Ending on a Good Note - I Can See Clearer Now

            As this course Leadership and Media Strategies comes to a close in a few days, I must admit that from beginning to end the materials have helped me to learn so much about myself, my professional life and the amazing world around me.  Starting out with Diffusion of Innovations and ending with a look at the future and leadership, as a strategic communication student, I know that I have so much to learn and so much to contribute as a result of this class. It is interesting that one of our final TED Talk videos featured Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.  A few years ago, I quoted her when a colleague questioned the leadership ability of a bossy 18-year-old.  I told the group that Sandburg suggests that instead of dismissing a young lady off as bossy, why not look at her bossiness as a strength, a great leadership trait. She said that a young boy being called bossy fits right in with society, but that people look at bossy young ladies in a different, negative light.  Sandberg is so right in pointing out how society treats women differently than men. I am glad that I recognized this years ago. Now I work to help young ladies tap into their true leadership abilities early on in life, even the bossy ones, like Sandberg encourages us to do.   

            Early on in this course while looking at Diffusion of Innovations, I fit in with the Newsasaurs, steadfastly holding on to some old methods of communications while on the outside looking in on the new amazing technological innovations that I see my younger students and colleagues using all the time.  It was during these early weeks that my curiosity began to work with my creative spirit.  As I have said before in this class, I have been out of college for a long time, and while beginning graduate school, I really started out with more questions than answers.  I wanted my master’s but it was hard pinpointing what field of study since I have gained much more exposure to different subjects since receiving my bachelor’s.  The one thing that I have always cherished is my creativity but sometimes that has limited me professionally.  Just like one of our TED Talk speakers this week, John Maeda, when people realize that I am smart, they applaud me, but when I say that I am artistic, the reaction is much different.  Thanks to this and most of the TED Talks this term, I have found vital information that is helping me to better plot my path for my future career. I am also learning and using more things from this class to better engage and help my high school students to plan their futures.  

            Like John Maeda, who is featured in the TED Talk “How Art, Technology and Design Inform Creative Leaders,” I see art in most things.  I work in higher education, and some people here and some family and friends still do not see the significance that art plays in society or what I can do with it career-wise to make a difference.  This is my favorite of all of the TED Talk videos this term because it helped me to realize that even though I do not know exactly what I want to do with gained knowledge from this graduate program that I am right on track to finding my way.  Maeda points out that technology makes possibilities, design makes solutions, art makes questions and leadership makes action. It is the combination of all of these factors that makes great leadership in any organization, and as a communication professional, being aware of these things will help me to use all of my talents and the talents of everyone around me to create better engagement. 

            When I began this class, I did not realize how important the Internet and social media played in everyday professional communication practices.  I often call myself old-school because up until now my main use for social media was getting in touch with old friends and family that I haven’t communicated with in decades.  I often thought that my young students were wasting their time by always being on social media. Technological advances like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the many Internet crazes that pop up every day can be put to so many good uses in strategic communications.  As a matter of fact, thanks to this class and some tech-savvy students, I am already learning to incorporate them.  Again, I work to prepare high school students for college.  Now I am posting more on Facebook that will help my students.  I am writing a script for some learning materials and hoping to produce a video for YouTube.  I am thinking about beginning a personal blog for a couple of my passions and hoping to gain a following and help people.  It is funny how at the end of this course, I have become a major target of the Diffusion of Innovations. 

            I am happy with my progress.  Another TED Talk feature this week included a cancer doctor from 2011 talking about all of the amazing possibilities in medicine that can result from “exponential technologies.”  Dr. Daniel Kraft, in “Medicine’s Future? There’s an App for That” said in 2011 that there were around 22,000 apps available.  Out of curiosity, I found on the website The Statistics Portal that there were over 2 million apps now available between IPhone and Android users.  What a growth, and the possibilities are endless.  Just as technology grows and continues to grow exponentially, I am growing also.  I cannot say that my growth this term is exactly exponentially.  I am growing slowly but greatly by combining my creativity with the arsenal of technological advances that exist. This will help me to grow as a strategic communication professional and in other areas of my life. 

            Yes, I still hold onto my old tried and true methods of communications, but now I am open to and using new methods that present endless possibilities.  Going back to Maeda, he says that he realized, “It isn’t about old or new.  It’s about something in between.  It isn’t about old, the dirt; new, the cloud.  It’s about what is good, a combination of the cloud and the dirt is where the action is.” Leadership is about action, and I am finding that in me. I look forward to tapping into my old-school capabilities and merging them with all of the new-school technological advances and producing some great materials in the future.  After all, as communication professionals, this is the future. We have to take what has worked in the past and incorporate it with what works in the present and the future and keep up with communication trends in order to be effective. To think, at the beginning of this course, I didn’t have a clue, technologically. Thanks, Dr. Padgett, for all of the possibilities to which you have introduced me. 

How’s That Working For Ya?

