Morningstar Communications Luminary Blog

Several years ago an acting teacher told me never to use the word “just” when describing what a character wants; it weakens the motivation. People use words as a crutch and hide behind them to avoid saying something bold, or even honest.

A recent post in Patrick Williams’ Trail Mix blog reminded me of this. People who find themselves in the media – athletes, celebrities, spokespeople – have a difficult time saying what they want, need or mean to say and hide behind meaningless words or phrases.

Williams talks about public figures and television guests using vague terms like “hopefully,” “just,” “really,” “very,” “sort of,” etc. Now that I’ve pointed it out, I have a feeling you’ll notice it often. Make it a game - it adds an element of sport to your daily media viewing.

I have noticed an annoying trend in which athletes give a five-word answer: “It is what it is.” You can substitute these five words with any five words and it would mean as much, if not more.

Reporter: “How do you feel about throwing that interception?”

Athlete: “It is what it is.”

Or …

Reporter: “How do you feel about throwing that interception?”

Athlete: “My wife makes good hummus.”

Neither one comes close to answering the question and neither are acceptable answers. But with the second one, at least you know the athlete’s wife can whip up a tasty and healthy snack dip.
 
In your everyday life, I encourage you to challenge yourself to cut out vague filler words and I think you’ll find your clarity – to others and to yourself – will improve and your motivation will be stronger.

Professionally, if you find yourself in a situation where you will be asked to explain a situation or tell your company’s story, media training will help prevent you from falling into the trap of saying a lot of words without actually conveying any real message.

Having your message misunderstood, whether personally or professionally, is a terrible feeling and completely avoidable. Knowing what you want to say and knowing how to say it without creating any confusion or ambiguity will go a long way.

 When I first was introduced to social media, it seemed pretty daunting. How would I ever have a thousand friends on Facebook? I nearly closed my Twitter account because I feared that I would never have more than five followers, and my blog remained blank for a few weeks, as I was unsure if anyone was reading. Over time, the content spoke for itself, and my personal social media outlets have grown.

Businesses or organizations thinking of breaking into the world of social media may be discouraged by power bloggers with fancy websites or Twitter users with thousands of followers. It is easy to look at these examples and give up before you even get started. Don’t let this be the reason your organization remains unseen in the social media world. Numbers are only one descriptor; connections are the golden ticket.

The online network you are building should include people who want to engage with your organization. This may not be the largest network, but it will be strong and active.

Consider what your organization provides for your audience. How is your organization valuable? How do you serve your audience? If you can provide for your audience, there will be a return on the time you spent setting up and maintaining your online presence.

Start by listening to the online community. Search for relative topics on Twitter, find similar fan pages on Facebook and look for groups on Flickr. Follow the pages for a little bit, and think about ways your organization could fit into this conversation, and join in the conversation and begin to understand the culture before starting your own pages. At Morningstar Communications, we recommend beginning with a soft launch. Start small, and experiment with all the ways you can use your new online tools. This gives you time to build your content and followers before making a big announcement to those who matter most.

After a soft launch, build your engagement by letting your community know about your new online presence. Advertise at your place of business, post a link on your website or add a few links to your email signature. All of these will help to grow your network. Of course, always remember to engage your audience and serve them. The connections you make online will pay off, and before long you will stop worrying about the numbers.

I’ve always been fascinated with communications channels and how news spreads in neighborhoods (where most of us do, after all, spend the majority of our time).

When I grew up (pre-internet), no one could mobilize a phone-calling tree like the moms in my neighborhood when it came time to protest that school board issue or even plan a block party. Most all neighborhood news (and much of the community news), spread across the backyard fences and across those curly phone cords.

Fast forward to today where my homeowners association and church news comes at me electronically. I’m just as apt to learn that my neighbor has bought a new car or taken a vacation on Facebook as I am to hear it from him/her in person … you get the drift. 

But how much have times really changed?

The Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. recently completed a project entitled “Neighbors Online” – a comprehensive look at the range of methods folks use to keep in touch and spread community news. This appears to be a new study, not much comparative data was provided, but the big headline is nearly half – 46 percent – of us still prefer face-to-face conversations as the best way to share news with each other in our neighborhood. Twenty-one percent prefer telephone and online doesn’t show up until we get to the 11th percentile (“reading an online blog on community issues”).

So what do we take from all this, besides just a better understanding of communications trends in what I like to call “cul-de-sac nation”? For one thing, any company that has a broad audience of general citizenry as its customers/stakeholders should by no means abandon the time-tested strategy of getting out and speaking face-to-face with as many segments of the community as possible.

Town hall meetings, community forums, road shows … all of these represent an effort on the part of the organization to talk to their audience in the most palatable way for them.

It’s always about the audience, and research like this can help us hone in a little better when it comes time to start drafting that strategic communications plan.

I am going with the assumption that anyone reading this has a LinkedIn account. If you are like me, when you first created your account it was because a friend or colleague said, "You should really have a LinkedIn account," but they never really explained why you should have it or how you should use it. Now your account sits dormant, collecting cyber dust.

