Airfoil Public Relations

Hit me with your best shot, Part 2

 

As the holiday season approaches, businesses are preparing to do anything to make 2009 a success despite the desperate circumstances of the recession throughout the year.

 

In a previous post, I discussed the importance of implementing a proactive reputation management program to assist in the collection of feedback for businesses and brand building (disclosure: RatePoint is an Airfoil client). But now what? You have this information and now you need to implement.

 

· Evaluate the business’s weaknesses and areas of opportunity.

· Make a measurable goal to work against and set a reasonable deadline to accomplish it. Choose two to three top areas to focus on for each round of overall feedback every six months.

· Keep your customers informed of the changes you are making and be sure to constantly gather feedback on those changes as well. Know that you can’t make everyone happy, but if the status quo is overall improving, then you’re moving in the right direction.

· Enjoy your success – once you’ve reached your goal, reevaluate and prioritize other improvements.

Remember, trust in your business and the good that it brings, now and this holiday season. With every sale this season brings another step to economic recovery. Best of luck you to all this holiday.

 

-- By Meg Soule

Personal, professional lives inspired by nature

An Airfoil client recently launched a product design software that leverages the principles of nature and biomimicry to help architects and designers be further inspired when developing their designs. It has had my whole team thinking for months: How much does nature influence us in our everyday lives?

 

Type “Nature-inspired” into your Internet/news browser of choice (Bing it, perhaps?), and you’ll get an overwhelmingly diverse response from a variety of different sources. Nature-inspired architecture, nature-inspired furniture and interior design, nature-inspired auto, nature-inspired art – you name it, and someone has come up with ways to utilize nature to enhance or influence it. And there certainly doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that. In fact, it seems to only make sense to use nature – it’s been around much longer than anything else, and through thousands of years of trial and error, has come up with the most fascinating and efficient ways to inspire and make things work.

 

Take a look at a few cool ideas and innovations that are inspired by nature:

 

· Stickybot is a robot that can climb smooth surfaces. This little guy’s “feet” were inspired by geckos.

· Speedo mimics shark skin in swim suits to help Olympic swimmers like Michael Phelps maximize their swim strokes.

· Who would have thought that a school of fish could inspire Nissan’s crash safety concept?

 

Even a product demo or modeling tutorial looks all the more interesting when you incorporate aspects of nature. This video demonstrates how to model a wasp using a design tool – I still love watching it in action!

 

Something as simple as a beautiful sunrise inspires me to try to have a good day and pass it on (ideally in the form of Higher Thinking for my clients, media friends and colleagues). What have you noticed in your daily lives and in the news that have been somehow influenced by nature? Or more importantly, what inspires you?

 

-- Jenn Korail

Cleveland Indians build strong employee team with communications foundation

They don’t have access to Facebook during business hours. But Bob DiBiasio, Cleveland Indians vice president of public relations, says the team may hire a social media coordinator the handle upcoming efforts.

As the breakfast speaker at the IABC Heritage conference in Cleveland, DiBiasio is dealing with a situation that communicators in several companies face: how do we get IT, the executive suite and employees on the same page with communications?

It still baffles me as to why companies would lock down social networks during work hours. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had open access at every job I’ve had. But a partial Web lockdown seems akin to unplugging someone’s desk phone or confiscating mobile phones when employees head into the office. What good does a lockdown do for employees except to make them increasingly frustrated?

Instead, give train your employees, give them guidelines and teach them to be brand ambassadors. The Indians have a communications calendar on SharePoint that all employees can access. It includes frequently asked questions and talking points. DiBiasio realizes that as an employee of the Cleveland Indians, regardless of position or title, friends, family and acquaintances are going to ask questions because the employee represents the team.

“We all need to sing from the same hymnbook,” he said. By providing every employee with clear information, messaging and talking points, the Indians are mobilizing their employees and giving them the power to promote the brand.

The same should hold true for employees regardless of online or offline chatter.

As DiBiasio said during his talk, “I don’t know if you all realize this, but we all work for Web sites now.”

Yes, employees can be your best brand ambassadors but you need to give them the tools do to so. If you don’t trust your employees enough to have access to Facebook during the day, how can you trust them with your business?

-- Tonja Deegan

 

New News Is Good News

Needless to say (but I will), it was a relief to read today’s headline on MSNBC.com: “Recession Ends in 79 Metros.”  An index compiled by the news outlet and Moody’s Economy.com showed that the recession ended in August for one of every five metro areas in the United States. 

