FIR Podcast Network

Understand motivation to reach your goals and achieve greater success. This episode features #ThoughtLeader and #Expert Susan Fowler (http://aha.pub/SusanFowler), who is the co-founder and senior consulting partner at The Ken Blanchard Companies, Out of the Box Learning Inc., and Leadership Legacies LLC.

Susan is widely known as one of the foremost experts on motivation and personal empowerment. She is passionate about helping managers and individuals gain a better understanding of motivation and how to effectively use it to reach their goals and achieve greater success.

If your team wants to reach out for a goal but doesn’t feel motivated enough to do so, consider reaching out to Susan Fowler by visiting her website at https://susanfowler.com/ and going to http://aha.pub/SusanFowler.

Here are a couple of AHA messages from this episode:

* Managers who are frustrated in trying to motivate their people should look at the work of Susan Fowler. #Motivation https://susanfowler.com/ @FowlerSusann

* If you’re trying to motivate your people, do you know what pushes them to move forward and do better? Do you understand what motivates them? You need to know that before you can boost their productivity. #Motivation https://susanfowler.com/ @FowlerSusann

* After finding out what motivates people, managers and individuals can benefit from creating a motivating environment where everyone is driven to achieve their goals. #Motivation https://susanfowler.com/ @FowlerSusann

* Shifting people’s #Motivation can help them achieve their goals, stop a habit, and live the dream they have always thought of living. Once you understand what motivates people, you can always help them do better. https://susanfowler.com/ @FowlerSusann

* Understanding what motivates people is the core foundation of #Motivation. You can’t motivate them effectively if you don’t know what to do and exactly how to do it. https://susanfowler.com/ @FowlerSusann

To learn more about Thought Leadership and how it can help you be successful, visit: https://thoughtleaderlife.com/.

Communications — internal and external — are cost centers. Other cost centers, like Human Resources, have transformed themselves from bureaucratic necessary expenses to vital business partners whose work directly affects business performance. Communications can (and does) have a direct effect on business when managed and measured strategically, but far too many communication functions still focus on message outputs than on improving productivity or other business elements that matter to the company’s leadership.

In episode 54 of Circle of Fellows, four IABC Fellows discussed how communicators can make this transition from a cost center to vital business partner. Shel Holtz moderated the panel that included Priya Bates, Neil Griffiths, Ned Lundquist, and Jim Shaffer.

About the Panel

Priya Bates is a senior communication executive who provides strategic internal communication counsel in order to ensure leaders, managers, and employees understand the strategy, believe in the vision, act in accordance with the values, and contribute to business results. She is president of Inner Strength Communications in Toronto and previously served as senior director of Internal Communications at Loblaw Companies Limited.

Neil Griffiths, ABC, Chart.PR, IABC Fellow, is Senior Manager, Global Communication & Global Inclusion Lead at ERM, the world’s largest sustainability consultancy. Neil has worked in communication management for 15+ years in public, private and non-profit organizations. Neil is a serial volunteer and has held a number of leadership positions on global committees within IABC, including the inaugural Global Communications Certification Council. Neil was Chair of the 2018 IABC World Conference to be held in Montreal in June 2018. He has been recognized with awards for his leadership within the profession, being made IABC Fellow in June 2019. Together with co-author Deborah Hinton, Neil has published two studies on the current and future state of the communication profession and has spoken on the topic at several conferences. Neil holds the Freedom of London and is a member of the Company of Public Relations Practitioners.

Edward “Ned” Lundquist, a retired U.S. Navy captain with 33 years of professional public affairs and strategic communications experience. He is a principal science writer at MCR Federal in McLean, Virginia, supporting government clients; and has his own company, Echo Bridge LLC, which provides outreach and advocacy support to commercial clients. He served on active duty for 24 years in the U.S. Navy as a surface warfare officer and public affairs specialist. Captain Lundquist was a Pentagon spokesman with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Director of the Fleet Home Town News Center, and director of public affairs and corporate communications for the Navy Exchange Service Command. His last tour of duty was commanding the 450 men and women of the Naval Media Center. He is an accredited business communicator and award-winning communicator who served as president of IABC/Hampton Roads and IABC/Washington, director of U.S. district 3 and chair of the International Accreditation Council. He was named an IABC Fellow in 2016. Captain Lundquist is a member of the executive committee of the Surface Navy Association and chair of the SNA communications committee. He writes for numerous naval, maritime and defense publications and chairs and presents at communications, naval and maritime security conferences around the world.

