Category: PR Trends

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By Rhonda Abrams on Sept. 18, 2015

Copyright, Rhonda Abrams, 2015

This article originally ran in USA Today on September 18, 2015

As a small business owner you have a lot on your plate — creating your product or delivering your service, managing your money, motivating your employees, ensuring operations run smoothly.

Phew! How do you find time to actually attract customers? For an overwhelmed small business owner, how do you manage to take care of one of your most critical business tasks: marketing?

Each year, I talk to thousands of entrepreneurs around the country. The one question  I get the most: “How do I attract more customers?” Marketing is always top of mind, but often the lowest task on the to-do list.

The truth is you will have to invest some time into marketing. But think of it as just that — an investment. But how can you increase the return-on-investment? How can you get the most marketing bang with the least amount of time?

There’s no magic bullet, of course. But if you’re thoughtful, these seven marketing tactics can save you time and bring in customers.

1. Put your marketing on auto-pilot.

Email is still an extremely effective method of keeping your name in front of prospects and customers. Whether it’s a newsletter, announcement of special discounts, free content, regular communication into an in-box works. Fortunately, you can set up and schedule a whole series of such communications using services like Constant Contact, Vertical Response, MailChimp or others. You can easily set up a series to automatically go to every new prospect or customer who registers to receive communication from you. To entice prospects to provide you with their names and email addresses, offer them something of value in exchange. Once you have the addresses, auto-responders trigger so your series begins to go to their in-boxes.

2. Schedule a few hours for social media.

Your customers expect to see you on social media but that doesn’t mean you should be dealing with it all day long. Spend an hour every two weeks to plan what you will post for those weeks. Choose pics and write your brief posts. Use a tool like Hootsuite or TweetDeck to schedule your posts in advance. During the week, check in occasionally and respond to comments.

3. Focus your social media efforts.

Do you really need to be on absolutely every social media site? No. Stick to the social media sites that work best for you. If you have highly visual content — you run a restaurant or food company, a doggy day care or an art studio — Facebook and Instagram might work best for you. A company that sells creative items? Then Etsy or Pinterest might be the right choice. Are you running a B2B (business-to-business) company?  LinkedIn might be your best bet.

4. Join a local organization and go regularly. 

Nothing beats the effectiveness of face-to-face marketing. Yes, this takes time away from the office or shop. But it’s a great way to get new customers and generate referrals. If you schedule this, it becomes a regular part of your month.

5. Look for a strategic partnership.

You don’t have to do everything alone. A strategic partnership is a relationship with another company for promotion, distribution, product development, or add-on sales. A strong strategic partner that’s already serving your target market can give you a real edge in reaching that market. For example, if you run a yoga studio, you could work on a marketing campaign with a local spa.

6. List your company online.

This is a no-brainer. Make sure prospects can find you online when they’re looking for a business like yours. Spend a few minutes listing your company’s location, hours, photos and other business information on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yelp.

7. Get help.

If you don’t have time to put some of these marketing strategies into place or to maintain them, hire someone who can.

Whatever you do, make sure you make marketing a priority. A bit of time now will reap rewards for months to come. The hardest part is just getting started.

[To comment: larry at larry litwin dot com]

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 This week’s blog comes from:

Dale Carnegie Training Newsletter

By Anita Zinsmeister, President — anita.zinsmeister@dalecarnegie.com
Dale Carnegie® Training of Central & Southern New Jersey 

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.” Peter Drucker 

[To comment: larry at larry litwin dot com]

 This week’s blog comes from:

Dale Carnegie Training Newsletter

By Anita Zinsmeister, President — anita.zinsmeister@dalecarnegie.com
Dale Carnegie® Training of Central & Southern New Jersey 

As a small business owner, managing your time and expectations are extremely important if you want to maintain the proper focus. I struggle with this issue and can be easily distracted by a phone call or a tendency to check my emails more often than is probably needed.

Time management is one of those skills no one teaches you in school but you have to learn. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t organize information well enough to take it in. And it doesn’t matter how skilled you are if procrastination keeps you from getting your work done..

I’m going to share some of my favorite time management skills in this post. I hope they will help you.

1. My personal favorite – cut the clutter. Keep a clean desk and desktop, clutter can be very distracting.
2. Use your peak productivity time well and make sure you get sufficient rest. Coffee will not assist you forever. It’s OK to take breaks throughout the day. Some of us are ‘morning people’ others are ‘night owls.’ You know what your strengths and weaknesses are better than me.
3. It’s most important to know how you structure your day and manage your time that makes the difference. Know the best days and times to target your prospective clients or targeted companies – which may be different than you first think.
4. Set daily goals for yourself and making sure you don’t work past your burn out time. This might include networking in person, making follow-up calls, writing a business proposal or putting a budget together – each day complete one specific goal – you’ll feel much better being able to check something off your ‘to do’ list.
5. It’s absolutely OK to block out some non-planned activities. Life happens and there will also be some unexpected event or emergencies to deal with. Or maybe you’re under the weather.
6. Plan for some specific time away from the computer and phone, 30 minutes a day. By that, I don’t mean a coffee break or to eat a meal. Talk a walk, run some errands, anything to take your mind off your business. Meet a friend for a cup of coffee.
7. Start your day by prioritizing what you need to get done (To-do list!). Block time out on your calendar each day to ensure you get work done.
8. When you are on a deadline and you need to finish something – Close your door (if you have one), put your phone on “send to voicemail”, close your email, and turn off the instant messenger. It is liberating! Not everything is urgent; yes, some things can wait until the next day.
9. Minimizing distractions – distractions are a big time waster. A lot of us have this constant urge to check our email every 15 minutes. There are many other common distractions and it is important to limit them.
10. Make sure social networks serve your purpose. Do you really need to be on all of them? Pick one or two that are really important and discard the rest. Be careful not to check your social sites while at work. It is a big time waster even if big brother is not watching.
11. Decide the time or times when you will check mail and stick to those times. There will always be some distracting message in your in box. Keep your emails short. That is how they are meant to be. Use the phone in preference to email where feasible.
12. Know your target company or companies whether it will be for job search or to find business partners. Starting out, that’s one of the most important things to consider. If you’re not sure what you want to do, it’ll be hard for you to communicate that to another client or company
13. Yes weekends are a time to take a break, but not entirely. Use weekends to review the previous week’s successes (and failures) which will give you the opportunity to prepare your upcoming week. The goal is to hit the ground running on Monday morning.‘

Can you think of more time management tips? Please let me know in the comments!

[To comment: larry at larry litwin dot com]

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Visiting Philadelphia, New York and D.C. last month, Pope Francis  showed us a leadership style we can all learn from. (For more on leadership, check out The Public Relations Practioner’s Playbook for (all) Strategic Communicators via www.larrylitwin.com. It is loaded with excellent strategies and tactics for today’s “leaders.”)

By William Vanderbloemen

“Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change.” Those were the words shared—on Twitter—by Pope Francis, Time‘s “Person of The Year” in 2013, who assumed the pontificate that year and has since projected a transformational leadership style.

Those who aren’t spiritual leaders should also rethink what their most important responsibilities are—people over processes, names over numbers.

That approach has earned him titles like “Holy Reformer” and “The People’s Pope.” In New York City today on a visit to the United States, Pope Francis reflects not just the changing tenor of the Catholic Church but evolving ideas about leadership itself. That makes his trip this week a perfect time for entrepreneurs, CEOs, politicians, and other leaders of all stripes to reflect on their own leadership styles. Here are five lessons all of them can learn from the Pope’s.

1. Be Accessible

Pope Francis is arguably best known for availability and openness to the public. On his first day as Pope, he reversed the tradition of blessing the people by inviting them to bless him instead. He’s since decided to ride in a bus with his team rather than in a bulletproof limousine. Pope Francis has also been seen getting around Rome in a Ford Focus and a Fiat during his U.S. visit.

Personal, handwritten thank-you notes and birthday lunch invitations to the homeless of Rome take priority in his schedule and exemplify his leadership vision.

Those who aren’t spiritual leaders should also rethink what their most important responsibilities are—people over processes, names over numbers. Accessibility sows trust and loyalty among colleagues and customers, making other transformations possible.

2. Don’t Ignore Social Media

The Pope is a tweeting aficionado. His primary Twitter handle (@Pontifex) is the English-language equivalent of eight others—in Latin, Arabic, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and German. And the English account alone has 7.3 million followers. In other words, communication matters, especially digitally.

Social media has proved one of the most effective—and democratic—mediums for influencing current generations. Its 140-character interface is clear, concise, and relatable, whether you’re a Starbucks barista, a Fortune 500 CEO, or anyone in between. For any business leader who has an idea to offer or a message to convey, social media is the main avenue for doing so. But bear in mind that the social sphere is about sparking conversation, not dictating from on high. The Pope’s tweets are popular not just because he’s the Pope, but because they’re humble, inviting, and pluralistic.

3. Flatten Your Organization

Pope Francis bypassed bureaucracy and reevaluated his organizational structure. He started with his own title, changing it from the “Supreme Pontiff” to the “Bishop of Rome.” Upon adjusting and delegating some of the papacy’s traditional responsibilities, he took a radical approach to age-old customs and rearranged his management team, reducing its sense of hierarchy.

As a result of Pope Francis’s innovative methods, the organization of the papacy got flatter. As a result, the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work referred to him as an “intrepreneur”—someone who generates genuine, sustainable change in an organization that’s resistant to it.

In the first few months of his papacy, Pope Francis took risks.

Flattening an organization can be one of the best ways business leaders can institute their vision without relying on the prevailing means. Restructure, revamp, and realign so that the top leadership drives the vision, and the subsequent layers can execute and sustain it.

4. Take Risks

In the first few months of his papacy, Pope Francis took risks. He made unprecedented claims and unconventional decisions. “To listen and to follow your conscience means that you understand the difference,” he wrote, reaching out to atheists and agnostics. He also proclaimed a year of jubilee for women who’ve had abortions but have since chosen to reflect on the Church’s teachings on the issue. It’s worth nothing that in both cases, Pope Francis didn’t revise Catholic doctrine, but his leadership style offered a refreshing new perspective to many who might have previously felt shut out.

In the business world today, many leaders are blinded by the fear of failure. Big changes are hard to make—they take time, and often many people, to institute—but messages are easy to change. Still, risk is vital to your business’s growth and your own development as a leader. Risk can help you rise, even though it sometimes leads to failure. But it will always prove a worthy teacher.

5. Value Input From Subordinates

Risk can help you rise, even though it sometimes leads to failure. But it will always prove a worthy teacher.

Pope Francis has shown he recognizes the intrinsic value of every person. First, he decided to transform the Synod of Bishops under his leadership into a decision-making body rather than a ceremonial group. And within his first 10 months at the Vatican, Pope Francis washed the feet of laity prisoners, women, and Muslims, rather than performing the ritual only on priests. He also refocused the role of bishops toward more pastoral activities, premised on the notion that human relationships should be esteemed above all else.

Leaders should approach the people in their organizations much the same. There’s real value in your lower subordinates—what they think and believe and the skills they offer—to achieve real progress. But it’s up to leaders to go out and seek that value, then develop it in everyone they lead.

In just two years, Pope Francis has taught us another lesson as well: It’s important to act. Start cultivating the right leadership style now, and you’ll begin writing your legacy today, rather than waiting for it to catch up with you later.

William Vanderbloemen is the coauthor of Next: Pastoral Succession That Works and president and CEO of Vanderbloemen Search Group, a startup that leads in executive search for churches, ministries, and faith-based organizations.

 [To comment: larry at larry litwin dot com]

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This comes from Eastern Michigan University’s Public Relations Student Society of America — Sept. 9, 2015

By: Katie Gerweck

It’s the beginning of a new school year, and for me it will be my last. I’m heading into my senior year, which means my schedule is full of tough classes, PRSSA duties, and work. Although I know it will be overwhelming at times, I’m going to try to stay ahead of the game this year and not fall behind. Although it can be tricky to juggle your different responsibilities, there are some steps you can take now that will help the rest of your semester go more smoothly. It’s not too late to form good habits and be prepared!

1. Make note of important dates and request them off work now.

Whether it’s an event for the club you’re in, an important family event, or a meeting for your second job, there are probably a couple days this semester that you’ll need off from work. Put them in the calendar in your phone or your planner so you won’t forget and request those days off from work as soon as possible to make sure you can attend.

2. Get a planner and use it!

A lot of students start out diligently noting homework assignments in their planner, only to abandon the practice two weeks in. But keeping a planner is a great way to help you keep track of assignments and remind you of upcoming deadlines. Check out Rachel’s post on how to organize your to-do list for some helpful hints.

3. Ask other students about the classes you’re taking.

If it’s early in the semester, it can sometimes be difficult to know what to expect from certain classes. How difficult is the class going to be? How does the professor run the course? Do you really need the textbook, or can you save $100 and just use your notes? If you’re not sure, find a student who has already taken the class and ask them for advice. You’ll feel more prepared.

4.Log off from social media.

Social media and websites like YouTube and Netflix can be distracting when you’re trying to get work done, and it’s hard to find the willpower to pull yourself away. If you know social media is going to be a problem for you, it might be time to take drastic measures. Before working on a big project, have your roommate change the passwords on your most distracting sites and keep them hidden from you until you get your work done.

Katie Gerweck is a senior majoring in public relations with a minor in journalism. She is the editor-in-chief for EMU PRSSA, and also works as a copy editor for the Eastern Echo. She was the copy chief for the Echo during the summer of 2015.

EMU PRSSA | September 9, 2015

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