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.