Jim Shaffer is a business adviser, leadership coach, author, and speaker. As leader of the Jim Shaffer Group, he helps organizations accelerate results through superior strategy execution. The Jim Shaffer Group creates hard business results by translating the business strategy to the people who need to implement it, aligning systems, processes, and culture to make the gains sustainable.

Most agency owners find value in talking with their peers and understanding the challenges that they share in running PR firms. The PRSA Counselors Academy is a special interest group within the Public Relations Society of America that brings together agency entrepreneurs through events and other programming.

The Immediate Past Chair of Counselors Academy, Chuck Norman, joined Chip to talk about the group and how it brings benefits to agency owners. In addition to his volunteer role, Chuck is also the owner of S&A Communications.

In this episode, you will learn more about Chuck’s journey, as well as specific examples of the work that Counselors Academy does to bring together agency principals and experts.

RESOURCES

* S&A Communications

* PRSA Counselors Academy

* Public Relations Society of America

* Ken Jacobs

* Sharon Toerek

* Chuck Norman on: LinkedIn | Twitter

[read the transcript]

The latest algorithm update from Google, BERT, is out for revenge on irrelevant, spammy content—and you’d better beware if this has been your MO of late.

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which means it uses deep learning to understand and respond to human language as humans use it. It also means Google now understands context, including word order, better than ever before.

This update has many implications for communicators. For one, local content will be even easier for local people to find; for another, using insider language and jargon will be useful for SEO and engagement.

Naturally, this means you have to laser-focus on your specific audience. Your content has to be targeted and in-depth. And it has to be the very best content on the internet for your topic.

Creators who have been writing great content for humans all along will see (or already have seen) a real jump in their search rankings.

An easy way to think about it is this: your content should be EAT-able. EAT stands for expertise, authority, and trust. When you create content that is original, informative, targeted, and engaging, you automatically check all the E-A-T boxes, and Google will reward you with high search rankings and more traffic.

In addition, now that BERT understands context and nuance, you will rank highly when people search for information that’s related to your topic, even when they don’t use your exact keywords! The Ultimate Blog Checklist lists all the elements you should include in your web content to make it EAT-able.

As a content developer you should always aim to create the very best piece of content on the internet for your topic. If you do that, it won’t matter what Google does—you’ll always be compliant.

Have Your Say

Share your thoughts about BERT in the Spin Sucks community.

Resources

What BERT means for communicators

Ultimate Blog Checklist

AI and SEO In the Post-BERT World

Where do I spend the money? Is this campaign bringing prospects to the finish line? Is my talent pool established and who do I need to hire to hit this big, hairy, audacious goal in three years? All valid questions, and all questions your marketing leaders are likely asking themselves. If there was a SaaS tool out there that could perfectly predict a multi-touch attribution model, and tell you when to hire and fire, and where to invest your budget, it would be a unicorn overnight. Guaranteed.

Of course, this doesn’t exist because figuring out how and why people buy is hard. These days there is so much direct and indirect noise in the purchasing decision that it is virtually impossible to account for and determine every little variable in the attribution model. Sure, we can make reasonable assumptions — traffic jumped after this podcast aired, so it must be the podcast — but they are nothing more than educated guesses. But educated guesses doesn’t get the budget – a solid foundation does.

In this episode of AMP UP Your Digital Marketing we meet Shane Murphy-Reuter, the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Intercom, a customer messaging platform. Through depth and breadth of experience, and making some mistakes along the way, Murphy-Reuter gives us insight into the ‘three buckets’ he follows for marketing budgets, delegation, and learning attribution models. His actionable tips will help you answer questions such as:

* How Do Marketers Spend Their Budget Wisely?

* When Do Marketers Validate Their Hiring Decisions?

* How Do You Delegate the Marketing Tasks?

* How Does a Marketer Learn Their Attribution Model with Imperfect or Incomplete Data?

* How Do Analysts Affect the Non-Directly Attributable and Not Direct Response Efforts?

Transcript:

Glenn: Welcome back to the show. Today we’re speaking with Shane Murphy-Reuter. Shane, welcome to the show.

Shane: Thank you, Glenn. Really happy and excited to be here.

Glenn: Shane, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Shane: Yes, so, obviously, I’m Shane. I run marketing right now at Intercom. I’ve spent probably the last – God – maybe 15 years working in marketing, variety of roles. Started probably the first-half of my career working in proposition development which is now called product marketing and more in the brand side as well. And then shifted, sort of, the second-half of my career towards more of the demand and now kind of running all of that at Intercom within, sort of, the B2B space. And so, I’ve had the pleasure to have a pretty varied background in marketing and really glad to be at a company that really cares deeply about all the different areas.

