Every business has a culture. But not every business knows what their culture is or how they got it. That’s a mistake no business owner should ever let happen. Because your business culture defines so much of how your business works, or doesn’t work.

Merriam-Webster defines culture: “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.” When you start a business, culture’s pretty easy — it’s you. But as you grow and add employees, if you don’t make a conscious decision to communicate your definition of culture to every employee, and infuse it throughout the organization, you still get a culture. Just not the culture you envisioned — kind of like thinking you’re going to see Atonement and instead ending up in the theatre showing Meet the Spartans. You can try to convince yourself that you’re watching an Academy Award-nominated period piece. But your employees, clients, vendors, subcontractors, etc. are watching some bizarre comedy where everybody keeps getting pushed down a giant sinkhole. (more…)

Public relations used to be about “getting our message out.” Today it’s much more about telling stories that will resonate with certain groups of people — people who have signaled they will care about the story through their affiliations, memberships, community connections, what information they access and where they access it, etc. In other words, public relations is about building relationships with select audiences for clients. That’s because 1) there are so many different ways to get information today and 2) consumers expect and have much greater control over their information sources and 3) numbers 1 and 2 impact each other bi-directionally and constantly, further changing, nearly every day, the communication landscape. (Marketing guru Seth Godin captures this bi-directionality brilliantly and quickly in his new book Meatball Sundae. A taste of the sundae is regularly found in Seth’s Blog, especially and including this recent post called “Dumbing Down.”)

Like any organization, I’ve got a story for Rosenberg Communications that I need to communicate to my target audiences. Problem is, if I’m completely honest about it, I’m having trouble keeping up with the story. (more…)

As a small business owner some of the toughest decisions center around resource allocation. How do I know what to do in-house and what to outsource? For me, it comes down to how best to utilize the creativity of my staff.

We create and manage blogs for clients. If we decide, in partnership with a client, that a blog can effectively help tell their story to people who will care, we blog. But we don’t do the building of the blog in-house, even though we have the in-house capability to do so. Why not? Because I decided that having my staff spend time on building the blog as opposed to doing what they do best and few others do as well — that is, crafting a story, developing the strategy to tell the story, and managing the storytelling — would be a bad use of resources.

We can outsource the building of the blog for less than what we would charge a client for the time, when the client would much rather be paying us for the same amount of time to manage the complete public relations strategy.

And we are skilled at bringing in just the right subcontractors to whom we outsource specific tasks. For example, for creating blogs we bring in Durbin Media. We work well with them. They can grasp what we want to create for a client. They do it at a reasonable price. And that just makes us even more valuable to a client because we can design the entire conceptual framework for a campaign, bring together all the right tools (in-house talent and outsourced talent), and manage it all to achieve desired outcomes within required budgets. That’s a pretty good talent for us to sell.

The iPod Touch as marital aide: My wife and I love my iPod Touch. We lay in bed, one earpiece in my left ear, one in her right ear, and watch episodes of Showtime’s Weeds. We spend more time together and talk less. Clearly the iPod Touch (and all video iPods) was invented by a man!

Oh gee, what to say to my twin 13-year-olds about the 16-year-old star of the popular TV show they watch who got pregnant? According to the media, parents everywhere are struggling with this quandary. Here’s what we said to my young teen son and daughter: “That’s why 16-year-olds should not be having sex.” Gee, didn’t seem that hard to figure out what to tell them.

We’re doing a marketing video. Stay tuned — in a few weeks it will premiere on Blogenberg. Of course, I was interviewed. Now I have even greater empathy for the dozens of folks I media train every year. When you go on camera to talk about your business or your organization, something that means so much to you, man it’s hard. Much harder than the hundreds of interviews I’ve done “flacking” for some organization or issue.

My business New Year’s resolutions: market, market, market (interspersed with lots of work for clients that makes us proud). As 2008 starts, I’m exceedingly excited and equally terrified. This is the year we either continue to build on a run of success or fall backwards. We’ve got a big plateful of opportunity before us. Blogenberg fans will be the first to know what direction 2008 takes us.

Happy New Year!

Corporate citizenship is a big term. Rosenberg Communications is a small (but growing!) shop. But I’m finding that being a corporate citizen supports my bottom line without costing me much.

For a long time I’ve understood corporate citizenship, or corporate social responsibility (CSR). The Hitachi Foundation, one of our clients, is a leader in the field. We’ve worked with the Foundation, the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, and Net Impact, to create the blog, corporatecitizen07.com. And we’re managing the rollout of the State of Corporate Citizenship 2007, the only survey of executives’ attitudes and behaviors that includes small, medium, and large businesses. The most important finding? Action trails behind talk when it comes to CSR.

