Have a Pizza and Some Beer

Communication is essential in all aspects of life. It is defined as “the effective conveying of ideas or feelings or a means of connection between people and places” according to Google. Effective communication can make or break business and personal relationships. Throughout my studies this term I have explored topics such as effective listening and inspiring vision. I’ve learned about smart strategies for communicating during a crisis and effective leadership. Throughout each of these topics I have tried to examine my behaviors and strategies professionally as well as personally because essentially isn’t that what higher education should be about?

I have to laugh when I hear about initiatives like creating safe spaces on college campuses because opposing views are just too stressful for students to hear. How can you truly give a knowledgeable opinion on any topic without first being educated on that subject matter? In reflecting on the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor this past week I thought what a stark contrast to the generation we have today. When I was pursuing my bachelor’s degree back in the old days before the concept of safe spaces and pony ride therapy for stressed out college kids, I was exposed to many different topics by professors from all walks of life. As a side note, we ate too much pizza and drank too much beer to cope with our “life stress”.

Men of WWII 

Anyway, I had a physical science professor who was supposedly an atheist who cut off his finger as a test to see if God existed. I didn’t find him scary or feel I needed play dough therapy in order to cope, I was fascinated by him and his view of the world from the perspective of science. When I encountered an English professor who said the bible was simply a book of stories and metaphors I didn’t abandon my religion. It inspired me to dig deeper to discover why I believe what I believe. In my ripe old age of forty-two I have come to believe you should constantly be learning. My children make fun of me because one of my favorite shows is Aerial America on the Smithsonian channel. But I enjoy it because it’s a beautiful exhibition of our great nation and I have learned so many interesting facts like the real von Trapp family settled in Stowe, Vermont in the 1940’s.

So my point to this week’s blog is that we should never fear education or expanding our views. It makes us more well-rounded and gives us the ability to see the world as the complex place it is rather than our two dimensional bubble of everything that this pleasing to our narrow palate.

Don't Be the One Left Drowning

“If a Marketer and an IRS agent were both drowning, and you could only save one of them, would you go to lunch or read the paper?” Unfortunately, this can be the attitude professional marketer’s face on a regular basis within their organization. Marketing departments are viewed as the team that makes things look pretty.

This challenge is exacerbated by marketing departments failing to show true measurable outcomes and how those affect the bottom line. Your CFO is likely to see value because your Facebook page has two thousand followers unless you can show him or her how that creates value for your business.
Fortunately, in today’s world measuring marketing impressions has never been easier. Clicks, visits, bounce rates and other metrics can be meticulously measured through analytics provided by sources such as Google. Customer engagement can be tracked through Hashtags and Shares. We have focus groups and surveys that can help us keep our fingers on the pulse of the public to measure how a campaign will be perceived before it ever hits the universal market. Today’s marketing campaigns can be measured in quantitative forms better and more than ever before.

Websites like Ted.com are great examples of seeing how quantifiable results impact business. In March 2016 there were over 2,400 TedTalks available and in 2012 over one billion views (Ted.com). The website has won seven Webby Awards, a Peabody Award and an OMMA Award for video sharing (Webbyawards.com, Ted.com). Social engagement is what Ted.com does best. Engagementlabs.com evaluated the quantitative results of the NCAA March Madness sponsors in 2016. By using their “eValue” analytics they evaluated how each brand performed during the playoffs. Northwestern Mutual upset giant Coca Cola by effectively marketing using the following:

• Leveraging their association with the March Madness tournament to expand their reach and catch the attention of tournament fans.
• Tying key brand messages to the tournament to stay top of mind for tournament viewers.
• Tapping into human emotion with motivational March Madness-related content to connect better with their audiences.
• Employing relevant hashtags to capture audience attention across various channels.
• Following the tournament in real-time to stay ahead of viewers who were staying updated via social. (engagementlabs.com)

This is a fun look at the overall impact of a marketing campaign. Here is the link to the article:

https://www.engagementlabs.com/media-madness-2016-the-evalue-social-media-bracket/

So what are some of the quantitative parameters marketers should evaluate? Forbes writer Jason DeMers’ 2014 article “10 Online Marketing Metrics You Need to be Measuring” gives a great overview of the criteria you should be evaluating for your website. DeMers discusses how Total Visits “will give you a “big picture” idea of how well your campaign is driving traffic” while New Sessions will tell you how many new visitors you have coming to your site and how many of them are returning. He goes on to talk about even deeper measurements like Channel Specific Traffic, Bounce Rate, Conversions and Close Rate. Taking an in depth look at all of these can help your team evaluate the effectiveness of your website. My team used these elements to determine we had too much interference keeping visitors from getting to the main page we wanted them to visit. We were able to evaluate where on the page visitors were leaving and therefore how we needed to better position our pages and buttons that led to a call to action.

Social media is a relative new world of marketing and strategic communication. As has been discussed ad nauseam, too many organizations base their success on social media simply by their number of followers. Well having 20,000 followers on Twitter does you no good if those followers aren’t engaged. You are basically like a teenage girl just trying to gather as many followers as possible in order to have the bragging rights of “I have a gazillion followers”. Yet, no one cares really what your organization has to say.

