Tag: communications

Colorado COVID-19 communications

A case study in crisis communications and effective leadership from Governor Jared Polis

At a press conference earlier this week, on March 30, 2020, Governor Jared Polis gave a great presentation and update on the COVID-19 situation in Colorado.

I was impressed by the honesty, empathy and strategic messaging. It was a breath of fresh air compared to what I typically hear from politicians.

Gov. Polis’s presentation serves as an example of authentic leadership and effective crisis communications. It also shows how you can — and should — speak conversationally, with a personality, and at the same time maintain appropriate tone and professionalism.

In this post I’m going to break the presentation down into its broad components, comment on strategic communications tactics, and highlight the key messages that jumped out at me. I include excerpts below that I edited lightly for clarity, and I added emphasis to sections that particularly relate to my points.

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The real MVP

In a world smothered by scripted interviews, entitled stars and vanilla soundbites, Kevin Durant – the 2014 NBA Most Valuable Player – delivers a slam dunk speech that pulls back the curtain, transcends sports and inspires leadership, humility and perspective.

These days, I don’t expect much from post-game press conferences, sideline reports, superstar interviews and other sports speeches. Why? Because we rarely get more than a quick thank you to God, followed by a litany of canned sports cliches.

If we expand the scope, the same low expectations can often be applied to other arenas, with force-fed agendas, rhetoric and scripted remarks clouding our glimpses at the true character and opinions of our leaders, influencers and role models.

But every now and then, we’re treated to something genuine, something thoughtful, something inspirational.

Kevin Durant’s exceptional acceptance speech for the 2014 NBA Most Valuable Player Award was one of those times.

Judged in a vacuum (in my amateur opinion), the speech stands strong as an organized address with a heartfelt and well-delivered story.

However, in the vanilla, lay-up context we’ve grown accustomed to in sports speeches, Durant’s MVP remarks deliver a posterizing slam dunk.

In this post, I’m going to break down why the speech is so special, and list a some of the lessons I took away after watching it a few times.

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Navigating the social media seas at #SMMW14

Top takeaways from Social Media Marketing World

Attending a conference is a lot like managing a business’s social media initiative:

You need to have a content strategy by planning which sessions to attend, engage your audience by chatting with other attendees, and gather feedback by asking the speakers specific questions that will add value to the conversation.

I kept these principles in mind when I attended Social Media Marketing World (#SMMW14), presented by Social Media Examiner in San Diego, March 27-28.

On the plane to San Diego, I highlighted the top three sessions from each time slot to help me manage my time efficiently and give me quick-reference safety valves should I need to switch day-of. I also talked with as many other attendees as possible, and joined in the the #SMMW14 Twitter conversations to share my notes and get an idea of what was going on in the sessions I didn’t attend.

Most importantly, I outlined in advance the main topics to investigate at the conference: corporate blog strategies, social media customer service training examples, trends in the creep factor and the declining News Feed reach for Facebook pages.

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When a comment goes crazy

Four warning signs of an emotional commenter

We social media managers throw around the word “engagement” a ton.

So much in fact, that these days it’s lost much of its luster.

Despite its increasing ambiguity, and buzz-ness, I still think it’s the key value for any social media initiative. However, not all engagement is positive.

Negative comments, criticism and crazy people are inevitable. And how you respond to them says a lot about your social media strategy.

We often need to be reminded (or remind others) that you can’t stop the crazy – you can only hope to contain it.

So I jotted down some of the factors that help me spot crazy in social media discussions, and added some ideas to keep all this glorious engagement on the right track.

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Writing inspiration from Neil Strauss, Tim Ferris and the HBR IdeaCast

“Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who’ll argue with you.” – John Wooden

These days, the vast amount of content and information at the ready on the Internet gives us access to many smart people, from all industries and walks of life.

Personally, I really enjoy listening to quality interviews either on the radio, online or via podcasts. Not only do they usually feature smart people with interesting stories to tell, but the conversation allows multiple viewpoints, debate and an organic flow of ideas.

Today I’m going to share two inspiring interviews with you, and hope you find them as educational and thought-provoking as I did.

Continue reading Writing inspiration from Neil Strauss, Tim Ferris and the HBR IdeaCast