Improve your communications with Ann’s consulting services

Do you need to bring in new clients? Communicate corporate messages? Help your organization achieve its goals and objectives?

If so, Wylie Communications can help with consulting services that range from critiquing your website to launching a new communication vehicle. Let us help you:

• Make communications more effective. We developed a blueprint to help FedEx transform its management magazine into a strategic tool for the organization’s success. Bring us in to help you align your communications to your organization’s goals.
• Revitalize a flagship piece. We revamped Saint Luke’s Health into a more effective, attractive, popular magazine — for the same budget as its less-appealing predecessor. We’d love to help you reboot an old favorite, as well.
• Stop reinventing the wheel. We gave General Dynamics C4 Systems a proposal template with a fill-in-the-blanks executive summary, guidelines and a before-and-after example to model. Let us create formulas, checklists and templates to make your communications more effective and less time-consuming.
• Outmaneuver the competition. We benchmarked a Motorola company’s press releases against those of its competitors, then delivered guidelines to help the company set the standards for media relations writing in the industry. Let us help you deliver best-of-class communications, too.
• Get an extra pair of hands — or four. We provide a virtual staff to write and edit newsletters and magazines for Saint Luke’s, Northern Trust, State Street/Kansas City and Sprint Corp. Let us pick up the slack in your department, too.

And more.

How may we help you? Contact me to discuss your project.

Might I rant for a moment?

BREAKING NEWS Your job isn't to report news; it's to change behavior. (Photo from the Library of Congress on Flickr)

Right this minute, all over the world, communicators are knocking themselves out to deliver organizational news that nobody wants or needs.

We’re exhausting our resources — not the least of which include our own time and our audience members’ attention — making sure the people know who won the corporate challenge billiards tournament, how many tons of concrete went into the new headquarters building and how thrilled we are to support the ballet’s spring season.

We’re doing battle with approvers over whether to use “that” or “which” in the fourth paragraph of news stories that nobody reads. We’re struggling to help content experts beat their 6,000-word essays on the award that engineering won down to the 30 words it actually deserves. And we’re smothering our readers with inconsequential blah-blah when it doesn’t even serve the organization.

The worst of it is: That’s not our job.

Start doing your real job.

Our job isn’t to deliver news, after all. Our job is to communicate information that helps our organization meet its bottom-line business goals.

That means using the five-step communication-planning process to identify those goals, then developing communication tactics — including editorial — to help us get there.

In marketing communications, that’s fairly easy: Just give targets entertaining information they can use to live their lives better that also promotes our products, programs, plans and positions. (I know: just.)

In employee communications, though, it’s tougher.

Develop stories that change employee behavior.

One way to develop editorial concepts that help change employee behavior is the one I used when I was at Hallmark. (Have I mentioned recently that I won a couple of Gold Quills for employee communications while I was at Hallmark? In the last hour? In the last five minutes? I thought so.)

Here’s how:

1. Identify corporate goals. To rip a list from a favorite client, those might include:

• Focus on growth products
• Innovate in growth markets
• Pursue flawless execution

These are your messages for the whole year. Yup, you’re going to repeat the same three to five (maaaaaaybe seven) messages over and over and over again for a year.

2. Develop stories to illustrate those messages. Bring these abstract, high-level messages down to earth with stories of individuals and teams who are helping the organization achieve its goals.

3. Allocate about 10 percent of your coverage to news. Of course you’ll still cover news. It just won’t make up the bulk of your work.

Why use the strategic editorial approach?

What happens when you scrap the news service approach? You get to:

• Do fewer projects better.
• Become a writer instead of a content manager.
• Work on a business schedule, not on a newsroom schedule.
• Serve the organization instead of feeding the beast.

Plus, by communicating messages instead of reporting news, you get to have more fun and stop irritating your readers.

Isn’t it time to close down the news bureau today?

Plan powerful communications

Want to master the art of effective communication planning?

• Get expert advice: Bring Ann in to help you adopt a strategic editorial approach.
• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a write or edit copy that helps your organization achieve its business objectives.
• Boost your own skills: Work with Ann to improve your strategic writing skills in one-on-one writing coaching.
• Learn more: Study Ann’s communication planning learning tools.
• Join the club: Get the full story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of communication planning tipsheetson RevUpReadership.com.

Good PR measurement doesn’t just track ad value equivalencies. Instead, it links your efforts to the organization’s key performance indicators, or KPIs.

