There's always plenty for which to be thankful

In addition to figuring out how to simplify the Thanksgiving Day preparations -- which never really happens -- I always try to use this annual event to consider what I need to be thankful for this year. I'm thankful for the great people at our agency who have pulled together during a tough economic year and worked as a team to deliver great work for their clients. This amazing group even voted for us as one of the best places...

What Elf on the Shelf Can Teach Us About Social Media

Okay, first the disclosure and then a word of caution. I do not work for Santa Claus. Nor did I consult any of my clients in the writing of this blog. Oh, and I have no affiliation with the authors of the popular book, The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition. The caution is that I will do my best to keep from spoiling the surprise for those boys and girls out there keeping track of where Elf is...

Options for social media and customer support

Jessica Sutera shared a great story yesterday about her personal experience with the poster child for how to leverage social media for customer service -- Comcast. There are more and more companies committing resources, technology spending and process changes to embrace social media as a new channel to service the customer. I'm sure many companies want to emulate Comcast and others, but can't for various reasons. For those companies, Jeremiah Owyang offers a useful matrix describing varying degrees of "social...

Customer service via Twitter. It can work!

In today's highly-connected atmosphere, it's no surprise that B2C and B2B companies alike are taking to social networks to better connect with their customers. It's something we continually recommend to and reinforce with our clients - the engagement aspect of social networking sites like Twitter. And by engagement, I mean making it a two-way conversation versus just a one-way, outbound-only communications tool. Earlier this week, I had a very personal experience with Twitter that showed me that customer service can...

Social Media Lessons From Today’s Multi-Channel Content Producers

Last night, the New England Publicity Club held a "Meet the Technology Editors" event on the 14th Floor at One Broadway in Cambridge, Mass. A room full of agency, corporate and individual PR and communications professionals were treated to a panel presentation by Wade Roush, chief correspondent for Xconomy, Laurianne McLaughlin, senior news editor for CIO, Jackie Noblett, Clean Tech/Defense Tech reporter at Boston Business Journal/Mass High Tech, and Jim Kerstetter, executive editor at c|net. The panel was moderated by...

The Genie is already out of the bottle, GOP

As a communications person who has often counseled clients to "deprive the story of oxygen" in the face of difficult situations where clarifying or responding will only cause a negative story to flare out of control, I immediately recognized Senator McCain's attempt to use this strategy to get ahead of the Sarah Palin book tour and media blitz this week. He asked his former campaign aides -- who apparently are skewered in the book -- to stand down and not...

Lou's Soapbox Exits CNN

One of my favorite videos to use in executive communications coaching is the interview Lou Dobbs conducted with John Chambers for CNN Moneyline on August 13, 2002. The CEO of Cisco was fresh from then-President Bush's Economic Forum and wanted to talk about what he and other business leaders had discussed. Interviewer Dobbs let Chambers talk for 1.5 minutes about the economic issues discussed at the Forum before he said, "Let's turn to another issue -- expensing stock options --...

Happy Birthday, eWeek!

If you want to feel really old, have someone call you for an interview about a publication you helped found 25 years ago. It is amazing to think that eWeek (PC Week in its incarnation) just turned 25 and I was present at the creation, along with my colleagues John Dodge, Elli Holman, Sam Whitmore and Preston Gralla. Wayne Rash did a great job capturing the huge shift this publication created, as it was covering an enormous sea change in...

A new Twitter List: LP&P clients on Twitter

We have had a great deal of fun working with our clients over the last few years to help them chart their journeys on Twitter. Of late, this is including advising them on how to think about leveraging the Twitter Lists feature. These ideas include the following: Create a list of all employees on Twitter for your company, provided they mostly tweet as part of their jobs. This gives your buying community a single way to connect with anyone at...

The most misused phrase on the Internet

Have you been in the industry long enough to remember Groupware? Since we worked with Lotus at the time, we certainly do. We also remember that the Lotus executives hated that term, because it was so fuzzy. We would use the old Saturday Night Live joke, "it's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!" Collaborative computing was the more descriptive term for products like Lotus Notes, but even that term was confusing for some -- Is it e-mail? Is it...