospitals and health care organizations. Recent acquisitions boosted the number of employees from 17,000 employees to 28,000.

Here are a few tips for keeping cohesion among the ranks in a large organization during times of change:

1. Align your strategic plans with your culture.

Your organization’s overarching mission must be supported by its culture and values, Gillingham says.

“If there’s a misalignment between the strategies and the values, it’s not going to work,” he says. “It’s going to fall flat.”

OhioHealth created a scorecard emphasizing its values of quality, service, culture and finance. Usually the finance part is more heavily weighted, he says, but the hospital group values them all equally.

2. Seek out internal allies—and help them reach out.

Court potential allies in human resources, finance, IT and other departments, Gillingham says. Then—particularly if you have new acquisitions—help them reach out to their new colleagues.

“These allies serve an important role in the organization,” he says. “We line them up with their counterparts in those new organizations, and we found that it’s a really good best practice to have as we integrate those new organizations into our culture.”

[FREE DOWNLOAD: 10 Essentials for Creating an Intranet Employees Will Love]

3. Use learning maps to acclimate newcomers.

Learning maps? Yawn. Lots of companies use those to teach how to navigate the company, school new hires in which department does what, or help point the way to newbies.

What fewer do, however, is dedicate learning maps to conveying the essential spirit of the organization, Gillingham says.

“We use these learning maps for one purpose: to make sure folks understand the culture of the organization,” he says.

4. Equip leaders to lead.

Support your leaders as culture ambassadors. OhioHealth holds a thrice-yearly leadership briefing that gathers more than 1,000 top leaders to inspire, engage, motivate and educate them.

“We do have a significant time for people just to network,” Gillingham says. “We see that as really important.”

The planning committee includes marketing and communications, HR and service excellence departments; the agendas are robust. The organization reaches outside its ranks for inspiration, he adds.

One session was called “OhioHealth Leadership Briefing Menu Food for Thought,” and speakers from the restaurant industry were invited. One shared his motto, “Yes is the answer. What is the question?” The agenda, by the way, was designed to look like a restaurant menu.

These meetings reinforce the need for understanding change and staying connected to customers and innovation. They seek to “rally leaders around the notion that we need to think differently in this new world,” Gillingham says.

5. Provide resources for your leaders.

The leadership briefing is intended to inspire and educate the bosses. Yet if they return to their workstations without a clear sense of what to do next, the time will have been wasted.

OhioHealth equips them with presentations, talking points, videos, handouts and other tools to help local facility leaders share important information with their teams, Gillingham says.

“Their job is to go back to their individual groups and teams and present to them exactly what they heard coming out of that particular meeting,” he adds.

@byworking

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3 essential online monitoring tactics for informed brand building

The real estate market is hot in Singapore right now, and competition abounds for a firm seeking to connect expatriates and others with the right short- or long-term rental property.

So, it’s essential that Michał Nowak, owner of RentInSingapore.com.sg, stay apprised of changes in the marketplace.

“The real estate there is trending so hot,” Nowak says, “so I’m monitoring the whole real estate industry and my competitors to see what’s going on in the market.”

Nowak isn’t alone. The world of online media monitoring is developing fast, and those who run PR and marketing campaigns know that many monitoring tools are available.

Each tool offers something different. Yet many businesses put all their eggs in one basket, missing precious information about their brand, competition and industry.

Here are three strategies to implement in order to get the full picture of how a brand is doing online:

1. Monitor media alerts.

In business, the ability to react swiftly to the latest industry developments and trends can make the difference between signing a fat contract and watching your business go under. So, the first aspect of media monitoring to consider is timing.

If you always keep your finger on your brand’s pulse, you can react immediately to any opportunity or crisis.

In Nowak’s business, there is a lot of consolidation, and he is interested in seeing which companies are being bought. Through monitoring, he learned that a competitor had been scooped up by another company, changing the lay of the land in the Malaysia real estate market.

Free download: 11 Essentials for a Stellar Online Newsroom

“I’m focusing on keywords that I’m interested in and keywords for the competition and keywords for certain terms in real estate,” Nowak says.

2. Estimate the impact.

After tracking the articles in which a brand is mentioned, you should extract three important pieces of information:

· Where was your brand mentioned?

· What does it say about your brand?

· What is the content’s impact on the audience?

Though the first two are easy to get (simply by reading the article), many firms miss the third and most important aspect.

It is incredibly important to monitor the impact of press releases, says Aleksandra Andreasik, PR manager with RTB House, which runs digital ad campaigns for clients such as Microsoft, Trivago and Toys R Us. (Like Nowak’s firm, RTB House uses Boost the News.)

“When you distribute a press release or publish an expert article,” Andreasik says, “it’s good to know how editors react to what you distributed or how many people actually read it.”

The company recently distributed a press release in Poland and abroad citing its analysis about what makes the perfect banner ad. RTB House analyzed hundreds of advertising campaigns for clients in 33 markets—including the Czech Republic, Greece, Poland, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine—to see which elements best elevate campaign performance.

Real-time monitoring helps RTB House plan further PR activities, promote articles or boost visibility if it sees that a particular press release isn’t attracting as many people as the firm was hoping for.

