Archive for: Services

Have you seen those new Toyota ads?  The ones in which the company apologizes for letting quality slip.  These are very unusual for a corporation facing product liability suits — and they are exactly the right thing to do.

Typically companies in Toyota’s position clam up.  Statements are defensive and evasive.  Maintaining such a posture during the long life of a litigation will leave a company’s reputation in badly compromise.

Yet public opinion studies have shown that companies that publicly speak to their problems — that defend themselves but also acknowledge faults and both pledge and work to fix them — build the trust of customers, suppliers, and potential jurors.

Toyota was slow to grasp its problem and engaged in denial for too long.  But now it has put corporate reputation first.  It is right to do so.  And it likely to do better in court as a result.

As I write, Mr. Obama has just finished delivering his first State of the Union Address.  We can debate the policies later, but for style, I felt he missed a key grace note of leadership.  Over and over he used the word “I”.  But the essential word of leadership is “we”.  Nothing is about me.  Everything is about us, the people, whom I, the leader, serve.

Digital social media has been a growing phenomenon for a long time, but 2009 marked a new high in terms of traditional businesses and media interest in the field.  As 2010 begins, companies that are looking to begin their foray into social media should do so carefully.

A good consulting firm will not recommend the same social media approach for every client.  Depending on your objective, there are a broad range of levels of engagement that could be appropriate.

Brian Solis has a helpful post today outlining his 10 steps of integrating social media into your business.

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

When considering communications strategy, most people think of television, radio, publications, and the Internet — this even though research has long found that face-to-face communications is often, perhaps always, the most effective.

When targeting elites, we at WHWG are big fans of policy dinners.  We gather between 10 and thirty of the kind of people our client wants to reach.  They may be D.C.-based journalists, or part of the Washington policy world (usually not current office holders but people office holders consult), or industry elites around the country (high tech or financial leaders for example), or even policy and political leaders in London or Brussels.  We hold the dinners at private clubs or fashionable homes or in the private dining areas of first-class restaurants.  We attract guests with a featured speaker (usually the client’s CEO or a globally acknowledged expert on the issue we want our guests to think about).  At least one member of the client’s staff is present, too. Read

Statistics are like a birthday gift. You never know what you’ve really got until you unwrap them. Take today’s unemployment data (for December). It shows the unemployment rate at 10 percent. That’s still lower than the rate at the peak of the 1982 recession — 10.8 percent in December of that year. But any experienced speechwriter knows that topline numbers are only a starting point, not a finishing line. Read

Taking a new look at old assumptions is as difficult in the digital world as it is elsewhere — something Wikipedia is currently discovering.  The stewards of the open source site have started asking themselves if they can increase the accuracy of their entries.

As the Financial Times reports, the site’s stable of voluntary editors has not grown apace with its increasing volume of articles.  The result, says the FT, is that entries “will be harder to monitor quality — and vested interests will find it easier to make alterations that reflect their own views.”

Not that the site lacks for accuracy challenges now.  The FT notes that “even optimists… agree with the more skeptical observers on this: that in terms of reliability and service, Wikipedia still has along way to go.”  Yet attempts to “subject changes by newcomers [i.e., new contributors] to approval by more experienced editors and flagging any revisions” have run into intense resistance in the hyper-egalitarian Wiki-corps.

The communications problem here is a familiar one:  The world has changed.  The organization needs to adjust. But both members of the organization (those most involved with Wikipedia are volunteers, not employees) and many of those it serves see the adjustments as violating the values and standards that got the organization where it is today and that they believe in.  Part of leadership in a time of change is to communicate how fundamental values are being preserved, not thrown over, by recognizing that circumstances have changed.

Surveys have found that, for most people, fear of public speaking exceeds fear of death. How does one in its grip deal with this fear?  Former Microsoft executive and current professional speak Scott Berkum says just keep in mind that your audience dreads listening to you.  They expect to be bored silly, so they won’t be disappointed if they are. For a witty review of his new book, Confessions of a Public Speaker, read this article.

When communicating with people in The Netherlands, one of the easiest ways to get in dutch is to refer to their country as Holland. North and South Holland are just two of the 12 provinces in The Netherlands. Calling the whole country Holland is like referring to the United Kingdom (or Great Britain) as England. (For that matter, it’s like referring to the United States as America when you are speaking to Canadians.)

These are just a couple of small examples of the kind of idiomatic and cultural knowledge it is increasingly important to have, whether writing a speech, an article, a report or any other communications tool aimed at reaching a foreign audience. Read

As the 1972 election campaignwas approaching, strategists for President Richard Nixon had a problem. They wanted to announce the formation of a re-election committee. But there had been some question raised in the media about whether Vice-President Spiro Agnew would be on the ticket. They couldn’t call it “Citizens for Nixon-Agnew” because that would pre-empt the President’s decision. And they couldn’t call it “Citizens for Nixon” because that might appear to be throwing Agnew under the bus. They turned to the resident master of language, William Safire, who was then writing speeches for the President. His suggestion? “Committee to Re-elect the President.” Read