At Morningstar Communications we often recommend that clients use LinkedIn to help grow their brand and participate in pertinent conversations. Individuals can use it for the same thing. I recently did some research to determine how I could use my account more effectively and found that there are simple ways to get greater benefits from the service.

You can find some very helpful information and tips from Shari Weiss and Mario Sundar among others. The key is to recognize yourself professionally as a brand and use tools such as LinkedIn and other social media to grow that brand. If you were a florist with a new water can, would you just let it sit empty on the shelf? No.

And don't think that you have to sit down and finish your profile in a day. More likely, it will be an ongoing process as your brand evolves. While you’re there, connect with me. You can use tdustin@morningstarcomm.com as the email address.

I attended Social Media Club Kansas City’s monthly breakfast this morning and was both shocked AND thrilled by the turnout. On our Facebook page, we had more than 130 confirmed/maybe attending (I’m terrible at guessing crowd numbers, but I bet we had 70 or so people at The Kansas City Café this morning. That is a huge turnout for a group that not long ago thought 20 people at a breakfast was a huge number.

However, this event shouldn’t come as a surprise to those interested in social media for work or play here in town. Kansas City is fast becoming the Midwest’s answer to San Francisco and Boston, the two coastal bastions of all things tech. I, for one, am happy to see the growth. I use social media primarily for business (helping create online communities is fascinating work), but you’ll find people who have integrated it into their lives outside 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. I’ll leave the sociological examinations of this trend to Brian Solis, but suffice to say social media has become WAY more than just a Facebook page.

Illustrating this point was the social media team from American Century Investments, a financial services company with deep roots here in KC. Brent and Jaime shared a case on how their team used social media to enhance engagement and drive TV viewership of the 2009 American Century Championship golf tournament. Working with LIVESTRONG and other event partners, ACI was able to build a social media presence around the tournament, basically from scratch, in five weeks and achieve some pretty impressive results. In fact, during the tournament and immediately after, Twitter was the 17th referring domain to the ACI website. That’s a tangible move of the needle resulting directly from social media efforts.

You can check out some videos from the 2009 tournament here or learn more about the 2010 tournament here.

What’s your favorite example of social media usage in Kansas City? Sound off below!

I’ve been involved with a number of nonprofit organizations locally over the last 15+ years and I’ve noticed a drastic change (for the better) in how charitable organizations communicate with their key stakeholders – the volunteers, donors, community leaders and others these organizations depend on so desperately to survive and thrive.

Casting a wide communications net for nonprofits used to mean coming up with major funds on a regular basis to pay for design and printing of newsletters, brochures and other controlled collateral – or calling in favors to get in-kind donations for printing and design.

Now, with all the new PR 2.0 online tools available, these organizations are all realizing significantly less budget crunch while still effectively getting their word out. Sure, they still have need for the occasional printed event program or DTC advertisement. But regular, serial communications (and even some one-time messages) can now often be handled online. Recent examples from a few organizations that I’m affiliated with or serve as a volunteer leader include:
•    Ozanam, a child services agency, now uses its Facebook page to successfully drive attendance to events. It’s email address list has increased by more than 100% and its blast email open rate is 27 percent – providing a powerful tool that is already helping reduce its snail mail postage costs;
•    Shawnee Mission Education Foundation recently started a Facebook page that it uses to update stakeholders on foundation projects. It has become a primary means of distributing news for an organization that has a limited communications budget;
•    I no longer get a newsletter in the mail from my church OR my homeowners association. Instead, those come to my email box where I can read them more conveniently (and not kill any more trees in the process);
•    Of course, nonprofits are also increasingly using e-commerce web tools to make it easier to donate money, sell products, etc.

We talk about how the shared media channel (see 4-channel media model ) is valuable because it costs so little in terms of money compared to paid, earned and controlled media. It does take significant time and resources, however, and this is where nonprofits need to make certain they have the staff or volunteers to keep “feeding the machine” and that they’ve addressed their communications strategy holistically. But, without a doubt, shared media tools have come along at the right time for small organizations with increasingly tight budgets.

 Marketing and communications departments across the country are working on how to integrate social media into the traditional marketing mix – or they are in the middle of implementing such strategies. But let’s not forget that social media is more far-reaching than marketing and communications.

A great article by Jeremiah Owyang jump-started the following tips on how to leverage social media for all areas of your business:

• Sales teams can leverage social networking channels to secure meetings and win deals. Operationally, your sales team can use information found on LinkedIn for their CRM systems.

• HR departments can use Facebook, LinkedIn and internal blogs for employees to feel more engaged, and for education and training. Recruiters can look to LinkedIn and other social media tools to find job candidates.

• Customer service representatives are finding success particularly with Twitter to provide quick responses to customers, often problem-shooting within minutes.

• Research and Development can utilize blogs and Twitter to gain customer feedback on new products. A couple years ago, I heard a Garmin communications director present at a local conference, and she mentioned that one use of their blogs is to gain customer feedback on their products.

• CEOs are finding social media helps them be better listeners and communicators – whether they are focusing on employees or customers. For instance, Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, has an internal blog to communicate with employees on a regular basis.

What about you? How have you used social media for other areas or departments of your business?