In a blog post in May (“Overcoming the trust gap”), I wrote about how little people trust corporate America. Well, it turns out that corporate America doesn’t trust itself, either. A new study released by the Chief Marketing Officer Council, “Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field,” found that, for example, 67 percent of
In my last post, we heard the story of an employee who had rubbed the board president and a few board members the wrong way with her overconfidence and perceived dismissiveness. The board president had given the employee’s manager instructions to solve the problem—only to immediately say that perhaps she had misjudged the employee, and
The board president pulled the manager aside and said she needed to discuss a problem with one of his employees with him. The employee had been observed being a bit short with other members of the board at a recent function, she said. Perhaps the employee just didn’t know how to work with board members,
There’s a joke in sports that fans don’t really root for the players, they root for the uniforms. Long gone are the days when players would stay with the same team their entire careers. For decades now, it’s been about chasing the money, and it’s not unusual for a top player in any sport to
In February 2013, Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer made a major change in the corporate culture at the online search engine company. She issued a memo via Chief Development Officer Jackie Reses that will require the company’s 14,000-plus employees to come to work at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA. In other words, no more
Corporate America, the good news is that people trust you more than they trust the government The bad news is that being more trustworthy than the government isn’t much of an achievement. The Edelman Trust Barometer, that annual worldwide survey of the trustworthiness of government, business, NGOs, and media, was released earlier this year. The
How is your institutional memory stored? If you’re like many companies, it’s in the heads of everyone who works there. This leads to that big, scary scenario: What if someone is hit by a bus tomorrow? What if someone leaves the company? What if they’re promoted, transferred, fired, become ill, take maternity leave, or are
It’s easy to prognosticate and pontificate on the future of digital this and that, but the reality is any one of us has very little control over the future of where the communication of ideas is headed. Like most people, we ride the waves but can’t control the weather. That’s why it’s nice sometimes to
One of our writers was recently reading a thread on a guitar discussion forum about the struggles that “mom and pop” guitar stores are having competing with big box music stores as well as online retailers. Retail has never been an easy business. Margins are small, overhead is high, and every purchase of inventory is
It’s almost always a good idea to do the opposite of what the herd is doing. Why? When entire industries head in one direction, they leave a vacuum behind. No one is serving the customers who prefer things the way the industry used to do them. Take the newspaper industry. The herd mentality at the
The Internet has ruined radio trivia contests. No longer must one rack one’s brain to recall who the ninth president was or what the ninth planet is (Hint: now there are only eight. Pluto was jilted.). Being caller nine is still a matter of luck, but the Internet and Google have taken away half the
In my last blog entry, I wrote about how newcomers and outsiders to the organization can provide important insights to management that can result in valuable contributions to the company’s success. This is especially true from a marketing perspective. There are five key questions every marketer or corporate communicator should ask new employees or visitors
One of our writers recently joined a service club in his town. Like many organizations of this type, membership in these clubs is shrinking as older members pass away and aren’t replaced by new ones. Our writer, a welcome, youthful addition to the club, was asked about ways to grow the membership. Freeze the action
Sometimes blogs are challenging to write because it seems like everything has already been said. Or, more correctly, it’s being said, all over the place, all the time, by everyone. Information overload via the Internet has gone beyond a novelty and well into the realm of a worldwide social experiment, the outcome of which we
A belief that most every America holds is that with hard work, determination and a little luck, anyone can be successful. And this is true. American history is full of successful men and women who rose from rags to riches, who built great companies and amassed great fortunes through their iron will, their smarts, and
Most business executives are familiar with the “elevator speech”: a very short synopsis of what your company does that can be given to a stranger in 15-30 seconds, or about the length of time you might spend on an elevator with someone. It’s usually a message given in response to the question, “So, what do
Monroe’s motivated sequence is a technique that is used to make presentations, speeches or sales pitches more effective. It was developed by Purdue University professor Alan Monroe in the 1930s and has five steps: attention, need, satisfaction, visualization and action. Let’s run through this tongue-in-cheek piece and see how it fits into Professor Monroe’s sequence:
In my last blog post, I talked about the three brains that all of us have: the reptile brain, which handles our body’s most basic functions and is responsible for our base instincts and drives; the mammal brain, which is responsible for emotions; and our human brain, which is the largest of the three and
One of our writers was recently discussing human behavior with a colleague while stuck in traffic. The subject of why seemingly smart people do stupid things—things they know are morally wrong—came up, and our writer said he knew how it happened. You see, our writer said, people have three brains. His colleague looked at him
It’s 1985. You insert a five-and-one-quarter inch floppy disk into the disk drive of your IBM PC and type in the command to save your word processing document in MS-DOS. You give it the filename “ANRPTDFT” and hit ENTER. After waiting several seconds, you take the disk, labeled “ANNUAL REPORT” in black magic marker, out
Sometimes people can be difficult. Sadly, many never learned the basics way back in kindergarten: sharing, kindness, politeness and helping others. And even the very best people—the ones who are generally receptive, professional, understanding and easy to work with—have bad days and don’t always act or react in a predictable way. Clients are no different,
In my last blog post I wrote about the surf shop owner who perhaps wasn’t making the best use of corporate communications to build customer loyalty and increase his customer base. There are numerous models of corporate communications. For simplicity’s sake let’s break corporate communications down into two broad types: internal and external. Internal Corporate
One of TPS’s writers was on vacation at the beach when he ran across the owner of the local surf shop while crossing over the dune one morning. The shop owner, camera in hand, explained he was taking pictures of that morning’s surf to post on Facebook—something he had just started using this past fall.
Trade Press Services works with a variety of writers from around the country with diverse backgrounds. Many of them also write for other publications, which we at Trade Press Services view as an organizational strength—the more experiences our writers have, the more depth and insight they can bring to Trade Press Services and our varied