     In a former career, our organization was once faced with a shortage of corporate sponsors, so our marketing department had to find new ways of reaching out to find sponsorships that once came from the Department of Education.  It seemed that targeting corporate sponsors was a whole different animal than the Department of Education because up until that year when they had major cuts, they were more than willing to hand out money for a proven worthy cause, but corporate sponsors seemed a harder sell.  In seeking new sponsors, our marketing department looked at what we needed, our corporate options, our stakeholders and came up with a plan.  Since the Department of Education had funded us for so many years, seeking new corporate sponsorship was somewhat new and we had to get a plan together, put it out there, see if it worked and learn from our success and/or failure.  It took years to line up sponsors that gave as willingly and as big as the Department of Education, but through strategic planning and continued work and evaluation, we finally made up all of that lost funding with more lucrative relationships that continue in that company until this day. 

     This week in Leadership and Media Strategies our question is how do you know that your strategic communication program is effective?  In order to evaluate any program or campaign, an organization first needs to know its purpose or its goals, what it takes to reach these goals and its stakeholders.  The article “Evaluating Communication Campaigns” by Thomas W. Valente and Patchereeya P. Kwan states that evaluation research determines whether a public relations campaign was effective in achieving its goals.  Evaluation has to first determine if a campaign resulted in its expected impacts or outcomes. Next an evaluation looks into how the campaign did or did not work. And finally, an evaluation garners information that will help professionals successfully plan future campaigns.  Our literature this week comes from so many forums and all of them specify many avenues of evaluating a strategic program and the problems in formally evaluating a program.  The fact that media has changed so drastically over the past few years is one reason that evaluating effectiveness is problematic.  Identifying the best means for evaluation presents another problem.  Yet there are good ways of evaluating a program. 

     The article “Five Ways to Measure the Impact of a Digital PR Campaign” states ways of evaluation that are reasonable and effective.  One method pointed out in the article is monitoring blog or web traffic.  Of course, if an organization is able to measure an increase of viewers once a program is instituted, this means the program is working.  Another measure would be referrals.  Social media shares are prevalent these days and easily tracked.  There are also ways to track press release engagement.  One last way the article recommends to evaluate a program is through outputs and outcomes in the amount of media coverage, articles and leads that come from a campaign.  In looking back on my former company, when we needed funding and put out a new campaign, we looked at all of these avenues in evaluating our successes even though back then some of the measures were not so popular as they are today because the Internet has grown so much since then.  But just as this article states, first you have to monitor things such as traffic, referrals, social media shares and any attention from your program that will push the public in your direction.  All of these results will help you to evaluate each step in your plan to see if your initial goals or outcomes have been reached.  These results are key indicators as to whether or not your program is on target or needs improvement. 

     It is interesting this week that in the midst of our literature for this topic that we had several TED Talks that really made me look at not only my professional journey but my personal one also, which of course are closely connected.  I love the TED Talk which featured Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist, who spoke about how your body language shapes who you are.  At first I didn’t connect this piece with our topic of the week.  After looking at everything and looking over the course of this class, I had an ah-ha moment.  Cuddy is passionate about the fact that “our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes.” Just as tweaking our bodies can pump our minds up to change our behavior, organizations today can look at their goals, tweak a few things and pump up their outcomes.  Gone are the days of old and relying on traditional methods of communications.  If you expect a return on your investments these days in strategic communications, you have to be bold, utilize all sources of media from traditional to the ever-changing Internet methods in order to reach your audiences.  This is not enough, because success also means keeping up with emerging media and innovations and utilizing them to the fullest in order to reach your audiences and fulfill your goals. Media and its audiences are changing every day, so strategic communications has to be changing along with them. 

     Our sources this week mentioned many methods of evaluating strategic communication programs, but in this market, as we have learned throughout this class, it can be quite obvious if your campaign is working.  People are watching around the clock.  People are posting on social media, writing blogs, checking links on websites and sharing information 24 hours a day.  If your program is effective, you will have an indication in one form or another, positively or negatively.  Sure it is important to have internal programs to evaluate a campaign, but keeping an eye and an ear on the powers that be in our popular streams of media is a major way of knowing if your program is effective or not in reaching any outcomes in your communication plan. 

 

Learning Crisis Management the Hard Way Teaches You So Much

     This week’s blog comes with a heavy heart on my part as I learn more about the Brazilian soccer team that lost most of their members along with 50 other passengers when their plane crashed.  Social media footage from the team before the crash showed jovial players full of smiles aboard the plane travelling to Colombia to play in the finals of their successful soccer season. Many families are mourning, but it heart-wrenching to me being an avid sports fan that most players on a team family have died in a plane crash.  When I saw the news of the tragedy it was devastating knowing that most of the 78 people on board had lost their lives as the plane went down during a bad storm on Monday.  As of today, Thursday, most reports say that the probable cause of the crash is that the plane ran out of fuel.  Reports also say that the pilot continuously called in asking for permission to immediately land because of low fuel but that air traffic could not clear the ill-fated plane in time and that it crashed waiting for permission to land.  This week in Leadership and Media Strategies we are looking at crisis communication management and in keeping up with this major news story, my thoughts go to the several organizations that are dealing with crisis communications during this horrible event that took so many lives during what was to be a great celebration of a team’s success. 

