Should a small business owner get out and work “in the trenches” among the employees?  In an emergency?  Every day?
My husband works for a small engineering company with 30 employees.  The owner works on projects, pitches in when a deadline must be met or when someone is ill, and he’s been known to clean up the office after a meeting.
This sounds like a great thing – a small business owner working along with the employees. But is it?  I don’t think so.
“A business owner’s job is strategic, not tactical.” This from Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, my …read more

Media used to be a solid thing: newspapers, TV, radio.
Now, with the Internet, and Web 2.0, it’s all beginning to blur. I’ve seen it. You’vve seen it. And now, someone has quantified it.
Ketchum and the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center recently released thier survey results which says that media isn’t quite as solid as it used to be. And because of it, target markets are fragmenting.
Shannon Nelson (the other great PR Shannon, who happens to be from Pierce Mattie) tells us that education and creativity is key in helping PR firms and their clients reach these …read more

Sure, no airline is perfect. But I have to admit Southwest comes pretty darn close.
Why? They know that good PR comes down to one thing: happy customers. It’s a tough job, especially when you are an airline.

But when they do it, they do it well.
I just learned on Twitter, directly from Southwest (Yes, even they are on Twitter!) that they’ve teamed up with The Container Store to wrap passengers gifts at the Southwest Airline Gates in Dallas, Denver and Phoenix.
It may not seem like a big deal but think about it for a moment…
Thousands of passengers carry their gifts on …read more

There’s been a lot of chatter this weekend about how many PR agencies are closing their doors, or at least cutting their staff.
Many are pointing to the economy, but I have an additional answer: social media.

As I wrote last week, many PR people are still doing public relations they way the learned it in college or from their first mentor.
That’s wrong. Here’s why?
A recent study from the Society of New Communication Research showed that 57 percent of respondents feel social media tools are becoming more valuable. They pointed to the fact that  consumers are using them more and more as …read more

The average human brain isn’t trained to perform memorization tricks in front of an audience.
So maybe we should alter our language and our powers of persuasion to accommodate the vast majority of us drones who are comfortable holding three concepts in our head at a time.
A simpler approach has inherent advantages over a complex one.
1)  Things with fewer moving parts have fewer ways to break down.
2)  A single, simple thought has a better chance of being repeated accurately than binder full of strategic plans.
3)  Our eyes and ears seek out the single element that contrasts against the background. A complex …read more

We’ve all experienced the rogue employee who wipes out any goodwill you felt for a restaurant or a service supplier with their attitude.
Well, corporate cultures can be just as toxic to the customer relationship, but instead of one dysfunctional “brand ambassador,” you have a company full of them.
Valeria Maltoni offers two examples of ways companies sabotage the customer relationship. On her Fast Company blog, she describes the way companies drive away customers with poorly thought-out cost cutting efforts.
On her Conversation Agent blog, she talks about measuring brand value, and how a weak or non-existent brand strategy can destroy your sales.
Put …read more

If Microsoft doesn’t want to buy Yahoo, why do executives keep talking about the acquisition-gone-wrong?
The continued dribble of comments about potential side-deals and semi-deals must be distracting to Microsoft employees, who are in the middle of the company’s transformation from Bill Gates’ company to an entity that embraces open architectures and web-based apps interconnecting in a cloud.
Does MSFT even know what messages it wants to be sending investors, regulators, the public and customers?
Microsoft Says Chances of Yahoo Takeover Negligible (Reuters)
Shocker: Yahoo Shoots Carl Icahn as Microsoft Messenger (Kara Swisher)
For a mega-corporation, Microsoft is acting like a teenage boy at a …read more

The interconnectedness of public relations and marketing is evident when you see a company effectively differentiating itself from its competitors. But even the most coordinated efforts have to amplify something true about your company.
Revolutionary advertising teamed up with bland media relations won’t get you where you want to be.
Setting yourself apart in the public’s mind will fail miserably if the customer experience doesn’t live up to the billing.
If employees and business partners don’t buy into the idea that you really are a different company, they’ll pass on their skepticism  to customers.
Southwest Airlines and Canada’s WestJet have been very effective …read more

It’s not every industry that gives away what would ordinarily be the key proprietary assets: source codes, communication protocols, content.
In the spirit of barcamps and podcamps before it, Jeremiah Owyang is offering to hold an impromptu trade-show-cum-unconference that defies the rules of trade shows. Instead of the vendors’ products and services being at the centre of things, this event would bring vendors of content management systems together to explore opportunities for common standards, joint action, even mergers and acquisitions.
All in response to his blog post about the research report he’s writing about vendors in the content management/social networking field.
Yes, this …read more

The Canadian Autoworkers’ Union is appalled that GM is closing factories that produce trucks and performance cars.
Their showdown with management fizzled recently when the courts ruled they couldn’t blockade GM offices and plants just because they don’t like decisions made by management.
How utterly lame.
CAW head Buzz Hargrove was patting himself on the back a couple of years ago, when GM announced they would be producing Camaros in Canada.
Was the company’s increasing reliance on the high profit margins of SUVs, power cars and pick-up trucks a good long-term direction for the company?
Let’s see, gas prices steadily rising. Concern for …read more