Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Regardless of your industry, a collective body of knowledge exists. These best practices help to identify how like organizations have faced similar challenges.

How to find best practices:

• Identify the area(s) that you’re interested in exploring. Don’t limit yourself to simply your industry, but think about your target audience, your geographic reach or complementary products or services.
• Talk to your trade association. Many trade associations have research databases that provide a wealth of information on industry trends.
• For specific best practices related to public relations and marketing, industry resource sites such as MarketingProfs and Marketing Sherpa are terrific. If you’re a PRSA member, you can access the association’s knowledge base.

Best practices, however, shouldn’t stymie creativity or result in simply following the status quo, but provide inspiration and lessons learned.

Keep Your Ear to the Ground

Safeguarding your reputation means listening not only to the “word on the street,” but to what’s being said online. Have you googled yourself lately?

A few tips for listening:

Set up Google alerts for, minimally, your name and your organization’s name. You can also add names of other prominent people in your organization (CEO, Executive Director, members of your Board of Directors).

Advanced Google alerts might include topics or issues that your organization is connected to. For example, a nonprofit organization that provides health care for low-income residents or those without insurance might include search terms like “universal health care” or “health insurance coverage.” This will allow you to track news, blogs and even video on these issues and keep up with the media.

Learn more about Google alerts here.

Other free options for monitoring include Technorati, Blogpulse and the download BuzzMonitor (which is from the World Bank, oddly enough).

There are also paid options, of course. And plenty of experts to help you navigate the options.

Photo: Corbis

How Do Millennials Work?

Each generation works differently. Often older generations worked for the sake of working and and its intrinsic value. Millennials are a mystery to many supervisors.

This article by Claire Raines outlines some of the differences between working with Millennials and older generations.

For example, Raines believes that Millennials are characterized by the following:

Confidence
Hope
Goal and Achievement Oriented
Civic-mindedness
Inclusiveness

But she also maintains that Millennials need leaders, fun, and flexibility in the workplace – less than standard aspects of the average workplace.

The Great Technological Divide

One of the most easily spotted differences between Millennials and other generations is the way they use technology to make decisions.

Millennials are the first generation to be weaned on computers. While Gen-Xers aren’t necessarily far behind, computer skills were something they acquired later in life.

iMedia Connection’s Jim Meskauskas wrote that “What makes Gen Y people different is the way they are consuming media. Not only are teens spending more time with the Internet than TV, but that they also use the Internet as the hub of their media activity. The Internet is the medium from which all other media decisions get made, and that’s a powerful tool for marketers.”

Growing up bombarded by media and messages nearly 24 hours a day has made Millennials wise to slick ads and commercial messages. Many companies are now approaching Millennials to make them part of an experience – not just sell them a product.

Coca-Cola created a presence in SecondLife, a popular online community, where teens and other users can hang out, chat, and create customizable Coke vending machines. This encourages participation and allows users to have a voice in how the company markets its product to them.

As today’s teens and young adults age, brands that are well-established with Baby Boomers will need to change how they communicate with customers in order to capture the next wave of potential clients.

Millennials. Who are they?

There is a new generation of Americans emerging: they number more than two for every baby boomer (73 million at last count), spend $150 billion a year, influence another $50 billion in family purchases – making the total $200 billion, and they grew up on MTV and the internet.

Millennials, or Generation Y, were born between 1977 and 1997. This generation is already a huge market force with a power that will only grow as today’s teenagers become adults.

Why is this important?

In order to communicate with Millennials, many of us will need to learn a new language.

In the next few posts, we will explore some of the differences between Millennials and the generations before them. Including: differences in technology and values.

Stay tuned.

Five Easy Ways To Connect With Employees

Employees should always be your first audience. Employees are your organization’s ambassadors, advocates and champions. Keeping them well-informed should be a top priority. Some simple tactics and tools will help you maintain and build quality relationships with employees:

1. Have regular employee meetings. And make those meetings productive.

Employees want to know how to succeed at their job. Whether a customer service rep, or marketing director, or CEO, Good meetings can go a long way to keeping employees informed. If you have a large, or dispersed, staff, make sure the line of communication with middle managers is clear and empower those managers to deliver company messages.

2 . Communicate regularly in multiple ways.

Employees, because they are people, respond differently to communication channels. Some may respond through electronic channels – so create a monthly email newsletter that highlights information employees need to know. As with all newsletters, consistency is key. If you’re planning to send a newsletter at all, plan to be consistent and send every month. Include regular columns and accurate, up-to-date information.

Other employees may prefer printed communication – so provide the same updates and bulletins in printed form as you do electronically. You might even consider an employee podcast or videocast.

3. Create a recognition program.

Recognizing successes helps motivate employees. Afterall, how will employees know the difference between ok, good and great performance? Recognition programs can vary as widely as what may motivate an individual employees. As it turns out money is not much of a motivator. So you’re going to have to be more creative.

4. Have one-on-one sessions.

Give employees a chance to meet with company owners, CEOs or other C-Suite managers. Employees appreciate the respect that a one-on-one meeting infers. It says that the company cares about their success and is interested in receiving feedback.

