FIR Interviews

Measurement standards have been available to the public relations community for some time. Only recently has the Institute for Public Relations assembled a group to establish a similar set of standard for assessing the effectiveness of employee communications.

On June 30, FIR host Shel Holtz moderated a discussion featuring Sean Williams, who coordinated the group’s efforts, and three other communication measurement thought leaders: Katie Paine, Angela Sinickas, and Ryan Williams. The robust discussion reflects the challenges of trying to set measurement standards for an activity as inconsistently practiced as employee communications. Among the points of contention that emerged in the conversation: the appropriate categories for various metrics and the items that belong in each category, whether outputs (such as intranet posts or emails sent) should be measured, and the distinction between metrics that predict future employee behaviors and those that look at past behaviors.

We have been given permission to share the preliminary document produced by the group; you can download it here in its pre-publication format. The list of proposed standards and their definitions, extracted from the document, appears below:

FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis, the public engagement specialists. If you are looking for tools and up to date techniques to engage with your community, Thornley Fallis can help. Find them at thornleyfallis.com.

About our interview guests:

Katie Delahaye Paine, aka The Measurement Queen, has been a pioneer in the field of measurement for three decades. Her books, Measure What Matters (Wiley, March 2011) and Measuring Public Relationships (KDPaine & Partners, 2007) are considered must-reads for anyone tasked with measuring public relations and social media. Her latest book, written with Beth Kanter, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit:Using Data to Change the World, is the 2013 winner of the Terry McAdam Book Award. Her latest company, Paine Publishing is the first educational publishing firm entirely dedicated to making more Measurement Mavens. Its newsletter, The Measurement Advisor, is the industry’s most comprehensive source of information about best practices in communications measurement. In her consulting practices, she designs measurement dashboards for some of today’s most admired companies.

Angela Sinickas, founder of Sinickas Communications, which has worked with companies, organizations, and governments in 32 countries on six continents. Her clients include 25% of the Forbes Top 100 largest global companies. Before starting her own consulting firm, she held positions from editor to vice president in for-profit and government organizations and worked as a senior consultant and practice leader at Hewitt and Mercer. She is the author of a manual, How to Measure Your Communication Programs (now in its third edition), and chapters in several books. Her 50+ articles in professional journals can be found on her website,www.sinicom.com. Her work has been recognized with 20 international-level Gold Quill Awards from IABC, plus her firm was named IABC Boutique Agency of the Year in 2015. She holds a BS degree in Journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MS in Leadership from Northeastern University.

Ryan Williams specializes in internal communications, research, and leadership development. He has a passion for servant leadership and shares the positive impact it can have on the lives of employees and organizational performance. His experience has involved strategy development, service improvements, communication audits, change management, and employee engagement. He facilitates planning, designs research, constructs effective questions, communicates results, and produces action. Ryan has won five International Association of Business Communicators’ (IABC) Gold Quill Awards and was recognized by the International Public Relations Institute (IPR) with the Golden Ruler Award of Excellence for Measurement in 2004 for his work with the Alberta Medical Association. Ryan earned his Masters of Arts in Leadership from Trinity Western University in 2007, and has a Bachelor of Arts in Recreation Administration with a major in Community Development from The University of Alberta.

Sean Williams is Vice President and Practice Lead, Education and Internal Communications, at True Digital Communications. Before joining True Digital, Sean was owner of Communication AMMO, Inc. Williams has held executive communication posts at National City Bank, KeyCorp and The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. He also provides managerial communication training through Face2Face Communication, which he acquired from Joe Williams Communications in 2015. Earlier in his career, Williams was senior consultant for Williams, where he expanded the strategic planning, research and consulting practices, and led and refined the Face2Face program with companies including First Energy Corp., KeyCorp, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Merck, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Prudential and Lucent, training literally thousands of managers in the innovative and highly rated program.

The post FIR Interview: The Challenges of Standardizing Employee Communication Measurement appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

When Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer first joined us for an FIR Interview in August 2013,  he had just launched AirPR as a marketplace to connect independent PR practitioners and small agencies with startups needing PR help. Our next interview came four months later, as AirPR introduced a new analytics tool, AirPR Analyst. Now, nearly four years later, AirPR has shed the marketplace and focuses exclusively on its analytics product.

