Posted by Alex on February 28, 2010 · 1 Comment
When I decided to “go solo” and start AlexanderG Public Relations, LLC, I asked some trusted friends for some direct and candid answers to one question:
Knowing me (and my work) as you do, would you hire me and why?
Trust me, these are some very close friends. They are the type of friend who will tell you your breath isn’t so fresh or that you look like you got dressed in the dark. Both have also worked with me in professional capacities as colleagues and/or clients. Now, I’m not going to sprain my elbow by engaging in personal backslapping (please read my testimonials page for some very kind words), nor will I go the self-immolation route by reporting anything that wasn’t me at my best. What I will say is that I was humbled and pleased that yes, they would hire me. I particularly liked these statements:
You’re dedicated to your project. You’re insightful and can get extremely focused.
I like these statements because it indicates I’m in the right line of work. Dedication, insight and focus are all byproducts of doing what you love. If you love what you do, chances are you do great work. That’s what I offer my clients.
P.S.
Okay. I will reveal one “negative” comment a friend made:
Your love of Halloween is a little creepy. Did you really have children just so you could go Trick or Treating again?
Posted by Alex on February 26, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Thanks for all the great comments, congratulations, suggestions and goodwill on the launch of AlexanderG Public Relations! I’m thrilled and blessed to have so many friends, peers and yes, even competitors.
I’m all about sharing and building partnerships, and you guys have just reinforced that it is indeed the best policy.
A special thanks to Shelly Kramer and her team. They did a magnificent job on this website and Shelly truly embodies the spirit of sharing, building and positivity.
Hope you have a great weekend. If you get a chance, come on by and join our Facebook fans, connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line. I’d love to have a cup of Joe with you and find ways we can help each other succeed.
Best wishes!
–Alex
Posted by Alex on February 25, 2010 · 3 Comments
(Sorry I’m a little late to the party on this one…had to get my new blog up before I could post this.)
Front line staff should be a direct extension of your public relations team. Just ask the folks at Southwest Airlines, who flew into some rough air when they booted famed geek, film director and “Silent Bob” legend Kevin Smith for being “too wide to fly.”
You’ve doubtless heard at least part of the story. Smith norm
Mr. Smith Goes to...the Terminal
ally buys two seats “for comfort” when he flies, but went for a standby flight that didn’t have two seats available. Thus he tried to cram his corpulent self into one seat and was soon removed from the plane due to “safety risks” in accordance to Southwest’s “customers of size” policy.
It’s as if Smith became the real-life Hurley on Oceanic 815. No wait, Hurley was never hustled off the doomed plane due to his portly proportions. (Heck he even had a guitar case with him.) If he had been, ‘Lost’ would be far less interesting in my book. Hmm.
In other words: a famous guy, with more than 1.6 million Twitter followers was humiliated publicly and unnecessarily. Hell, even if he weren’t famous, didn’t anyone learn from United’s broken guitar incident?
Now Smith is flooding his Twitter account with nasty notes to/about Southwest. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance is screaming for a Southwest boycott; all uncharted waters for “America’s Favorite Airline.”
“If a customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement,” Southwest said in a statement on their blog entitled “Not So Silent Bob”. They also offered him a $100 travel voucher.
I cannot disagree that being crammed into my seat because the guy beside me is overflowing his own is a drag and really aggravates me. I suspect a lot of flyers will feel the same way and offer support to Southwest. But that’s not enough to avert a PR meltdown.
What this really gets down to is the fact that Southwest humiliated a passenger; a famous passenger at that. One whose bulk famously broke a toilet, yes, but more importantly one who has more than a million people willing to listen to him say “Go F*ck Yourself, Southwest” and liken its service to that of a “bus.”
I suspect Southwest’s PR team probably has felt fairly immunized by years of “love” from their customers. This event—where front line staff react to a situation in the worst possible way—is proof that public relations shouldn’t be reactive. It should be proactive.
Front line staff should have known better; and if it isn’t the PR department’s responsibility to make sure staff are trained correctly in these matters, then they should have made it their business long ago. Your first line of defense against bad Public Relations is your front line service staff. They’re the difference between people chewing the fat about how great you are or throwing your fat in the fire.
Filed under Crisis Communications Plans, Public Relations · Tagged with Bad pr, Hugo on Lost, Hurley Lost, Kevin Smith, Kevin Smith Fat, Oceanic 815, Public Relations, public relations blog, public relations kansas city, Southwest Airlines
Posted by Alex on February 12, 2010 · 3 Comments
My column in the October 2009 issue of KC Small Business is about making your employees into brand ambassadors. As an unapologetic fan of both, I thought Starbucks and Star Trek were good examples. So, here’s a taste. Click on the link below the excerpt to beam over to the entire article.