There is tons of material available to guide marketing professionals on what they should be evaluating in their social media campaigns. In evaluating parameters like Reach which incorporate followers but also take it a step further to look at the number of Likes and Views to see how many people are really paying attention to what you have to say. Then by going a step further and looking at Engagement you can see just how compelling your communications were. How many people shred, retweeted or commented on your organizations posts?  Recently I wrote a personal blog about self-image and posted it really more for a couple of friends of mine who were really struggling with this issue. I was amazed at the engagement over this simple little blog that I thought only a couple of people would read. The page view is at close to 2,000 with tons of comments, likes and shares. Apparently, this topic resonated with a lot of women and even a couple of men.  When you are developing social media campaigns professionally you have to evaluate how and how often you are truly engaging your audience. Are you posting the same boring topics your competitors are posting? Would you be compelled to like, comment or share your posts? As I write this blog I am putting together my business unit’s social media plan for 2017. I want to evaluate the how and why but I also need to set some quantitative goals and parameters in order to judge our success. I am evaluating our sales goals and business unit objectives in order to develop a campaign that can help support those goals and initiatives. BY developing our social media campaign with these objectives in mind, I can relay these parameters and the quantitative results back to leadership in order to show that marketing does play an important role in the business efforts and results and is there for more than just to make things look pretty.

Marketers can make campaigns look pretty, however if they fail to produce a desired action then they are pretty much like the Hope Diamond sitting in the Natural Museum of History in Washington, D.C.. It’s great to admire but can never be worn and put to use. So when developing marketing campaigns be sure you are looking at as many measurable results as possible. Create value in what you do and maybe just maybe someone will think you are worth diving in to save.

Crisis Averted

“Sometimes you need a little crisis to get your adrenaline flowing and help you realize your potential.”  states Jeannette Walls in The Glass Castle and oh how true this is. Whether in life or business how you manage a crisis reveals a lot about your character and ability to weather the storms that come at you. I remember when I was a senior in high school and preparing to try out for majorette with the Sound of the South at Troy and I was having difficulty with a particular part of a routine. I was frustrated and sat down on the ground and begin to cry. About that time my father walked outside and asked what the problem was. I told him. He looked at me and said “Well you have two choices. You can sit here and cry about it and not accomplish a thing or you can get up and keep working at it until you get it right”. For some reason, those words have stuck with me throughout my life. Trying times will come and you have a choice in how you choose to react. Strategic communications in times of crisis is no different. You can’t “sit there and cry about it”, you have to have a game plan to deal with the crisis at hand and the impact it will have on your organization in the future. As Neil Chapman says in his 2011 Chartered Institute of Public Relations interview on the BP oil spill that resulted from the Deepwater Horizon explosion, “there’s not much you can say to make it better, but a lot you can say to make it worse”. He goes on to talk about how all of the different agencies involved in the incident and cleanup had to work together communicate effectively in order to get things back on track.  They had to repair the damage done to BP’s reputation. BP’s CEO Tony Hayward issued an apology and then a campaign followed discussing BP’s ongoing commitment to restoration and amends.

There are numerous examples of companies who faced crisis situations and chose to face the situation head on. In the study “Linking Crisis Management and Leadership Competencies: The Role of Human Resource Development” by Lynn Perry Wooten and Erika Hayes James, they examined leadership competencies during crisis situations. Alaska Airlines, Ford and Merck were a few of the companies whose executives exhibited most of the five phases of crisis management well. Consequently, all of those companies came out of those crisis situations faring well. Many of these organizations are stronger than before the crisis situation.
Now let’s consider a new public relations crisis of sorts fresh out of the headlines. A couple of days ago an unruly fan got an up close encounter with country music star Luke Bryan. According to video footage and news reports, the fan was flipping off the singer and continuously making rude comments. Apparently Luke Bryan had enough so he came off stage and had a brief physical altercation with the fan. As his publicist now what? What are your next moves? His team issued a statement saying “"A man in [the] front row was making crude hand gestures toward Luke during his performance," the statement reads. “It was insulting not only to him, but more importantly to the men, women and families sitting around him who were there to support and celebrate Charlie Daniels and the efforts of raising money for the military veterans -- some of who were in the audience. The concert security personnel saw the man's disruptive actions of the event and he was escorted out."

The media began with reports that the star “punched” the fan. Eonlinenews.com’s headline read “Here's Why Luke Bryan Punched a Fan in the Middle of His Concert”, however from the video it looks more like he really just shoved the man’s head. Nonetheless, Luke Bryan’s public relations team now has an issue to handle. In keeping with the discussion of the five phases of crisis management discussed earlier let’s discuss how some of these may fit this situation. Looking at Signal Detection, thankfully there does not seem to be a history of confrontations with fans for Luke Bryan. In fact, according to reports from 2013 (WKBR) and 2015 (whiskeyriff.com) Bryan has a history of criticizing violence at his shows and events. However, considering he got directly involved in breaking up a fight in 2013, it would seem the singer does have a history of stepping into situations he should let his event security handle. This leads to the next step of Preparation and Prevention, by allowing his event security to handle these situations, he can avoid potentially reputation damaging scenarios not to mention some that could result in legal issues. We know in our litigious society, people are always looking for a reason to sue a big celebrity and make a quick buck. I think Luke Bryan’s publicist handled Damage Control and Containment well. Instead of simply looking like Luke Bryan was defending his honor; the situation was made to look like he was defending the honor of veterans and their families, since the concert was in their honor. Using the Evading Responsibility through provocation component of the Image Restoration Theory, his team is able to suggest his response was warranted because of the fans actions. This is a perfect strategy especially for the typical country music fan. According to a 2004 Gallup survey, over sixty percent of country music fans identified themselves as Republicans which tends to support a strong military and veterans benefits. The typical “good ol’ country boy” won’t see a whole lot wrong with Luke Bryan “defending” the honor of military veterans and their families.

In conclusion, crisis management is a comprised of many different elements but the biggest piece is what you say and how you say it. Devising the right message, with the right tone, delivering it at the right time and following up with comparable actions will go a long way in managing a crisis situation. Whether you are BP, Merck or Luke Bryan, trusting your communications teams to craft that message is crucial. Strong crisis management plans can hopefully minimize the damage and help keep another crisis averted.