Engage in PR

Currently I’ve been extraordinarily busy with end of year planning and messaging. Lots of companies are asking us to come in and run our messaging workshop in order to make sure they are hitting on the right messages to their audiences in 2008. I absolutely love this exercise, it illuminates the disconnect between what customers, partners, media, analysts and even internal owners see as your core value proposition.

• Who are you?
• What do you stand for today?
• Tomorrow?
• How do you explain your main benefits?

I talk a lot these days on the venues in which to communicate and the power of community. But if you don’t know how to describe yourself our what you provide it really doesn’t matter how strong your community is or what communication techniques you are using. We have a pretty cool methodology that brings people through an entire day and ends up with a messaging platform that then is integrated in all communications activity from the web site, news releases, media interviews, blogging and more. But the one exercise I’m really looking forward to this week with one client is a core value exercise. Here is how it goes:

• The folks in the room see images spread across the wall…an eagle, a baby, the Eiffel tower, an American Flag;
• Each person is given three post-it notes, three are for images they believe visually represent their core values and three that do not;
• We collect the groups of images and discuss what this means to each of the people and why the chose the image;

Suddenly people are talking about who they are as a company and what they stand for; words come up that just start fitting into what they do, but more importantly how they FEEL about themselves. You are creating the right message based not only on what you do, but your passion for actually doing it. Now that is truly powerful messaging.

Now…how do we communicate the messages?

/kff