Services
A California PR man demonstrates that high-touch contact with the press is not the best way to go.
Services
At the end of a testy exchange in an interview with blogger Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz resorted to a time-honored Anglo-Saxonism.
At least one other Fortune 500 CEO runs his own blog on which he denounces journalists in the coarsest, most graphic terms possible (accusing them of certain acts with certain financial insiders). Other executives are also feeling free to speak like Tony Soprano in public.
Is this refreshing candor, or defining deviancy down for CEOs?
Digital Services
Seventy percent of Americans trust online reviews by strangers. A recent piece in The Washington Post shows how deeply grassroots perception campaigns have reached into the world of Yelp and other online reviews.
That world of online-reviews is not exactly the Wild West. There are industry standards, ethical boundaries of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and U.S. Federal Trade Commission guidelines on disclosure.
Little understood by many is the need for firms to use proactive techniques to counter the dark side of reviewing. Critics complain about Yelp’s elevation of good reviews for firms that advertise on Yelp. Less well understood is how often it is necessary to use tools to get out the good word, to protect oneself from what Chicago’s Zocalo Group calls “reputation terrorists” and “competitive destroyers.”
Training
A national meeting of the best and the brightest in the field. A day of powerful research on a topic of urgent importance.
All far less meaningful than it could have been because almost every single one of the presenters–to a man and a woman–made three simple mistakes.
–They arrived with many slides, in some cases more than 40, for presentations that were to be no longer than 15 minutes.
–They crammed their PowerPoints with enough words and bullet statements to fill a book.
–They insisted on reading their slides, instead of engaging in a conversation with the audience. Read
Practices Public Affairs Research Services
We often see clients who ask us to defend them against studies that make unsupported connections between their products and health or environmental claims.
Alex Lundry of TargetPointConsulting shows how scientific-looking charts can suggest outcomes that are nonsensical. For example, the universe of data you select is critical. (One of his charts shows that President Obama, when compared to every president going back to McKinley, is the all-time “pirate killer.” His record is sadly diminished, however, when you go back to Jefferson and Madison.) Read
Services Training
Company X has a problem. Their Leader–recognized as trend-setting, dynamo by people in the upper-ranks of his industry–can come across as wooden, even defensive, when making a presentation before large audiences.
This Leader will soon be facing a very large and critical audience–the global meeting of the major investors in his company’s far-flung empire. The case has to be made that these investors need to reach into their pockets and pony-up for a fresh wave of modernization. To make this case, the Leader needs to get off the operational details and shift the thinking of his stakeholders to see startling possibilities.
He needs to be spellbinding. But he isn’t. Read