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In this blog, we explore what it takes to engage, inspire and connect whether you are building a personal or organizational brand.
Join us in this ongoing conversation about creating effective leadership communications with strategies and tactics that foster understanding and motivate people to act.
Join us in this ongoing conversation about creating effective leadership communications with strategies and tactics that foster understanding and motivate people to act.
Your Public Relations Firm Relationship: Is It a Marriage Made in Heaven?
Outside public relations support can be an invaluable tool – whether you’re working on a single project or in a long-term engagement to provide perspective, expertise, and communications support. But if you’re spending wads of money and feel as though your relationship with your PR firm is spiraling toward the drain, it’s time to reexamine the basics.
Change Management: Post Sale to Jeff Bezos
In the movie Avalon, the father character Sam Krichinsky, remarks wistfully, "If I knew things would no longer be, I would have tried to remember better." I'm sort of feeling as Sam did today when I learned about the sale of The Washington Post to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. We mourn for what was while moving forward to the future.
Spokesperson Training: 5 Tips for Staying on Message
Poet Robert Burns tells us that “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Well, the same holds true for spokespeople and their messages. One of the goals of spokesperson training is to help people with message discipline. Even after careful thought and planning, spokespeople and presenters often stray from their message, tripped up a by a hostile question or something else unexpected.
Spokesperson Training 101: Never Lose Your Cool
It's not been a great week for the Anthony Weiner campaign. Aside from the candidate's own missteps, his communications director and spokesperson, Barbara Morgan, made her own mess. Speaking to a reporter from a political website, Talking Points Memo, Morgan lambasted former intern Olivia Nuzzi and her article, which painted an unflattering picture of the Weiner campaign and its team. Morgan's tirade broke just about every spokesperson training rule and used almost every expletive in the book.
Messaging Development: Can You Write a Great Subject Line?
The headlines about the Bradley Manning WikiLeaks trial offer a great lesson on messaging development. Scanning my Twitter feed and the Washington Post headlines, I thought, at first, that the uber-leaker was acquitted. That’s because the headlines all focused on the fact that he was [...]
Celebrating Message Development that “Rocks”
Posted on “The Rock” in Ellicott City, a picturesque and popular historic village in Maryland, the sign reads: “Climbing prohibited on these 300 million-years-old geological formations; let’s all respect The Rock.”
Improve Your Storytelling: Change Your Perspective
Everyone, it seems, is jumping on the storytelling bandwagon, and with good reason. Storytelling is a powerful communications tool that taps into both our emotions and our minds' most effective way of accepting and retaining information.
Spokesperson Training: Spokes-Disasters and How to Avoid Them
Let’s face it, if you are like most people, you’d rather get a root canal than have to stand up and speak in front of group. And with good reason. Absent effective spokesperson training, a nervous misstep can cost you a client, cause a deal to go south or create a social media firestorm from which it is hard to recover.
Customer Service Nightmares
Today was the day I had dreaded for some time. I had to clear up a bunch of issues with several big companies—Lowes, Comcast, Verizon, and KitchenAid. And now with phone calls completed, I’m looking back on a day of exhausting, frustrating, and dehumanizing experiences
Crisis Communications: When Shtickiness Goes Wrong
Paula Deen, the doyenne of Southern cooking, had a really good thing going—a strong brand, a loyal following, TV shows, and a multi-million dollar empire of endorsements, cookbooks, cookware, restcookbooksAnd then it all came crashing down.
Liz Wainger says:
Liz Wainger says:
Liz Wainger says: