As we enter 2021, the world at large and corporate communications teams, in particular, find themselves at a significant turning point. What will be the new normal?

Whether corporate communications is an opportunity area for your company — or you are a Public Relations (PR) practitioner — there are several new ways for you to up your company’s game in the year to come.

Here are my predictions for what to expect in 2021 and how to capitalize on the changes taking place.

Corporate Reputation as a Key Success Metric

During this era of disruption and uncertainty, corporate values and brand activism have become more important than…

Coronavirus’ Biggest Mouths

There are a lot of talking heads out there when it comes to the novel coronavirus, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York stands head and shoulders above the others.

Using Onclusive’s media monitoring system, I analyzed the digital media coverage of various prominent figures related to the COVID-19 epidemic from March 1, 2020 through April 30th, 2020. What immediately jumps out is how dominant Gov. Cuomo’s voice is in the media.

Of course, President Trump gets more coverage on the topic than Gov. Cuomo. Still, Gov. Cuomo garners substantially more than governors of other large states, for example, Gavin…

Much ado is made about how much political candidates spend on advertising. Why? I suspect there are many reasons we analyze this ad spend, but from my perspective, the important lesson is that correlation is not always causation. Let’s sort this out and then examine three ways you can shape public opinion for your company like a master of the political realm.

Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics and economics professor at the University of Chicago, analyzed the effect of campaign spending by studying U.S. House elections between 1972 and 1990. According to Levitt’s findings, “Campaign spending has an extremely small…

Drive Sales & Build Your Brand

5 Key Marketing Strategies to Leverage Your Efforts

In my musings about marketing ventriloquism, the art and science of speaking through voices other than your own, I’ve covered a lot of ground. Why it is so gosh darn effective? How do you control the uncontrollable? How do you introduce it to your organization?

Now, let’s explore how marketing ventriloquism ties to other au courant marketing initiatives that may be underway in your organization: employee advocacy, content marketing, account-based marketing (ABM), industry analyst relations and marketing attribution.

Employee Advocacy

I’ll start with employee advocacy because it is a pure play form marketing ventriloquism…

Speaking in tongues that your customers believe

In my last article, I laid out the three steps to introduce marketing ventriloquism into your organization: focus on what you can control; install control systems; amplify earned media. I also speculated on some of the reasons more organizations are not connecting the dots internally to maximize marketing effectiveness in this way.

Now, let me walk you through the mechanics of wringing the most out of your content, teams and processes to improve marketing effectiveness via marketing ventriloquism and earned media amplification.

In the simplest terms, earned media amplification is the delivery of content produced by a third party to…

INSPIRE YOUR COMPANY

Every year we give out our company Values Awards. It is probably my favorite 20 minutes of the year.

I ripped this idea off from Dave Calhoun, currently the CEO of Boeing. When I worked for him at Nielsen, Dave called them the Chairman’s Awards.

After the gala dinner every year at the annual offsite, Dave would select a small group of individuals to honor for their “above and beyond” contribution to the company over the past year. Sounds like big company manufactured corporate culture hoopla, right? That is how I felt when I understood what was about to happen…

Put other voices in your customers’ heads

In my first article on marketing ventriloquism, I made the case for marketers talking through voices other than their own and explained that most marketers tend to rely on advertising because of a need for perceived control.

Content marketing is a positive step toward truly effective marketing communications in that it starts to drift away from advertising toward useful information provision, which is what your audience wants. It is also comfortable for most marketing professionals because they can still control it completely. But it is still you sharing information with your audience, and they know it.

One of my key…

COVID-19 is infecting our minds faster than our lungs

I think we have almost certainly just witnessed the fastest ever global adoption of a new word. And, maybe, the fastest diffusion of two words in the history of humanity.

Perhaps the only thing to spread faster than the “coronavirus” is its new name, COVID-19.

Words spread a lot like diseases — most of them never make it into the general lexicon. Few make it out of a group of people, much less achieve even colloquial or dialect status. Only a precious few make it into multilingual use.

The word coronavirus spread amazingly fast, once the disease exploded onto the…