Tag: PR

My analysis of “Papa John’s founder resigns as chairman after using N-word on conference call”

Carl Setzer

Reading this article stunned me: Papa John’s founder resigns as chairman after using N-word on conference call

A simply mind blowing story. Over the years I’ve seen plenty of people make horrible public gaffes.  It’s hard to imagine coming up with something worse to say. By a man who worked really hard to build a company into something huge. 

Psychoanalyzing people based at a distance is ineffective. However, reading this, and looking over his list of other public faux pases, I wonder if he subconsciously wanted to be fired. It explains a lot, really.

Contemporary Communications

Carl Setzer

A current cultural value: speed. Faster, faster…get more done sooner!

So, with that, one of my recent personal observations: I need to slow down. In the grand flurry of work, I find it easy to wrap myself up in the frenetic nature of life and reactively communicate. My most common culprit: email, though other medium catch that, too.

Taking that moment to consider “what am I trying to say?” and “what do I want to happen?”, then evaluating my content against those proves itself valuable again and again.

Also valuable: thinking through medium. Is an email the best tool to get the results I need? Sometimes I end up shifting to a phone call after a few emails where we talk past each other.

Quite often slowing down, getting focused on quality ends up being by far faster. In my experience, I find that true more often than not.

Pro-tips to maximize social media marketing

Carl Setzer

I subscribed to Ragan’s PR Daily years ago. Ragan provides timely insight into the current state of PR and it’s related fields.

Lauren Friedman just posted “3 tips for creating a real-time marketing command center“. Her points are spot-on. Read the article! However, here’s the  highlights:

  1. Social Media marketing/PR is about engagement (sorry for the buzzword, but it’s important to get this). Listen to the audience, read hashtag threads, know what the discussion is about and your relevance to it.
  2. Know your market! How is your audience going to respond your commentary. And, sometimes, silence is valuable. One doesn’t need to be involved in every high-profile discussion, and at times it’s critical to steer clear.
  3. Teamwork: having valued “ears” you can bounce ideas off “right now” is valuable. Diversity is key to those teams, ensuring you avoid the tone-deaf statements.

So, take a minute and give it a read.