I was one of those — a good talker, not much of a walker. But I figured, “I’m small. Just keeping afloat is my biggest contribution!” I’ve since learned that being a good corporate citizen doesn’t cost me much at all, and has some immediate payback. (more…)

On Blogenberg, I’ve talked a lot about the direction we are heading, much of it built around Word of Mouth Public Relations (WOMPR). We’ve done some walking of that talk — quite a bit actually, for a number of clients. We’re about to start walking that talk deep into Pennsylvania coal country.

We’re working with a rape and victim assistance center that’s trying to address sexual abuse by helping young people decide to wait to have sex — there’s a lot of young girl, older (much) guy relations going on, all of it, almost by definition, exploitive and harmful. One of their strategies is to help parents talk to their kids about avoiding unhealthy risk behaviors, especially sex. We’re building a WOMPR campaign throughout the county to support the effort. (more…)

I came across a survey of business executives in a magazine. Fully 65 percent said that they would not want to start their own business. I can understand, though not relate.

I’m now old enough, and have been running my own business long enough (13 years), that men and women, usually younger than me, occasionally come to me seeking advice about their own business aspirations. They hope I have some answers, hope my graying beard makes me sage-like. I initially disappoint them when I say I don’t have any answers. I tell them I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on the questions, though:

If you want balance between work and family, are you willing to kill yourself for it? If you’re going to run your own business you have to be dedicated to it 100%. There’s no room for lopping off, say 10%, for your family. That doesn’t mean you can’t be equally devoted to your family – of course, anybody who has read Blogenberg realizes I am. But you have to kill yourself to do it. About two to three times a year I get sick, simply because I work, travel, and tend to family so long and hard, my body decides getting sick for a day or two is the only way to get some rest.

Can you live with the frustration (pain?) found in the gap between striving for perfection and realizing you can only do your best? Are you committed to endlessly working to shrink the gap? Recently, my company has made a few mistakes. Fortunately, they were small mistakes, having mostly to do with process that in no way affected the client or the product. But it sent me through the roof. I expect perfection for clients. When we don’t hit it, I’m depressed. As a result, we work harder. I also go to the gym to throw weights around. (more…)

There is, admittedly, a streak of arrogance that runs through Blogenberg at times: my public relations firm knows where PR is going and we’re betting that the market catches up with us. (Read on and hopefully you’ll see we’re really not arrogant – just trying to allow clients to go where today’s communications market can take them.)

A number of businesses and organizations we work with are getting it, making me feel more and more comfortable with the business bet I’ve made. But nobody yet has gotten it like The Hitachi Foundation. We have put together and implemented entire rollouts that rely completely on blogger media relations, e-mail marketing and word of mouth, website placements, and partnerships with allied organizations.

As part of our work for The Hitachi Foundation, we are in the midst of rolling out the State of Corporate Citizenship Survey 2007, the most comprehensive survey of business attitudes and practices when it comes to corporate social responsibility. The linchpin of the rollout is a blog, www.corporatecitizen07.com. Every piece of a comprehensive communications strategy – including traditional media outreach – revolves around this blog. (Check out the contributors list. The heft of this list speaks both to the leadership of The Hitachi Foundation and its partners on the blog, the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship and Net Impact, and the import of the issues at stake.)

So I’ve been asking myself, how do I find more Hitachi Foundations? (more…)

In earlier Blogenbergs I’ve posted about how I’m betting that we know where PR is going – narrower and narrower, more and more segmented, embracing social networking and citizen journalism. Am I an “out in front” progressive business owner, or Don Quixote? The income statements will tell us.

We just submitted an extremely creative proposal to reach youth with messaging built entirely on a social networking platform, never touching traditional media. If we win, it will work. The question is, will the screening committee “get it”? I’ll let you know.

And once again, I’ve been asked by a potential client, one who has a track record of building successful organizations, why not hold a press conference? (more…)

The toughest thing about being a small business is being bigger. Not getting bigger; being bigger.

Getting bigger will happen – or not – on its own time schedule. But being bigger, when business or proposals or pitches demand it, that’s another thing. Because sometimes the only way I can get new business, or put a competitive proposal in, is to actually be bigger than we are. That’s why, as I’ve mentioned in earlier Blogenbergs, I’ve started on a concerted effort to enter into strategic alliances with other companies.

I’m now creating marketing materials around alliances with an advertising agency, a marketing firm, and a design shop – case studies, for example, which share logos. I pick and choose the strategic alliance, off the shelf, so to speak, depending on what the proposal or pitch demands. Now, I can market my business as bigger. I’ve just got to make sure bigger equals better.
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My wife likes to watch Dateline. I’d rather watch Barney re-runs.

Just somebody tell me what journalistic contribution NBC is making with it’s all murder, all rape, all kidnapping, and, of course, all pedophilia show that is Dateline. Indeed, it’s not that Dateline makes no contribution to society. It’s a negative, a drain on the bit of civility this society has left. Dateline is nothing but the constant glamorizing of evil for the sake or ratings.

Here’s a note to Dateline producers: take a field trip to 60 Minutes, where they actually try journalism.