     Our resources this week come from several studies and a couple of videos from YouTube and TED Talk concerning crisis management. We covered information looking at crisis communication from the September 11 tragedies, health scares, banking and automobile incidents to oil spills and so much in between.  From all of this information, several things stand out to me but the most important are preparations for the three stages of a crisis – before, during and after an event.  In looking at the Brazilian plane crash, I figure that there are several groups trying to strategically manage this incident, and they include the country, the airport, the airline, the soccer team, the soccer federation, and probably the manufacturers of the airplane plus so many more. There are endless stakeholders involved including the families of everyone affected.  Chances are that all involved have worked diligently to prepare for a tragedy like this – the before stage. During – this is of course the most trying stage.  Here many communications professionals are working this very moment in order to “exchange information based on balanced communication between the organization and the public” according to one reading.  In the publication from the Business and Society Review entitled “Toward an Ethical Model of Effective Crisis Communication” by Young Kim, emphasis is on ethics in crisis communication and it talks about communicating truthfully, transparently and in a timely manner during a crisis but ensuring that you are ethical during the whole process. 

     Effective strategic communication comes from diligently seeking information, strengths and strategies that will work within your organization. When an organization is prepared and knowledgeable about themselves and about what works, they may know how to deal with a crisis but no one says that it will be easy. The article, “Eight Best Practices for Applying Change Management in Crisis and Emergency Events” by Tim Tinker, Ph.D. and Booz Allen Hamilton states that it is during emergencies that organizations truly discover what works in crisis situations.  The publication “Linking Crisis Management and Leadership Competencies: The Role of Human Resource Development” by Lynn Perry Wooten and Erika Hayes James says that effective management and leadership “encourages members to actively engage in knowledge acquisition and the formulation of strategies to resolve the crisis.” They conclude that knowledge, skills and abilities to help you in crisis management comes from actively working and gaining an understanding of what it takes in these situations.  Then you should come up with implementation strategies if something happens. They also state that often organizations do not know who is best suited to deal with certain situations until after a crisis occurs.

     Our staff took a group of students out of town one weekend, and by the end of the first night there were a couple of emergencies.  Five staff members traveled along so there were enough adults to deal with everything, but I was put in charge of a medical emergency.  I thought my supervisor would have handled this situation because up until this point I figured her to be the calmest, most logical and level headed of our staff.  When we realized we had a student that had signs of a serious internal injury, she turned to me and said that she wasn’t good at dealing with things like this.  I almost freaked out, but something within me told me to handle it.  One thing that I will never forget in this incident is dealing with teenagers and social media.  Before I even began dealing with the sick student, the staff had to put out fires on Facebook.  Apparently when the student first started feeling ill, some of her friends went on Web MD, and diagnosed her with a brain aneurism.  I was traumatized at learning this, and thought that I wouldn’t make it through the night. First we worked to stop the posts on Facebook about an aneurism before her family found out. Then I calmed down, assessed the student and her symptoms and found a hospital where she was treated.  All along I also handled communications by informing our whole group about what was going on and I also communicated with the student’s parents who were hundreds of miles away. Thankfully, she had no aneurism, but a minor head injury.  

     Usually I am the anxious one during emergencies, but this time I took charge and calmed our group and managed to keep the student’s parents calm also. We were also successful at shutting off the Facebook inaccuracies before they caused more problems. This is one area of crisis communications that I am sure causes a lot of problems nowadays because one of the first things to do when there are injuries or death is to contact family before information leaks.  I have no idea how communications professionals can deal with this since it poses a big problem with instances such as the plane crash.  It is just something that has to be studied and dealt with on a case by case basis, but it is hard to manage because there is no way to stop social media postings and time them before you prepare a family for a loss of a loved one. This used to be more manageable, but it is one of the problems with communication innovations that reach so many instantly.   

     The Wooten and James article’s point that during a crisis, you can learn a lot about your personnel is important and proved true to us.  Not only did I learn a lot about myself, but our team learned who the stronger more level headed one was in emergencies.  Never did I think I was capable of being in charge of a major medical incident, but I did. Success came after much planning and training and my personal dealings with small emergencies along the way.  We also knew each other well enough and knew the students and parents well enough in order organize, strategize and to keep communications flowing and helpful during this incident. To this day, I am thankful that I was able to see that side of myself.  The student turned out fine and my perception of my crisis management abilities grew tremendously. Our staff took a long look at this incident and at our organizational structure and we are still training and re-structuring some responsibilities after looking at how things worked out – After, the third stage.  Again this week in class, I learned a lot.  Hopefully, our crisis management will not be tested any time soon, but just in case, I think we can handle it and learn a lot along the way.   

 

Where Are Their Packages?!