In this third FIR Interview, Sharam discusses insights he has gained from four years of assessing PR efforts, including a “potential customer number.” He discusses the dramatic changes PR has experienced in the last four years and the increased demand on practitioners to deliver meaningful metrics, as well as the integration of PR with web analytics to track actions and behaviors following a communication.

Sharam also talked with FIR Interviews host Shel Holtz about the pointlessness of impressions and advertising value equivalencies as PR metrics and the role Artificial Intelligence will play (and the roles it most likely won’t play) in PR and PR measurement.

FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis, the public engagement specialists. If you are looking for tools and up to date techniques to engage with your community, Thornley Fallis can help. Find them at thornleyfallis.com.

About Our Conversation Partner

Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer is co-founder and CEO of AirPR, a technology solution to measure the impact of PR. He was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Shasta Ventures focused on consumer internet and the social graph. Prior to joining Shasta, Sharam was a Senior Associate at Sierra Ventures focused on consumer internet, enterprise software (cloud computing/virtualization), and mobile. He served on the Board at Makara (sold to RedHat) and TouchCommerce (sold to Nuance). Sharam began his career as a technologist at Appian, a BPM software startup where he managed the first enterprise-wide tracking system for the Department of Homeland Security. Sharam has lectured at universities, events and conferences, and judged business plan competitions at Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Syracuse. He is also an advisor and mentor to eLab (Princeton University’s Accelerator), Dorm Room Fund (First Round Capital’s Accelerator), and Acceleprise (Enterprise Technology Accelerator). Sharam graduated with honors with a BS in Computer Science from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He played NCAA D 1 ice hockey and is fluent in Farsi. Follow him on twitter @sharamfm.

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As businesses increasingly focus on building the Customer Experience (CX), companies look to employees to contribute to CX. It is hard to imagine employees who are having terrible experiences at work would be anxious to do their best to help their employers. That’s why so many organizations are also turning their attention to the Employee Experience. (A recent search for “employee experience” in job titles on LinkedIn produced more than 2,000 results.)

While the definition of CX has been refined over the years, the notion of the Employee Experience is new enough that what it means depends on whom you talk to. In his new book, “The Employee Experience Advantage,” Jacob Morgan aims to establish the criteria for the Employee Experience. In this FIR Interview, host Shel Holtz spent half an hour talking with Morgan about what it takes to deliver a great work experience to employees, some of the misconceptions about the idea, and the connection between experience and engagement, among other topics.

FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis.

About our conversation partner

Jacob Morgan is a three-time best-selling author, keynote speaker, and futurist who explores the future of work and employee experience. His latest book is, The Employee Experience Advantage: How to Win the War for Talent by Giving Employees the Workspaces they Want, the Tools they Need, and a Culture They Can Celebrate” (Wiley, March 2017) and is based on an analysis of over 250 global organizations. Jacob’s work has been endorsed by the CEOs of Cisco Systems, Whirlpool, T-Mobile, Best Buy, SAP, Nestle, KPMG, Schneider Electric, and many others. He is regularly featured in business publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CNN, NPR, USA Today, Forbes, and others. Jacob also has a popular podcast and YouTube series where he explores various themes around the future of work. You can learn more and get access to all of these resources by visiting TheFutureOrganization.com.

The post FIR Interview: Jacob Morgan on Creating the Employee Experience appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

The word “disruption” is thrown about with reckless abandon these days. Defined simply as “disturbance or problems that interrupt an event, activity, or process,” in the business world every new technology or trend is heralded as a disruptive force. In a 2013 TechCrunch post, financial advisor Andy Rachleff argued that Silicon Valley engineers “mistake better products for disruptive ones.” when, in fact,  a disruptive product “addresses a market that previously couldn’t be served — a new-market disruption — or offers a simpler, cheaper, more convenient alternative to an existing product — a low-end disruption.”

When faced with genuine disruption, businesses need to respond with innovation. Consider Ford Motor Company, facing disruption from autonomous vehicles, which is exploring new lines of business, “such as ride-hailing and pay-by-minute car rentals,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

The problem with business innovation — changing something established by introducing something new to it or introducing something completely new — is that most companies are structured to support their established lines of business, products or services that were innovated long ago and that now just chug along, cash cows producing most of the company’s revenues.