Glenn: And just to give people a sense of the size of your marketing organization today, can you give us some rough numbers?

Shane: Yeah. So, the marketing team, once we are fully staffed, will be 80 people. We are going into a hiring drive at the moment. So, anybody out there who is in marketing and would like to join Intercom, let me know. And yes, we’re about 80 people. And, you know, we have a pretty typical split of the team across product marketing, brand, demand-gen, content. Those are kind of our four key pillars of the team. And then from a budget perspective, you know, we have over $10 million in actual dollars that we can use to execute marketing. So, like, media buying or marketing technology cycle, that sort of thing.

Glenn: And so, when you think about that, I mean, it’s a sizable budget, it’s something that you really have to think about, am I putting this to best use? So, what do you think about that and how do you even get your team to think about, you know, highest and best use of the dollars and the resources that you’re allocating?

Create more sales and profit through the science of revenue generation. This episode features #ThoughtLeader and #Expert Rick McPartlin (http://aha.pub/RickMcPartlin), the CEO and president of The Revenue Game, LLC, past fractional chief revenue officer at Tomar Electronics, FMS and Quadras Corporation, advisory board member at Shared Performance, and Vistage speaker.

Rick conducts business strategies consulting services for companies, particularly about revenue generation. He is dedicated to helping his clients and companies fundamentally change the way they generate sales and revenue.

If you’re not managing chaos appropriately and don’t know what #RevenueGeneration strategies do to execute creating more sales and profits, consider reaching out to Rick McPartlin by visiting his website at https://www.therevenuegame.com/ or http://aha.pub/RickMcPartlin.

Here are a couple of AHA messages from this episode:

* Companies that are wondering how to continually, intentionally, and always create more sales and profits should look at the work being done by Rick McPartlin. #RevenueGeneration https://www.therevenuegame.com/ @RickTrg1

* Revenue Science is the context for business. It’s what will create long-term business health. As medical science works for humans, the same kind of discipline in scientific management is needed for companies. #RevenueGeneration https://www.therevenuegame.com/ @RickTrg1

* Knowing this discipline can make companies understand that certain things are supported by science, and makes their world better. It makes their customers know what their value proposition is. #RevenueGeneration https://www.therevenuegame.com/ @RickTrg1

* If companies don’t understand their revenue context, then they’re often working on the wrong stuff. Science helps us understand the difference between “dumb stuff” and the science. #RevenueGeneration https://www.therevenuegame.com/ @RickTrg1

* “Dump stuff” creates the cost of the chaos to produce the revenue. Average chaos for a B2B company is between 20% and 40%. Consider getting an expert to eliminate the “dumb stuff” that holds down your company’s growth and erodes margin. https://www.therevenuegame.com/ @RickTrg1

To learn more about Revenue Thought Leadership and how it can help you be successful, visit: https://thoughtleaderlife.com/.

Learn crisis management by thinking differently for lasting success and transformation. This episode features #ThoughtLeader and #Expert Marcia Daszko (https://aha.pub/MarciaDaszko), a C-Suite leadership transformation consultant, a protégé of Dr. W. Edwards Deming (who co-founded two Deming user groups), and co-founder of the non-profit In2In Thinking Network.

Marcia passionately helps leaders challenge their thinking by guiding strategic innovation and transformation in Fortune 500 corporations and private startups, school districts, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. She has been doing this for more than 20 years.

To learn more about Marcia Daszko, go to https://aha.pub/MarciaDaszko. If you need strategic thinking and planning, visit https://www.mdaszko.com/, where you can also connect with Marica and discover new perspectives.

Here are a couple of AHA messages from this episode:

* Managers and leaders from any field who are in crisis and not even aware of it or any individual whose life has been stable for too long and realizes that there’s something they could be missing out on should reach out to Marcia Daszko. https://aha.pub/MarciaDaszko

* If you’re struggling or just feel frustrated at trying to solve problems for long periods of time, I can help you take a look at your situation and come up with ideas so we can work together for solutions. #ThinkDifferent https://www.mdaszko.com/ @MarciaDaszko

* Sometimes, organizations are close to bankruptcy or don’t know how to save their company, but their data has been showing it for a while already. I can use available information to improve your business early on. #ThinkDifferent https://aha.pub/MarciaDaszko

* Is your business currently facing a crisis and you’re open to learning? With my background in corporate communications and marketing and consulting, I can help you accelerate your leadership with successful results. #ThinkDifferent https://aha.pub/MarciaDaszko

* Leadership with systems knowledge is important so the team understands the essential things that should be done to make all things work together. Are you looking for strategies to #ThinkDifferent in the face of crisis? https://www.mdaszko.com/ @MarciaDaszko

To learn more about Thought Leadership and how it can help you be successful, visit https://thoughtleaderlife.com/.