Watching too much television got me into a lot of trouble as I was growing up.  My parents didn’t frown on my obsession with entertainment; they just insisted that I do my chores and homework before I became engrossed in whatever was airing at the time.  Often I would forget my homework or my chores because of my love of television and I had to suffer the consequences.  But the entertainment that was coming from that little box was my get-away from my boring world in rural small-town Alabama. I became so involved in the shows that I was watching that my emotions would take over and I would build relationships with the characters and their plight.  As I grew older and ventured out into the world all over the United States, television still was amazingly important to me, but I learned to separate fiction from reality better.  Yet still today, I find myself feeling strongly for entertainment characters.  Therefore when our topic of product placement came up this week, I reflected back on how sorry I felt for the characters of Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks.  While watching the hit movie, first I felt sorry for him having to survive alone on a deserted island for so long.  But at the beginning of the movie, I remember feeling sorry for the “owners” of all of those Fed-Ex packages that never got to their destination. Let’s just say that the product placement in this movie and in others is interestingly important and this marketing practice is ever-changing.

This week in Leadership and Media Strategies, our emphasis is on message development and placement.  We have information about product placement from a lot of interesting sources.  A study we read on the placement of political messages is important in that we just finished a tumultuous campaign season that often took the low road in attack ads.  Thank goodness that this one is over.  Modern media is so prevalent that we were bombarded with political messages everywhere from traditional media to modern Internet social media.  I was overwhelmed, and believe it or not, I found myself watching less and less television, my beloved entertainment staple.  The article “Campaign Ads, Online Messaging, and Participation: Extending the Communication Mediation Model” that was found in the Journal of Communication noted that too much exposure to political attack ads might result in a backlash against the campaign pushing the negative ads.  I wonder if that is what happened in this election cycle that resulted in so many voters not coming out that had voted four years ago.  Both sides equally attacked each other, especially towards the end. I don’t think that Clinton ads were more negative than Trump’s, but others may have felt so. If so, the Republican organizers did a better job of political advertising placement than the Democrats.  I just wonder what future studies will show.

Other fascinating information this week came from numerous studies and opinions on message development and product placement in television series and blockbuster movies.  Our always inspiring TED Talks this week featured Morgan Spurlock in The Greatest TED Talk Ever Sold. Spurlock gave a hilarious presentation about the not so subtle tactics of modern product placement.  He talked about his marketing pitch to Hollywood to do a film totally about product placement that would be funded by product placement, marketing and advertising called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." Every definition of product placement says that the marketing technique should be a subtle placement of a commercial brand to blend in with the piece and not jump out at the audience. In the article “Making the Invisible Transparent,” the authors note that in marketing, professionals should “make the consumer the authority through their freedom to discover – to stumble upon – the promotional message rather than being subjected to it. Spurlock’s amusing in-your-face movie pitch to entertainment executives turned out to be not so amusing to them at all, but it was funny. He did a good job of allowing the executives and us, his TED Talk audience, to take a good look at product placement and how it can get out of control. 

Some studies such as the one entitled “When Product Placement Goes Wrong: The Effects of Program Liking and Placement Prominence” by Elizabeth Cowley and Chris Barron points out that the technique should occur “under consumers’ radar.”  Many messages and their placements are now so blatant and the practice occurs so often that I truly understand Spurlock’s comedy in his tactics in pitching his film.  The mentioned study and others show that product placement that is not subtle may turn audiences off towards the brand because it may interfere with their natural enjoyment of the piece.  Other studies show that too subtle placement may make a product go undetected and have no effect at all.  So how should marketing professionals approach the practice in a world of traditional media and the world of increasing Internet and social media?

            The fact that entertainment executives wanted nothing to do with Spurlock’s idea tells me that it is noted that going over the top with product placement is troublesome, but that professionals have to continue to study the markets and come up with subtle ways to continue to grab all markets.  The key word again is “subtle” because unlike “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” and unlike too many political attack ads, marketing does not want to turn the public off and garner a negative connotation towards their brand. 

But this all brings me back to Cast Away.  I recall two products placements, Fed-Ex and that basketball, Wilson.  Wilson’s brand did not stand out to me, but Fed-Ex certainly did, as I painfully worried about those customers not getting their packages. Now, I have a heart and wanted Hanks to be survive and be rescued, but I was concerned with how the castaway just helped himself to someone else’s possessions. Sure I wanted him to survive, but I also wanted those people to get their packages. Yet the whole time, I had no idea of how the marketing technique was working in a very subtle way back then to allow several companies exposure in a big movie.  Studying the markets and keeping up with media and social trends will allow marketing professionals to continue to use product placement to tap into a huge market and not even remind them that they are there marketing themselves within your beloved entertainment.     

 

College GameDay Taught My Morning’s Lesson on Vision

     After my morning walk through the hills and streets of my neighborhood, I usually sit down and watch ESPN’s College GameDay on Saturdays to see what the headlines are in college football, my favorite sport.  I thought I had the wrong channel this morning when I saw the highly popular sports program was on a campus in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Michigan nor Michigan State were being featured.  Confusion set in. I was shocked when the commentators said they were showcasing Western Michigan!! I have no idea who Western Michigan is in college football, and why in the world is College GameDay there instead of USC, who is playing UCLA; maybe Ohio State, who is playing Michigan State; or even LSU, who is playing Florida? To top this off, it’s snowing on the freezing GameDay team and fans because, of course, the show is always filmed outside from a scenic spot on campus! The opening voiceover assures us that Western Michigan is indeed worthy of College GameDay this morning because they are ranked number 21 in the country and are one of only two undefeated teams in the FBS, the other being Alabama. They go on to let us know that a few years ago, someone, some leaders, at the university had a vision of a highly successful football program. Internally and externally the Western Michigan family bought into that vision because here they are a few years later, number 21, undefeated and featured on College GameDay.  That was some vision.