Excerpt:
The heart of your repeat business model is the mechanism that perpetuates the best aspects of your company: your employees. Some of the best companies in the world foster a culture that makes employees into brand ambassadors. The company trains and empowers employees to embody the company’s brand message.
At Starbucks, everyone from the barista to the CEO is on message about the company’s environmentally friendly, pro-trade policies and giving customers the “coffee shop experience” with every cup. Even better, Starbucks has been successful in making their customers into brand ambassadors. It speaks volumes that in today’s challenging economy, you still see brand-loyal people start their day with the iconic, premium-priced Starbucks cup in hand.
So how do you make your employees into brand ambassadors? Start with your “elevator speech.” If you were on an elevator and someone asked you what your company does, could you explain it in a coherent, appealing way in less than a minute?
Let’s take a page from the summer blockbuster movie Star Trek. You don’t have to be a Trek fanatic to know the mission statement of the starship Enterprise: “To seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” In All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek, Dave Marinaccio aptly points out that every crewmember—from the lowly (and generally short-lived) red-shirted crewman to the elite bridge officers—knows the ship’s mission and “brand.”
Read the entire article here
Of course, hailing frequencies are open (the comments section) for your thoughts, mind-melds, or favorite barista joke.
Posted by Alex on February 5, 2010 · 1 Comment
I’m asked what I do all the time. Occasionally I’m asked why I do it. Kind of a “what’s it all about, Al G?” question.
My answer? Stories.
I’ve always been attracted to stories: reading them in books, watching them on stage and screen or listening at my grandfather’s knee. As a youngster into early adulthood I acted in plays and occasionally tried my hand at writing stories–partially because I’m a big ham but mostly because I loved being part of a story. Of course, I’m not the only one.
Since we first took breath thousands of years ago, humans have used storytelling as a means to learn and share information. Campfires, cave drawings, coliseums, prosceniums, books, radio, TV…humans have found ways to spread the word as quickly as spilled water finds cracks in the desert floor.
Today we are no different, except we have so many more ways to tell stories. Besides the “classic” methods–books, newspapers, radio, TV, smoke signals–we now have the electronic behemoth of the World Wide Web. Blogs, chat rooms, message boards, Twitter, YouTube, eBooks, webcasts…if you’re reading this chances are you know something about all of these tools for information sharing.
These tools have changed the game on the news media. The internet has made it possible for everyone to share his or her story. That’s good. It’s also not so good if you have a story you want to tell about your product, service, organization or cause. Why?
Millions of stories flood the web, all vying for the attention of the most credible sources. Sure, you can tell your story on your own blog, but who’s reading it? The ideal strategy is to get your story into the hands of credible sources with lots of eyeballs watching. That starts with news media and high traffic purveyors of information and opinion on the web.
In that lies the challenge and the reason why experienced public relations professionals are important now more than ever. But don’t just take my word for it (from the Jan. 14, 2010 edition of The Economist):
According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more than 10% in 2009.
PR has done well in part because it is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns. Its impact, in the form of favourable coverage in the media or online, can also be more easily measured. Moreover, PR firms are beginning to encroach on territory that used to be the domain of advertising firms, a sign of their increasing clout. They used chiefly to pitch story ideas to media outlets and try to get their clients mentioned in newspapers. Now they also dream up and orchestrate live events, web launches and the like.
“When you look at advertising versus public relations, it’s not going to be those clearly defined silos,” says Christopher Graves, the boss of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. “It may be indistinguishable at some point where one ends and the other begins.”
PR has also benefited from the changing media landscape. The withering of many traditional media outlets has left fewer journalists from fewer firms covering business. That makes PR doubly important, both for attracting journalists’ attention, and for helping firms bypass old routes altogether and disseminate news by posting press releases on their websites, for example.’
As I said, it’s about stories. Advertising is great at telling people about your products and services, but people still innately know it’s a sales pitch. Public relations professionals identify what is most interesting (sexy, funny, informative, odd, crazy, etc.) about you, your product, service or cause and package it for the media in a way that gets their attention. If the media finds your story interesting and tells it to their audience, you are granted something advertising will never get you: credibility.
So, when people ask me what I do, I say I tell stories. Sure, I still write fiction and one of these days I’ll get back into community theatre (if they will have me); but my profession is based on telling your story–getting your message out.
That’s what it’s all about.