Jeremiah Owyang founded CrowdCompanies as a council of large businesses that stood to be disrupted by the “sharing economy,” a class of businesses established based on the innovation of technology serving as the intermediary between people who have something (cars, spare rooms or apartments, free time) and people who want it (to get somewhere cheaper and faster than a cab, to stay somewhere more homey and less costly than a hotel room, to clean out a garage or scan photos, for example). Each of the members of CrowdCompanies needs to innovate to stave off disruption.

They asked Owyang “to look inside of companies, to find out how they are structured to respond to disruption trends.” The result is a report, “The Corporate Innovation Imperative: How Large Corporations Avoid Disruption by Strengthening Their Ecosystem” (which is available below). In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz and Jeremiah talk about the obstacles to innovation, some of the 10 types of innovation programs the study uncovered, the metrics for measuring innovation success, and more.

About our Conversation Partner

Jeremiah Owyang helped major companies navigate the first phase of sharing: social media. He’s committed to helping companies through the second phase of sharing, as people share and create the physical world around them. Over the course of his career, Jeremiah has identified big trends before they happen, and helped major companies through the transition.

Jeremiah was a founding partner and research director at Altimeter Group, and currently serves on Altimeter’s on board of advisors. Before that, he was a Forrester Analyst covering social computing for the interactive marketer. Jeremiah was also Global Web Marketing at Hitachi Data Systems, where he launched the social media program Jeremiah has been advising and influencing business leaders globally. Jeremiah is a professional speaker and keynotes business conferences around the globe. His online publications often receive over 100k views from his blog, Web Strategy.

Connect with Jeremiah on LinkedIn.

The post FIR Interview: Jeremiah Owyang on Corporate Innovation Programs appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

As more states pass laws or voter initiatives to legalize marijuana — either for medical purposes or for recreational consumption — commerce that was once an illegal, underground enterprise is moving slowly into the mainstream. From growers, producers, and sellers of cannabis and its by-products to manufacturers and distributors of related goods, those engaged in cannabis commerce are learning that they need to undertake the same kinds of business activities as any other company. That includes marketing, PR, and other kinds of communication.

The burgeoning cannabis industry is attracting a flood of entrepreneurs in the states where it is legal. Aliza Sherman, a pioneer digital marketer, is among them. Aliza — who founded Cybergrrl, the first woman-owned Internet company, in 1995 — has launched a new marketing agency, Spark The Creative, which provides marketing services specifically for the cannabis industry. Concurrently, she has created Her Canna Life, an online publication focusing on women in the industry.

In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz talks with Aliza from her home in Alaska about the preparations she undertook before opening the doors of her new agency, why she’s keeping it separate from her existing enterprise, some of the challenges in working in an industry that, while legal in some states still violates federal law, and what it’s like working with businesses that have never considered marketing before.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

About our conversation partner

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We all hear about the importance of networking. How many of us know what it actually means? Assembling a list of people you know, going to meetups, and connecting with strangers on Facebook or LinkedIn (or any of the other myriad social networks available to us) is great, but will it help you achieve your goals? Do you even know what your goals for networking are?

J. Kelly Hoey built a dream network and that network encouraged her to write a book about it. Within short order, “Build Y our Dream Network” went into a second printing, so her network evidently knew what it was talking about. In this FIR Interview, Shel Holtz chats with Kelly (who was a panelist on FIR #72) to talk about dream networks, how to build them, and what you’ll get out of her book.

FIR Interviews are sponsored by Thornley Fallis, an integrated communications agency.

About our conversation partner

Author and investor Kelly Hoey is a networking expert whose new book Build Your Dream Network is to be released in January 2017 by Tarcher Perigee. Kelly has reinvented her career from corporate lawyer to influencer, author and investor. In addition to her portfolio of angel investments (Levo League, Hullabalu, Smigin, CloudPeeps, flowthings.io), she is a LP in Laconia Capital Group. Kelly advises several emerging company initiatives (NZTE and CTA) and is an adjunct professor at LIM College in New York City. In addition to her professional pursuits, Kelly is the Chief Tech Ambassador for the YWCA of NYC’s Girls Geek Club. As a connector, and networking expert, Kelly has been lauded from Forbes (“1 of 5 Women Changing the World of VC/Entrepreneurship”) to Fast Company (“25 Smartest Women On Twitter”). She has a column on Inc.com, blogs on myturnstone.com (as well as Medium and jkellyhoey.co) and tweets frequently. Kelly has appeared as an investor panelist on CNBC’s Power Pitch and is the host of the BroadMic podcast.

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