     This week in Leadership and Media Strategies we focus on vision and leadership. We had a great list of references including the transformational power of classical music, Wendy Kopp’s vision of educational advancement, and our professor’s vision for this graduate program. Throughout our class, a major focus has been on the characteristics and qualities of leaders.  Dr. Padgett began our look at vision by telling us about his vision for this Strategic Communications graduate program. Other references this week came from entertaining and interesting sources including classical composer Benjamin Zander on TED Talk who stated, like other sources, that great leaders have a vision that they believe in so deeply that they know that the people they are leading will believe and follow. Zander’s goal is to help people appreciate classical music even though a majority of people could care less for the art. Because his passion for classical music inspires him so much, his vision is to help others realize their “untapped love for it.” In doing so, he opens people’s eyes to “new possibilities, new experiences, and new connections.” This is the type of leadership that resulted in College GameDay setting up at the Western Michigan campus this morning in the freezing snow, I’m sure. The culture at the university believed in this vision and did what was necessary to make it happen and this has resulted in new and awesome possibilities, experiences and connections and has them highlighted on the college football stage today.

     John Ryan is president of Center for Creative Leadership. His article entitled “Leadership Success Always Starts With Vision” stated that the first major step in leadership success is not giving up on your dream, and that this starts with a vision. This week’s Harvard Business Review article entitled “To Lead, Create a Shared Vision” states that leaders must ask, “What’s new? What’s next? What’s better?” Surely, great leaders, including the ones at Western Michigan began their visions this way and worked hard to bring aboard the administration, students and the community in order to be successful. Jerry Porras, from the Stanford Graduate School of Business focused on numerous studies to summarize what leadership entails, especially leaders of “enduringly great companies.” In his “Leadership and Vision” broadcast in GoogleTechTalks, he discussed how these amazing leaders make contributions to organizations that thrive long after they leave. They have a vision that is supported by having a purpose or a reason to exist. They are focused on building their organizations by building into them all of the qualities that develop the capabilities of others within the organization. No one person associated with an organization can succeed alone.  All enduringly great companies have had leaders who were passionate enough toward their purpose and set the appropriate to goals to bring aboard the cultures that ultimately ended in tremendous enduring success. History shows that this does not happen easily or overnight.  But with the proper leadership, communications, hard work and continuous belief in a vision and a purpose, lasting success is possible.

     A friend started a successful company in a rural area.  He was only in his late twenties in the 1980s.  He knew himself well enough to know that he wanted to work for himself and that he wanted to help people.  He did the research and found out that there was a need for a company on the forefront of providing medical equipment in his area.  He had a vision that would require a big investment of money and people that he trusted.  He also knew that this industry would have competition that already had a proven track record in the area.  Instead of focusing on services that the competition offered, my friend did his research, looked toward the future and included products and customized services never offered before.  Today he remains successful and he is always training, researching, and motivating his stakeholders to grow with him.  His vision continues to be a success because he continues to have a purpose and a passion for what he does and for his community.

     I will wrap up my assignment today in time to enjoy college football and family and friends.  USC plays UCLA later tonight.  Florida plays LSU, where I have a lot of family.  I will surely catch that game around noon.  In the meantime, I guess I will watch more about Western Michigan and learn more about the fruits of great leaders’ vision that helped this program to grow. Surely this vision was well supported, nurtured and orchestrated if it warrants the presence of one of  the country’s most popular sports shows this morning.  I wonder if when the leaders were setting forth with this plan if they had any idea that ESPN College GameDay would one day be set up on their lawn and that people all over the world would be looking at them, not Alabama, not Michigan nor Michigan State, this snowy November day in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  

Ice Cream Moments

The orientation instructor asked the freshman, “Are you a leader?” The nervous 18-year-old slowly responded, “No. I haven’t done anything to call myself a leader.” The instructor then explained to that student and to the whole class, “Truly you must be leaders. You managed to successfully get through 13 years of school and graduate.  Here you are in college, deciding to make something of yourselves by earning a degree and hopefully pursuing a career.  You’re setting an example for your peers and family. Give yourselves some credit. You are leaders.” Our topics this week in Leadership and Media Strategies are leadership and communication with internal, external and government groups.   

