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Whether it’s reaching prospects with your sales and marketing messages, communicating with customers or vendors, creating a communications plan, or targeting the media with your press releases, knowing your audience matters. Asking some questions upfront will help you do a better job of reaching the right audience with your message. Who do we want to…

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn, if you have created social media channels for your business, think of them as platforms to tell the story of your company. The best way to begin is to look at the possibilities. Think about your audience(s) and the social media channels they may be using. The reality…

Back in our nation’s Wild West days, cattlemen branded their herds with a hot iron that showed a simple mark, like their initials or even their name, to help them lay claim to ownership over their cattle or other livestock. That tradition continues even now in some areas of the country. Today branding is a…

As an admitted extrovert, I enjoy meeting new people, seeing new places and learning new things. But let’s face it, not everyone is an extrovert. Not everyone loves going to networking events, meet and greets, or whatever you call them. For some people, events like these can be scary. I went to a recent networking…

Taking the lead. Talking the talk and walking the walk. It’s often up to us as leaders to meet these standards. Each of these phrases may have a certain meaning to us, and as leaders we may wonder: why do we have to do them? At the 2019 Global Leadership Summit, I was able to…

Do you feel guilty about taking time off? Apparently, here in the U.S. a lot of us do. According to an article in Forbes, “Why America has become ‘the no-vacation nation,’” a survey of 1,200 full-time American workers showed that 47% of them didn’t take all their vacation time the previous year. Another article by…

Have you ever come across a company that portrays themselves as one thing on Facebook (or Twitter or Instagram), but another thing on LinkedIn? And yet another persona on their website? This happens when companies don’t have a good idea of their “image.” Or, put more simply, they don’t know their key messages when it…

I was a shopper with a mission. I knew exactly what store I was going to, what product I was going to buy and my goal was to achieve said shopping trip as efficiently as possible. So as I strode purposefully into the large supermarket near my home to buy some floral bouquets, I was…

Is the talk of the upcoming 2020 presidential election already making you shudder when you look at your social media channels? Is tuning out is the answer? Maybe that’s a good option for the current political cycle, but I think there’s too much tuning out on other fronts. Consider how many of us are tuning…

I’ve written about crisis communications on several occasions, even publishing an e-book just over a year ago. Today, I just want to remind you that a business crisis can take many forms, including: Fire, flood, natural disaster Environmental/industrial accident Inappropriate/criminal behavior by an employee Injury/death of an employee Violence or criminal activity at a workplace…