5. Establish clear organizational and department goals.

And make them known. No employee can help achieve the organization’s goals if those goals are unknown. Share them, measure them and ensure that everyone is working toward organizational and individual success.

What other tips do you have? What motivates you?

Creating Your Logo:

Often, your logo is the first thing to make an impression on potential clients. This alone makes it a must to have an eye-catching and memorable design.

There are a few rules of logo design that many designers agree upon. David Airey, graphic designer, outlined the four major rules:

1. The logo must be memorable.
2. The logo must be describable.
3. The logo must be just as effective in black-and-white as it is in color.
4. The logo must be scalable down to a quarter-inch in size.

These rules ensure that potential clients will be able to remember (and describe) your logo after seeing it once and that your logo will work on any number of collateral or design projects of all shapes and sizes.

Take a look at some corporate logos that won the 2006 Best of the Best contest for logo design. Do these logos fit the four rules above? Or do some interpret the rules differently, and, if so, why do they still work?

Using SEO to Your Benefit

Search. Engine. Optimization. Three words that can make or break your company’s online search engine results.

Wikipedia defines SEO as “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via search results.” This is important because the higher a site is listed in the search results the more searchers will visit that site.

The best description I could find of how Google works is here:

“Google indexes pages on the Web by using what are commonly known as “spiders”, ‘crawlers,’ or ‘robots.’ Google’s famous search engine spider, GoogleBot, uses links on web pages as a sort of freeway. It travels from site to site by following links. When Google finds a new web page, Google will “crawl” the code on the page and transport it back to its datacenter.”

The Web Developer’s Journal has these and other tips to help optimize your company’s search engine results:

1. Fine tune the TITLE tag to increase traffic to the site. Make sure it includes keywords that potential visitors will be search for on engines like Google.
2. Create gateway pages that are specific to the focus of each site.
3. Ensure that your web site technology won’t confuse the search engines.
4. Search the search engines to see where your web site is listed.
5. Learn more about how search engines work.

To get started and submit your web site to Google, go here.

Presenting to Community Organizations

I’m currently the interim Program Chair for my Rotary club. I offered to help because I know quite a few people in Eugene who represent the type of agencies and organizations that we usually hear from at Rotary. Many of those people are my clients, former clients and friends.

Presenting to civic and fraternal organizations like Rotary clubs is a great way to reach business and community leaders. I often recommend it as part of a communication plan. Part of doing the “animal circuit” (as one of our clients calls it), is that you need a succinct 15 or 20 minute presentation that gives enough background, yet still allows time for a “how you can help” message. Rotary clubs may be informal, but there’s no excuse for not being professional.

Here are some tips for presenting to organizations like Rotary or Lions or Kiwanis.

1. Know your audience. Your local Rotary club might not be what you’re thinking. Our club, for example is younger and more female than the average Rotary.

2. Be clear about your objectives. What is the purpose for your presentation? Even if it’s to inform, consider what you want your audience to do when it’s all over. What should they want to do with the information? Maybe it’s to volunteer or maybe it’s just to take the info and share it with someone else.

Or in the case of United Way’s Success by Six initiative, maybe the objective is to encourage people to support young parents, whether with a kind word or just a smile or through policy decisions.

3. Deliver your key messages. These are messages that you’re not coming up with for this presentation, but ones that should infuse everything in your organization. Every press release, every employee training, every brochure (you get the point) should reinforce your key messages.

4. Be passionate. Care about what you’re talking about. If you don’t find someone who does. Passion is contagious.

5. Be prepared. Be prepared not just for the presentation with an outline, a nice powerpoint or some kind of visual, etc. But be prepared for questions. If you’re part of a community organization that’s had some recent controversy or press coverage unrelated to your topic, don’t think that subject is off-limits. And one poorly thought-out answer could damage your organization’s (and your) credibility.

For more tips:

Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen blog

Fast Company: Now that We Have Your Attention

Transparency is Important

I was talking to a client today specifically about some new competition in our community. This new business is engaging in some practices that it’s unlikely its clients are aware of. The intentions don’t seem malicious, based on what my client knew, but the potential implications should their customers become aware could be damaging to say the least.

I obviously can’t reveal the details of this particular situation, but I’ll offer this advice… be transparent. Be crystal clear with your customers, be see-through with your employees, be vitreous with your vendors and suppliers. No exceptions. No “it’ll be taken out of context” or “they just won’t understand.” Take time to explore the context and to explain.

When you reveal your company or your organization’s motives, you become accountable to the public. You must do as you say.

Transparency is self-regulating. You cannot choose practices that you cannot justify publicly. If you’re a business leader, you’re not only putting your organization’s credibility on the line, but your personal credibility.

Five tips for you:

• Make your ethical decisions now: think through how you and your company would react under a situation likely to occur in your industry. A few minutes brainstorming will help identify potential ethical quandries.

• Develop empathy: What would want to know if you were a customer? How would you want to find out? Put yourself in your customers’ shoes.

• Take time to think:When faced with a difficult decision, take the time to think through what you will do and explore the potential consequences to potential actions to the best of your ability.

• Call it what it is: stealing and lying are, by any other name, still stealing and lying. Call it what it is.

• Every action & decision has an ethical component: Think through intended and unintended consequences.