Lollipop moments and BizTweets were only a couple of the interesting topics this week.  We had a diverse and entertaining list of readings and videos which included a college administrator, a soldier, scholars and we read about a firm in South Korea. My favorite topic was “Everyday Leadership,” a TED Talks video which featured a college administrator named Drew Dudley who talked about lollipop moments, which are transformational moments that you may not even be aware of that make someone’s life better.  One of his transformational moments happened when he gave a young student a lollipop and did other memorable small things that changed her life. Dudley said that leadership should be redefined as being about lollipop moments that are capable of changing the world.  We have all had lollipop moments but we don’t always give ourselves enough credit to accept that we have done something that just might change someone’s life. The focus of our topics this week is how effective communication can be instrumental in improving the success of an organization and possibly changing the lives of everyone involved.

I vowed years ago that I would not spend a third of my day every day at work miserable.  There is nothing worse than working for an organization that does not value its employees enough to communicate with them. My first jobs in college were not the best, and now that I look back on those environments, I realize that there was a lot of dysfunctional communication.  There were a lot of student workers who received very little information about the departments where we worked.  Managers gave you pretty good instructions about your duties, but they didn’t communicate with you enough for you to get to know them or for you to get to know much about other departments. Leadership was not good because communication between management and employees was almost nonexistent. After college, my jobs got better.  Communication was better, but there were needed improvements.  Managers gave more information, but only to a point. There seemed to be managerial secrets and information on a “need to know” basis and it wasn’t as if we were working for the FBI. Sometimes we were rushed to meet deadlines because we didn’t have complete details about work orders, and this created a stressful work environment. Leadership was better, but they needed to work on internal communication.

The publication “Promoting Internal Communication” states that internal communication is communication within an organization that allows everyone to get the information they need, easily get questions answered and allows no one to be left out.  Internal communication can provide information to help people do their jobs effectively, give feedback, provide emotional support, suggest new ideas, and help share goals, vision and sense of ownership in the organization. Without it there is a huge disconnect.  My jobs early on had dysfunctional disconnected cultures between workers and management.

I have a job now where communication is free-flowing and all cultures have continuous access to vital information through daily emails, bi-weekly staff meetings and face-to-face interactions that help you stay informed. Leadership here is great! The authors of the article “Exploring Public Sector Communication Performance: Testing a Model and Drawing Implications” concluded that clear and effective channels of communication result in productive work environments.  They also state that improving communication should be a continuous, well-planned and well-executed plan. Good leaders within any organization should have a plan to address and continually improve internal communication in order to make worker relations excel and then address external communication to deal with that group.

Also this week we looked at government communications. Being left in the dark and not knowing what is going on cannot add to good morale for an organization or any government. Brooke Fisher Liu and Abbey Blake Levenshus state in “Public Relations Professionals” that a basic government duty is to inform citizens by constantly reporting decisions and actions by the media. The article concluded that the public’s trust in government communication is important because trust is necessary to effectively communicate messages with citizens. Governments have to address millions of diverse people, but modern communication tools like the Internet, traditional media and social media make communicating with citizens easier today.

Stanley McChrystal’s TED Talks video is called “Listen, Learn… Then Lead.” McChrystal looked over his 27-year military career and discussed how things have drastically changed on the battlefield and in communications.  He concluded, “A leader isn’t good because they’re right; they’re good because they’re willing to learn and to trust.  You can get knocked down, but if you’re a leader, the people you’ve counted on will help you up.  And if you’re a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet.” McChrystal’s and Dudley’s perspectives apply to all aspects of life.  Managers, supervisors and executives cannot lead without effective internal communications to start with. Nowadays with so many amazing technology advancements, communications within an organization can easily take place and allow everyone to communicate, get the information they need and work toward success.  The improvement in leadership between my early jobs and my present one is a result of better communication through things like the Internet, email, and social media. Back then, I guess it was a task to disseminate ongoing information to every worker. Now management can simply produce one memo or announcement and send it to hundreds instantly. Management can also get creative like the South Korean company we read about. For internal communications they use BizTweet, a less formal Twitter-like tool to help workers discuss things like seminars and meetings, solicit ideas for customer problems and do feedback. Organizational leadership is about listening, informing, seeking and responding to feedback. The lollipop moments will come when management is doing everything possible to promote harmony with all stakeholders by simply keeping vital internal and external cultures well-informed and happy.

The instructor I mentioned in the beginning was me.  The student I helped to realize that he was a leader has become a great high school coach and stays in touch years later.  My pointing out that he was a leader made a great impact on his life.  That afternoon he brought me ice cream and we developed a great friendship. That, in turn, changed my life and encouraged me to always find something positive for every student to take away from me through effective leadership.  I try to always do my best to make ice cream moments.

 

 

 

Along Came the Internet and Changed My PR of Years Ago

This week our focus is on how the world of public relations has changed so drastically because of social media.  When I graduated college with a bachelor’s in public relations, I was well trained on the ins and outs of dealing with the media, our consumers, employees, and whomever else with which I needed to communicate. Pitching ideas and events came easily to me because I could write the most intriguing press releases and draw in publicity from many angles.  I never got to put my training into use because I got a great job doing post-production editing of TV shows, movies and commercials.  After over 10 years, I was forced to leave this amazing job because of repetitive stress wrist injuries.  My second career would begin in education.  This was extreme going from working in entertainment to educating teenagers, but the transition was easy because my main job was preparing students for college, teaching them how to produce the news, and doing light publicity for the program.  Years later, I still work in education, but I am pursuing my master’s in strategic communications and here I am learning the new ins and outs of public relations. The Internet was just becoming popular when I graduated college, and social media had not been introduced yet.  Social media has changed public relations in so many ways since my initial training, and this revolutionary communications tool can help an organization as well as hurt it. 