How does it help you to know that your brand was mentioned in an article, if you don’t know how many people that article reached?

“You can see that you are mentioned, but one article is not comparable with the other one,” Nowak says, “because the one has coverage of 1 million reach, and the other has coverage of 1,000.”

3. Monitor social media.

It’s also important to know how online content performs on social media. There are many tools that reveal how many people are sharing an article, who they are and what are they saying about a brand.

This is important, because it’s the most sincere kind of feedback you could ask for. By monitoring social media, you can get the picture of what people are saying about your brand and join the conversation to find out more about what people are expecting from you.

Major brands such as Coca-Cola use such mentions to determine customer sentiment, Nowak adds. “Or they can find negative PR, and then respond to it,” he says. “It would be helpful in specific industries like banking, finance, where it’s really important not to have one customer unhappy, because he will just make things really difficult on social media.”

Using intelligence gained through his monitoring tools, Nowak sometimes engages with people inquiring about his company. “They’re asking other people if they can use this website, and is it free, and if it’s safe to use to website, and how do go about I log in,” he says.

He then describes what the website does and reassures the potential customer about security.

Smart organizations should use all three popular media-monitoring strategies. Each monitoring tool has its strong and weak points, and the best approach is to combine them. Choose a set of monitoring tools to cover all three strategies; that should provide a full picture of the brand’s performance online.

This article was written in partnership with Boost the News —a media monitoring tool that allows users not only to monitor news about chosen topics, but also to estimate the traffic of selected articles, and to promote articles that are important to them.

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Infographic: How millennials use LinkedIn

There are 87 million millennials on LinkedIn, making up 38 percent of the social network’s user base, a recent study from LinkedIn revealed.

The folks at LinkedIn researched how members of Generation Y use the platform, as well as what they want from a job and how much economic influence they have. You can check out the results in this infographic.

Many of the findings are relevant to content marketers. Consider these:

• Millennials represent 30 percent of all long-form publishers on LinkedIn.

• More than 2 million millennials hold marketing positions.

• The content topics millennials engage with most on LinkedIn include recruiting, social media marketing, employee engagement and self-esteem.

• Three factors millennials look for in a job are advancement opportunities (67 percent), higher pay (60 percent) and challenging work (51 percent).

[WHITE PAPER: How to communicate with a millennial workforce]

Millennials, weigh in. How do you use LinkedIn?

Check out the full infographic for more:

(View a larger image.)



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WhatsApp stakes claim as leader in mobile messaging

Brand managers have begun using messaging apps in their marketing efforts worldwide. 

To increase efficiency and strengthen relationships with customers, many customer service reps are digging deeper into certain messaging platforms. As opposed to email, applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger give brand managers the opportunity to interact with customers in a way that feels relatable and casual.

These platforms—and others on social media—have become the preferred method for customers in need of a quick reply.

What the numbers show

Similar Web analyzed the most popular messaging apps across the world, based on reach (percentage of installs) and daily use. In almost every country, messaging apps had the highest percentage of daily use.

Here’s more of Similar Web’s analysis:

Of the 187 countries examined, WhatsApp was the world leader [of messaging apps], claiming 109 countries. WhatsApp territories include Brazil, India, Mexico, UK, Russia, and many other countries in South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Facebook’s Messenger app came in second overall, claiming 49 countries including Australia, Canada, and the U.S. In the U.S, Messenger is installed on 60 percent of all Android devices compared to WhatsApp’s 21 percent. U.S. WhatsApp users have an average daily use of 29 minutes, compared with the roughly 10 minutes for Messenger users.

What marketers can gain

Bernhard Hauser, co-founder of customer service outfit Orat.io, says WhatsApp is important because it attracts a lot of people.

[FREE DOWNLOAD: Not all staff sit at a desk all day. Here are 10 ways to reach them.]

“It’s where your users are right now,” he writes in a blog post. “It’s true that email will remain an essential form of communication between customers and businesses, but messengers are opening up new possibilities for real-time interaction through text messages, photos, videos, locations and much more.”

Here’s additional insight from his post:

o WhatsApp is fast and personal. A message through WhatsApp is more important [to a customer] than [just] any other email.

o [It] is mobile first. [It lets you] reach customers wherever they are.

o [The app] is already [being] used by your customers. It’s is the largest messenger worldwide with more than one billion active users every month. Almost 60 percent of all users use the messaging app more than once per day.

If you’re looking to expand your organization’s digital relationships, here’s how messaging apps can help:

· Provide Individual customer assistance in real time

· Assist with online ordering and concierge services

· Solicit customer feedback

· Improve team communication and coordination

Long live the BlackBerry

Former BlackBerry users: Do you remember the early messaging app BBM? Surprisingly, data show that it’s still being used—by a tremendous amount of people—in Indonesia.

As of April 2016, BBM was installed on nearly 88 percent of all Android devices there—far surpassing any other country’s BBM use.

“When comparing the install rate of BBM to other countries, it becomes clear just how large the divide is,” Similar Web’s analysis states. “In the U.S., only 0.42 percent of Androids had the BBM app, with Australia and The U.K. showing slightly higher use.”

What messaging apps do you use, Ragan readers?

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