 

Instead of constant doom-and-gloom headlines on news home pages, we’ll be reading turnaround stories and comeback sagas, which may finally drown the frowns and dial an occasional smile on the faces of those who have been so wounded by this recession.

 

For their part, communicators need to be careful not to overstay their now-two-year-long visit to the muck of the economic downturn but to get in front of the tide of positive stories that may be coming our way.

 

Here are a few areas that we should be preparing to explore as the well-known new reality becomes the next-new-reality:

· The impact that health care reform is having on each and all segments of our nation, now that legislation is likely to pass within the next 60 days. 

· Many manufacturers already have geared up for a clean and green future and are likely to rise to the top rapidly as the economy recovers, while online companies have learned the value of virtual relationships and will build an even broader base for their growth.

· The dwindling distinction between “media” and “social media” as blogs, social networks, comment sections of news sites and crowd-generated stories become the trusted, word-of-mouth methodology for communicating news. 

· As the economy improves, will the fortunes of print editions do the same?  Not likely. Instead, watch for respected—and now jobless—journalists forming more collective Web sites where they will publish their investigative feature articles.

·  The return of entertainment in exciting new forms.  After cutting back during the recession, Americans will want to be cutting up during the recovery—without the lavish spending that got them into trouble way back 24 months ago.  We should be watching for the impact of 3D television, coming to homes in 2010. 

So there’s the challenge, communicators.  A good-news world is coming—deal with it.

 

--Steve Friedman

 

(See the full version of this post at Steve's blog.)

Answering Obama’s challenge for Energy Awareness Month

President Obama has declared October 2009 to be National Energy Awareness Month, and has challenged all U.S. residents and companies to begin making clean energy choices that not only help rebuild the economy, but also help make it more sustainable.

 

As the world’s leading importer of oil, U.S. companies and residents are dependent on many other areas of the world to support its lifestyle. President Obama and his administration are trying changing that by turning the U.S. into the largest exporter of green and clean technology.

 

Promising technologies can support this goal, such as lithium-ion batteries  to replace oil engines in power tools and vehicles or LED light bulbs to replace fluorescent bulbs that clog landfills. Other technologies are being perfected every day to pull energy from water, wind and the sun so that we can reduce the amount of oil we need as a country. While it is unlikely that the U.S. will ever completely rid itself of a need for oil, merely reducing that need will go a long way toward helping the environment, as well as setting a global example.

 

Additionally, simple lifestyles choices that each and every one of us can make will help begin the U.S.’s transformation to a more “green” and sustainable place. Purchasing organic cleaners, moisturizers, and fertilizers that will not pollute the water and land when disposed of, and networking with other leaders who are interested in promoting progressive change can move the country toward more environmentally friendly and sustainable business practices. While these practices may not directly affect energy efficiency, they are part of a larger picture of creating a healthier, greener planet.

 

To honor the President’s energy vision, I encourage all of us to take a step back and look at how we can make small changes in our lives to be more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. While one person’s contribution may not seem significant, if everyone joins in to do their part, we as a nation can encourage a global shift in the way humans think about and use energy.

 

(Disclosure: Links in this post include current and past Airfoil clients Imara, Ilumisys and ecostore USA. Airfoil is a sponsor of eco Tuesdays in Detroit.)

 

-- Caitlin Cassady

Fifty Years After The Twilight Zone, Creepiness Abides

This month, a time of creepy-scary Halloween visions, marks the 50^th anniversary of the creepiest, scariest—and most intelligent and entertaining—science fiction series of all time:  The Twilight Zone. 

 

From its first broadcast in 1959, each program kept its huge fan base guessing right up to the last twist.  When the covered-wagon leader walked over the hill to discover a highway and a diner, when the U.S. astronaut dominating an alien race of Lilliputians was himself squashed by a newly arrived colossus—ohhh, when doctors uncovered the patient’s horribly disfigured bandaged face after a failed operation to reveal a gorgeous woman living in a world of monstrous visages—viewers shivered from coast to coast.

 

The kinds of surprise twists that an earlier generation enjoyed in the much more down-to-earth short stories of O. Henry were popularized on the tube by Rod Serling’s now-classic series.  And while they were literally chilling out in front of The Twilight Zone each week, Americans also were absorbing lessons in tolerance, peace, love and understanding.  Long before the Hippies, Rod Serling was sitting in our living rooms with images that placed each of us in front of our own mirrors to reflect on our vanities, biases and baseless fears.