            Nowadays public relations can happen instantly, whether your organization was planning it or not.  Soumitra Dutta points out in an article What’s Your Personal Media Strategy in Harvard Business Review that your social media presence is important and that it can bring your organization invaluable exposure that is often positive but sometimes negative. She states that now some of the best businesses have social media strategies to help them reach their goals and their decision to use social media proactively or reactively is most important.  This morning in a technology conference, a leading educational technology expert told us that studies show that 75% of the U.S. population has a social media presence.  That was much higher than I expected, but considering this high number of participants, having a social media presence is a no-brainer for any company wanting to pitch an idea, a new product or seek information or feedback from the public. If a company wants exposure, joining Facebook, Twitter or putting videos on YouTube are creative and inexpensive ways of publicizing your brand. 

It is vital that you communicate with your audience. Having a social media presence makes public relations so much more interactive now because feedback, good or bad, can be instantaneous through social media and the Internet.  Leading companies such as BP and Nestle very well know the importance of a social media presence and how monitoring and nurturing that presence can make or break your brand, especially during a crisis.  When I was studying PR, we learned the importance of having a crisis plan.  In the article Corporate Facebook Pages: When Fans Attack, the authors tell us that in order to handle a crisis situation with care you should first listen to the public’s complaints and suggestions of how to fix a problem before you fix a problem. Showing compassion and listening to your audience gives them a chance to vent and usually allows your company an opportunity to gain more credibility and trust in the process of crisis management.  Inconsideration and not showing enough care to respond to your audience on social media is a good way to lose credibility and gain a bad reputation with the millions of members that use this communications tool.   

            I want to learn more about strategic communications and put my entertainment and writing background together to be a better public information worker in education. Tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have possibilities that I never cared to investigate.  For years now, I have looked at them as distractions that my students use to escape the real world.  Now I am seeing that social media is actually bringing the world to this generation in a way that my beloved television did for me when I was their age. I’ve mentioned that I was a laggard when it came to technology, but now I am opening my eyes to the vast possibilities of social media and how it can help me professionally.  In order to pursue my career and help my current organization to grow, I will use some of the many tools listed in the HubSpot article How to Leverage Social Media for Public Relations Success.   I already produce creative videos to help my students learn and showcase their talent.  We already have a Facebook account.  Now I can put those videos on Facebook and YouTube and help my organization to receive recognition for the work that we do in helping our students.  Who knows, something could go viral and help us gain sponsors and help our students to be noticed and win scholarships for college.  We can also utilize their tech savviness and knowledge of today’s trends to make our social media sites creative and attractive to students of all ages.

            Once again, the subjects in my class are introducing me to amazing possibilities.  My undergraduate experiences along with my work experiences are coming together with what I am learning here. Public relations has in some ways remained the same, but with the help of social media and the Internet, the practice has changed and improved drastically.  Thanks to this growth in technology and the awesome possibilities that lie ahead, the projects and ideas that I am imagining are something that I look forward to creating.

This week in Leadership and Media Strategies our topics are word-of-mouth marketing, opinion leadership, and social influence and size of network.  After reading and viewing our assignments for the week, I look back on my adaptation of modern technology.  Around nine years ago, I remember assuring some of my high school college-prep students that I would never join something like Facebook.  Honestly, I had no idea what it was; I just knew that it was online and that they seemed obsessed spending time on it chatting with friends and posting pictures via their cell phones. Being old school was something that I was proud of. My students didn’t understand why I still called my friends, wrote and mailed letters and sent actual birthday cards. I had no use for such a thing.  After a few months and a lot of coaxing from my students, I finally joined MySpace and Facebook.  I still didn’t really understand what it was or why I really joined but I scored cool points with my students……. UNTIL I saw that several of my friends from college were on Facebook!

            Years earlier I had moved from the city to a rural area and lost contact with a lot of friends.  In no time, I reconnected with friends that I had not seen in decades.  I don’t know what happened to my MySpace page, but about nine years and over 1,000 Facebook friends later, I am a fan, to a point. Honestly I love Facebook because it is my lifeline to friends that I have lost touch with.  Over the years it has grown to include marketing of great products and it now keeps me informed on issues of the day. I cannot count the number of times I have learned of a death in our area or of a developing news story from Facebook instead of from mainstream news or a neighbor. Now there is much more advertising, and the members are so diverse, especially in age.  I personally don’t like the negative or disrespectful cultures, but my “online filter bubble” prevents me from distasteful topics in which I have no interest.  