So track outputs, outtakes and outcomes, says Shonali Burke, ABC, principle of Shonali Burke Consulting. Then link outputs to outcomes, communication results to KPIs.

A lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and blogger at BNET, Burke has earned a Golden Ruler award from the Institute for Public Relations for her measurement work. She shared this approach at the 2010 PRSA International Conference:

And if at first you don’t succeed?

“Measure and correct, measure and correct, measure and correct,” Burke says.

Plan powerful communications

Want to master the art of effective communication planning?

• Get dozens of tipsheets on communication planning at RevUpReadership.com.
• Read Ann’s learning tools on communication planning.
• Subscribe to our free writing tips e-zine.

___

Source: Shonali Burke, ABC, “Measurement in the Age of Now,” PRSA 2010 International Conference, Oct. 18, 2010

I remember the good old days at Hallmark Cards, when I was responsible for the company’s gorgeous, glossy employee magazine.

Period.

Yup, I wrote and managed one quarterly publication.

Occasionally I’d pitch in to help a colleague who produced the daily employee newsletter. I’d write a book chapter or brochure now and again. I believe I remember making a horrible video once.

But the gist of my job was to produce four magazines a year. That came out to about 20 publications over the course of my five-year career at Hallmark.

I know folks now who produce that many pieces a week.

Overwhelmed by assignments

And that’s one of the problems with communication today. (Oh, my A-Rod, did I just type that? What am I, 90?)

But it’s true: One of the problems with communication today is that communicators have far, far too much work to do to do anything well. That leaves us with two options:

• Resign ourselves to lives of mediocrity. Oh, we’ll get everything done, all right. But none of it will be very good. And that will make us very, very sad. (Not to mention exhausted and cranky.)
• Perform communication triage.

(Here’s a tip: Choose No. 2.)

Communication triage is actually pretty easy to perform. Conveniently, it takes three steps:

• Prioritize. Sort projects into A, B and C pieces — or essential, nice to have and frankly, doesn’t deliver much value.
• Allocate resources. Invest in A projects, develop templates and other tools to streamline B projects and let C projects die (or kill them).
• Sell your plan. Planning and metrics are excellent alternatives to your third option, which is doing daily battle over priorities and resources.

Improve approvals

Want to master the art of managing the approval process?

• Invite Ann’s team in to handle a special writing or editing project.
• Work with Ann to polish your writing skills in one-on-one writing coaching sessions.
• Get dozens of tipsheets on managing the approval process at RevUpReadership.com.
• Find Ann’s out about Ann’s next “Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” teleseminar.
• Read Ann’s “Develop an Approval Process That Doesn’t Drive You Nuts” handbook.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2010 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

by Ann Wylie, president, Wylie Communications Inc.

I don’t know about you, but any campaign that includes a Myers-Briggs-type personality test for cats is a winner in my eyes.

But will identifying five feline personality types put you on the fast track for promotions, raises and bonuses? When layoffs loom, will the boss say, “Yes, I know we have to let 80 percent of our people go. But she’s the one who helped us figure out that Gigi was a Bossy Cat and Mimi was a Scaredy Cat”?

No.

It takes more than creativity — let’s face it: It takes more than communication — to help you become a player in your organization.

It takes bottom-line business results. And that’s what communicators at Purina Cat Chow delivered in their Public Relations Society of America’s (PRSA) Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign, “Way of Life Experience.”

In 2004, the 25-year-old brand was losing market share to its competitors, specifically Iams, whose scientific positioning had helped it gain ground. The folks at Purina decided to go beyond diet to position the brand with a whole-cat approach that included exercise, dental hygiene, emotional well-being and companionship.

Enter the Purrsonality test, tour and attendant publicity efforts.

Communicators could — and did — report PR results, like placements, impressions and event attendance. But the real results measured the bottom line:

The campaign helped Purina Cat Chow post a 2.7 percent increase in market share to lead the dry cat food category.

Want to be a winner? Instead of measuring whether communication occurred (placements, impressions, attendance), measure what happened because communication occurred.

Want more inspiration from organizations that measure and move bottom-line performance through communication? Check out PRSA’s The Business Case for Public Relations case studies. You’ll find profiles of best-in-class PR programs that have achieved bottom-line business successes.

Bottom-line communications

Want to master the art of developing communications that help you achieve bottom-line business goals?

• Read Ann’s “Setting SMART Goals and Objectives” handbook.
• Get more tipsheets on creating communications that get bottom-line business results on RevUpReadership.com.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2009 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.