 

Half a century later, with racial prejudice still bubbling, with increasing polarization between those who would push us left and those who would tug us right, with citizens who see government as a lifesaver and citizens who see it as a life-taker shouting at one another, we could use an update of The Twilight Zone.  Without it, however, the job of showing us ourselves falls to perhaps less-acclaimed communicators—news media, bloggers, tweeters, commenters and all of us who take part in the public forum. 

 

Let’s strive to quash the creepy sordidness we’re feeling in our communications with each other these days. 

 

Let’s unwrap the blinders from our eyes and see more of the beauty in each other’s point of view.  

 

Let’s attempt to work our way over the hill and beyond the twilight zone to a brighter, more intelligent and more welcoming way of treating opinions and each other.

 

-- Steve Friedman (Steve also blogs at http://stevefriedman.wordpress.com/)

Giving Optimists a Voice

If you’ve read Time magazine or the Wall Street Journal lately, you may have gotten the feeling that Detroit is a) so devastated it’s now as interesting as New Orleans post-Katrina or b) everyone is focusing on Detroit to watch the explosion and see where the dust settles.

As a born and raised Detroiter, I’ve recently learned a lot about the history of my hometown from these articles.  I’ve also been fascinated by the tone because I am optimistic about and confident in the city’s future—a question of faith that has been posed to me recently by several friends as a result of these stories.  And, beside the city-dwellers that I talk to on a daily basis, it seems that a lot of other people feel that way too.  According to a story posted Tuesday on Crain’s Detroit Business, a recent Gallup study found that Detroiters have become increasingly attached to the city since last year. 

So what does this mean to PR professionals? Negative news always gets attention, but don’t be afraid to tell the positive story too, even if it is just one individual or company leading the charge.  Here at Airfoil, we work day in and day out with individuals who strive to not only make a difference professionally, but to leave a positive mark on their community as well. Get out there and tell those stories—the world needs to hear the reasons why they should care and stand behind Detroit.

 

-- Kaitlin Slattery

Wearing the pants in the relationship

One of my passions in life is a good pair of denim. Lame, no. Expensive, yes. Unimportant/shallow, maybe. But the word pants has always lent itself to meaning something more than Japanese cross-stitching. Working in public relations puts this all in perspective.

The stitching between the media and public relation professionals is a fragile one that needs to be carefully hemmed. You see, no one likes to feel like they are inferior or that their opinion is not held in as high-esteem as the next guy's. Being conscience of how your message comes across can make all the difference. Being confident about a brand and image is a great quality, but each pitch angle needs to give the user some leg-room and flexibility.

In order to ensure that embarrassing need for a patch doesn't occur, switch up your approach by disguising your preference for taking control and molding the pitch for the reporter. This is especially true for social media who don't like to copy and paste but rather to form their own statement. Instead, be confident about your client and pitch the high-level topic rather than pushing a word for word statement.

And that's the fabric of our relationship.

-- Heather Arft

Wake up, NFL! Your reputation depends on it!

As I was driving in this morning, I heard a quick piece on the radio about how the NFL will not consider lifting its TV blackout for cities that cannot sell out stadiums – Detroit and Oakland being two of those cities.

At an average price of $75 per ticket in this economy, the NFL is slowly hanging itself. And - given all the bad press around the League with criminal conduct of players including former New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress - it is the perfect storm that likely could set back the NFL. Its reputation is at stake with loyal fans, like those in Detroit who despite the Lions 19-game losing streak, still care.

Shame on you, NFL. You need to learn a lesson from your baseball brothers – the MLB. Remember the 1994 strike? Greed is something no sports fan tolerates.

-- Leah Haran

SMBs Prefer Law & Order over 30 Rock

When it comes to chilling out in front of the tube, small- and midsized business owners prefer to cuddle up with a spicy drama vs. cackle with a comedy, according to primary research conducted by Airfoil.  Increasingly, the importance and influence of the small- and midsized business audience continues to increase. It’s crucial that companies understand how SMBs prefer communications to be delivered and what channels they favor.  

 

So, if you desire some SMB love, how compatible are you? Take this Airfoil Higher Thinking SMB Quiz and explore other key findings from our primary research.  Hopefully, you’ll make a better match than Liz Lemon and the Beeper King!

 

-- Leah Haran