Leverage your high-value property to help win the fight against human trafficking. This episode features #ThoughtLeader and #Expert Mitzi Perdue (https://aha.pub/MitziPerdue), the founder and chairman of Win This Fight (WTF), an organization whose purpose is to stop human trafficking.

Mitzi enables wealthy donors to convert high-end jewelry or works of art into cash that they can donate to the anti-trafficking organization of their choice. She does this through an auction where the auction house has agreed not to charge a commission.

If you want to #Donate to a charity that you care about but do not have the budget to do so, you should consider reaching out to Mitzi Perdue by visiting her website, http://www.winthisfight.org, and going to https://aha.pub/MitziPerdue.

Here are a couple of AHA messages from this episode:

* People who want to #Donate to a charity that they care about but do not have the budget to do so, should reach out to Mitzi Perdue. http://www.winthisfight.org @MitziPerdue

* Human trafficking is a huge worldwide problem. There are 40M people suffering. You can make a difference by converting your high-value property to cash to #Donate to anti-trafficking orgs. http://www.winthisfight.org @MitziPerdue

* Millions of people endure incredible suffering due to human trafficking. The good news is that you can do something to help stop this. You can leverage your high-value property to #Donate to the cause against human trafficking. http://www.winthisfight.org @MitziPerdue

* Auctions convert high-value items into cash. Leverage your high-value property through our auctions. We enable you to #Donate the entire amount to the anti-trafficking org of your choice. http://www.winthisfight.org @MitziPerdue

* I have done fundraising my whole life and have been involved in many charities. This gives me the credibility to help you leverage your high-value property to #Donate to the anti-trafficking org of your choice. https://aha.pub/MitziPerdue

To learn more about Thought Leadership and how it can help you be successful, visit: https://thoughtleaderlife.com/.

Fred Bateman has been around the tech world as long as we have: At the dawn of the PC era he worked for various PR firms and then founded the Bateman Group, which grew to 90 staffers doing tech-focused PR and content marketing. Fred recently announced that he will sell his majority ownership to his three co-owners, who have re-branded the company as Mission North. He plans to partner with nonprofits to teach disenfranchised groups of people the business, writing and communications skills required for a successful career in tech-focused PR.

We spoke with Fred about how far the PR profession has come sine the dawn of the Internet era, how PR and content marketing people need to work hand-in-hand and how branded news sites such as Adobe’s CMO.com have created new avenues of influence for marketing organizations. Fred also reflects on the skills that distinguish the best PR pros he’s worked with from all the other and the complex role of influencers in today’s media landscape.

About eight years ago, we launched the PESO model. Today it’s everywhere. Although we’ve constantly refined and improved it over the years, it’s not always easy to implement.

In this week’s show, we talk about the four reasons people can struggle with it, and how to overcome those obstacles.

* Experience and wisdom: People with expertise and experience often know what works and stick with that. Often, however, they’re not open to learning new skills, strategies, or tools. Start small, and show them how the PESO model can be used to make decisions based on data.

* Being. So. Excited. About. Tactics.: Tactics aren’t strategies; they’re just steps along the way to fulfilling the goals in your PESO model communications plan.If you’re someone who gets excited by every new thing, help yourself by allowing some wiggle room in your program to experiment with different tactics.

* Wishful thinking and untrue assumptions: Strategy, communication, and logic aren’t quick fixes. PR isn’t an instant fix or a miracle worker. The best way to correct wild assumptions is to use the model itself and tie it to specific short-term goals that lead to long-term outcomes.

* Lack of a big picture understanding: Christopher S. Penn says that you should think about artificial intelligence as a symphony, with you as the conductor. This means you have to know everything about the PESO model, how it works, and how to integrate it all to create authority, credibility, and results.

Have Your Say

What do you struggle with in trying to implement the PESO model?

Do executives fight you when you want to do more than media relations?

Share your insights in the Spin Sucks community.

Resources

PR Pros Must Embrace The PESO Model

Media Relations Is A Tactic, Not A Strategy

The PR Industry and The PESO Model