            Just as I was reluctant to join social media, I never really desired a smart phone.  I had a Blackberry for years, and four years ago, I finally got an iPhone.  My cell phone is important.  It is far more important than Facebook. Focusing on our week’s topics, I look at my once reluctance towards things like social media and innovative technology and I see how marketing trends are changing just as I am.  Nine years ago, I was a laggard, slow to adapt to new technology and new communications. I am older than the asset-light generation.  Maybe this is one reason why it took me so long to adopt social media and smartphones, but I see their importance in my life just I see its importance in marketing.  A study this week weighed PC word of mouth versus mobile Internet word of mouth.  This study pointed out many reasons why more marketing is done through mobile Internet rather than PCs. Factors such as convenience, spontaneous and personal communication, purposive value and social enhancement influence marketing strategies just as it has my adaptation of innovations.

            But how in the world have I gone from a laggard to possibly an opinion leader?  I’ve grown probably because of the high school students that I interact with five days a week. My students are smart, technologically savvy leaders and they stay on top of trends that make their lives easier as part of the asset-light generation.  Often they see me struggling with things in my life and they introduce me to products and ideas that enhance my life. It wasn’t always this easy for me to accept change, but after buying an iPhone and experiencing all that it does to make my life easier I, in turn, introduce my friends to innovations brought to me by my students.  A lot of my friends have adopted social media and smart technology because I have influenced them to do so. One friend called Facebook “Fussbook” four years ago and vowed to never join.  She kept hearing me talk about my positive experiences re-sparking friendships and learning about new products through social media. She is now a proud member, posting and promoting her businesses constantly throughout the day. Word-of-mouth persuasions from my students in person and online have introduced me to so many vital innovations, and my word-of-mouth persuasions have introduced many of my friends to important innovations. My students are my opinion leaders in a lot of areas, and I am an opinion leader to a lot of my friends. 

            I truly understand why people are still reluctant to adopt technological and communication innovations.  Our topics this week made it very clear that the use of the Internet and social media can cause problems.  I had no idea that who I am and what I do on social media and the Internet can dictate the “online filter bubble” and keep me from being exposed to information that is important to me being “old school.” I may spend a lot of time online searching for trends to help my young students.  This, in turn, might make the filter bubble alienate me from information that I hold dear like health, nature, world tragedies, weather, and entertainment of decades ago. I must remember to spend as much time online with my interests as I do with my students’ interests until this problem is solved.
            My students are passionate about social media, and you cannot separate them from their cell phones.  But I guess the reason why these things are so important to them is because in their culture they truly believe in the why’s of their products and the things they hold dear.  They believe in the technology and innovations of today.  I criticize my students in that a lot of them cannot spell and that they lack important interpersonal skills because of technology. But they have grown up as members of social media and have had cell phones since elementary school if not before.  These things are a part of their culture just as a land line and running letters to the mailbox were a part of mine. 

            I have not changed much; I still call my friends, and still send birthday cards through the post office.  I just remember that I had lost touch with so many friends over the years that my network had become small.  Now, my circle of friends is much larger due to social media.  Now I not only send birthday wishes to a few friends through the post office every other month, but daily I send birthday wishes to several people via Facebook.  A lot of my friends live busy lives with their families all over the world, so texting and posting through social media is helping me to continue friendships that I once lost because of lack of communication.  I owe a lot to my students.  We enhance each other’s lives. I am fortunate enough to interact with such passionate people who have in turn introduced me to innovations that I rely on and hope to grow with in my future. They and the innovations that they have brought to me have changed my life, just as the technology of today is changing the lives of marketing and communications.

 

Welcome to my professional blog, A Savage pov, located at http://gasavagepov.blogspot.com/. This is a new adventure, my own blog!  I have always loved writing, but I have not written anything for the public in years.  Blogging is totally new for me, but the more I learn about this forum, the more confident I am that I will truly enjoy it. My weekly blog posts will focus on information and my thoughts from a graduate class that I am taking at Troy University about emerging media and strategic communications, Leadership and Media Strategies. 

Our first topic is Diffusion of Innovations.  It is funny how my graduate courses are helping me to understand so much about communications and obvious trends and practices that I witness and take part in daily, yet I never truly consider how and why they are effective. After being introduced to Diffusions of Innovations, I better understand the hard work that goes into successful implementation and adoptions of innovations, from hybrid crop seeds of the last century to technical innovations of today.  The diffusion process communicates information to targeted social groups to introduce innovations with hopes of persuading them to adopt their product or position.  It seems that innovations are introduced every day, but it is the diffusion of these innovations into the public that makes them succeed, or fail. Learning more about the diffusion process has prompted me to look at how some of my most prized conveniences probably came to light. Before my toys and necessities successfully hit the market, who were the targeted social groups, innovators, early adopters, early majorities, late majorities and laggards?  What group would I have fit into?

It has been years since I received my bachelor’s in public relations. The world has changed so much since then but with every new topic in graduate school, I am reminded of communication strategies that have always worked but are in need of a new twist because of the drastic change in technology and today’s audience. My eyes are open and my brain is stimulated as I learn more about communication and how it works daily in the life that I live and enjoy. I look forward to more enlightenment in this class, your following of my blog, and your constructive feedback.