The practice of public relations may be more important now than ever given the immediacy of the social media channels.  Social media is about direct contact that consumers can choose to have with companies and their brands.  Today communicating with your customer is dynamic and it happens when consumers interact with your company as well as when they respond and act on that messaging with each other.  Social media changed the game and gives control to your customers in these communication channels so its important to be transparent and credible when responding or delivering messages to your community.  If you aren’t, they will know and they can be either your best advocates or your worst opponents.  Today’s PR professionals need to be interactive, responsive and authentic when engaging in social media communications.

Media Relations

In today’s 24/7 world news is happening faster than the traditional network distribution can get it to the wires.  Social media has transformed how information travels.  Relationships with journalists who cover your brand are vital in today’s light-speed communication environments.  Anyone with a camera-phone can break a story before it even hits the news.  A savvy PR professional tuned in to these channels understands that getting to the story before it gets to you is critical for leading and shaping the coverage of your story.  Media relations are key to this effort before the crisis hits to ensure effective and timely communications centered around the messaging that is best for your brand.  Its all about relationships.

Trust & Credibility

People appreciate it when you are upfront and honest, even when you deliver a tough message.  Social media communities demand authenticity and responsiveness.  When your brand is just another corporate “talking head”, they know and they spread the word around.  The whole idea of user-experience marketing through social media channels has many companies considering what this really means for their products and image.  For years, product-focused marketing has been the norm, where the conversation has essentially been a “one-way” street.  Now the customer has the ability to give direct and immediate feedback not only to you, but your OTHER customers and POTENTIAL customers, by talking about their experience with your brand and products.  It’s a new layer in the way we market ourselves in the social media arena.  For companies who are consistent in the delivery of their messages with their products, it can be a good thing.  But even great companies occasionally deal with negative situations.  It’s a fact of life.

How you deal with it can positively or negatively impact your future relationship with your online community.  These people are actively engaged with you.  Nurture them.  Every seasoned sales person knows that word-of-mouth is the most effective sales tactic.  It can also sink your ship.  Avoiding the issues, ignoring comments or requests for feedback, or actually deleting comments from Twitter or Facebook around situations you are not prepared to deal with isn’t going to get you very far in this space.

Be honest, immediately interact to touch the customer and let them know you are looking into a problem, and then provide a method to directly communicate with the customer to resolve the issue.  This is an effective way to deal with problems that come up on your social media channels.  Over time this kind of responsiveness creates good will and may even produce “ambassadors” for your brand.   Read:  customers from your online community who actively engage to defend or protect your brand because they love you so much.  It happens.  These kinds of influencers can sometimes deflect other users comments and instigate positive comments to help defuse a tricky situation.  It isn’t magic.  You have to work to cultivate your brand image in your social media channels to ensure that its honest and responsive to build and engage your social media community.

Many of these tactics are tried and true tenets of corporate PR.  They work.  There will still be those one-off sticky situations to deal with occasionally.  When you have seasoned professionals  skilled in the art of communications, thoroughly engaged with social media channels and strong media relationships you have the best of the old and the new to enable  your company adapt and thrive in social media.

I sometimes get frustrated with people who ask me why are you learning Chickasaw?  Why does it matter? You can’t use it in the real world.  What difference does it make? Why do you live in Ada, Oklahoma? As if living life in the corporate fast lane, in and out of airports, speaking Spanish as a second language and spending my life making money is the path to happiness and a purpose, or end in itself.  Been there, done that.  Not happily either.

I’m always curious about why people think asking me questions like that isn’t rude?  The ones who do ask seem to do so with a sense of entitlement to question my life choices.  I wonder how they would feel (when I’m in a rather obnoxious mood) if I asked them why do you have a job that takes you away from your family 5 days a week and causes you to have to commute 1.5 hours each way to get there?

Obviously, we have different beliefs and value systems. My values are focused on family and time. You can’t buy those things and when you lose one, you can’t get it back, no matter how much money you have.

I’ve known rich people and I’ve known poor people and I’ve known a lot of people in between. The most unhappy people, regardless of their financial station, are those I’ve known who have no connections, no ties to people who care for them and spend time with them.  Some people can get through life on the strength of those bonds, even if they can’t be brave enough to make life-changing alternative choices in the  way they live and work.

Generosity of spirit knows no financial strata. Having family and friends who love my son and love me, and spend time with us is something I am very thankful for this year, always and every day.  Living a life filled with purpose isn’t always easy or grand even it sounds like it.  It can be a hard and lonely road but you do it for a reason.   If someone chooses a path that is different from yours, try to show some empathy at least and if possible, at most, some compassion. They just might need that to help solidify their own unique vision and to keep going with it this holiday season.

I’m going to pray that I can follow my own advice this year. It’s hard but it’s worth doing.  But then again like I always say, life is hard even when you are doing what you want to do with it, so do your best to make sure that all your efforts count and that you are doing something you love most of the time with the people that you love whenever you can.  Be grateful for ALL of it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Being a woman in this country, and a Native American, the privilege of voting is especially important to me.  Black men could vote long before women of any color.  It was even longer before Native Americans were considered citizens of their own country and could be trusted enough to vote.

What’s on my mind most tonight as I anticipate what I will do with my vote tomorrow is how often certain groups count on the vast majority of Americans NOT to vote.  That’s how “they” win, you know.  Whether you like Obama or not, he certainly galvanized the country to get out and vote.  He’s still doing it, using online channels very effectively too.  Whatever you think about his politics, he’s relevant using today’s technology in communicating his message.

I’m also thinking about the ways we limit ourselves by thinking in terms of labels.  Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, the “left”, the “right”.  Labels marginalize our thinking.  We use them to instantly categorize things we like or don’t like, in this case regarding politics.  But what is the purpose of having a well-informed critical thinking mind if every time you disagree with someone else you are labeled, or “marginalized” … categorized into a bucket of whatever that person thinks you mean by not agreeing with him or her?  I suspect that most of us are part liberal and part conservative in certain ways, each different.  Our issues today are complex and touch us emotionally, financially and in our humanity.  There is not one simple answer to any of the problems in our country.  Labels will blind us to critical and original thought with regard to these issues.  We should transcend them and overcome our institutional ways of thinking so we can try to come up with some innovative solutions to the problems that affect all of us.

We are Americans after all, noted for hard work and innovation and getting tough when the going gets tough.  Let’s stop marginalizing ourselves with this self-destructive labeling and figure out the right thing to do for ourselves and for our fellow citizens.

Vote.  Tomorrow.  Make a difference.  Use your mind and your heart.  Do the right thing, whatever you think that is… make the Nike move and Just Do It.  Stop limiting yourself.  My current favorite quote says it all:  Change your thoughts and you can change your world.-Norman Vincent Peale

There are 3 videos. The first deals with the vowels of “a”, “i” and “o” in Chickasaw. The second video deals with the word order and the grammatical structure of Chickasaw though very briefly.    See this link on Wikipedia to learn more:  http://bit.ly/zOEJ.  The third video describes resources for building vocabulary by visiting www.chickasaw.net where you can hear a word of the day with an mp3 file as well as download basic vocabulary in pdf format. I also present the Facebook  page  Chikashsha Iliachika – We Speak Chickasaw and show the
Twitter page with the same icon as is found on my blog so subscribers will know they are in the right place. Please visit the Facebook page and Twitter profile @traghic to post questions or words you would like to learn in Chickasaw or subscribe to this blog and do the same.

I’m excited about sharing Chickasaw language with all of you in cyberspace. Language, of any kind, is really about connecting with other humans to share our thoughts. It is another common element of our humanity in our attempt to communicate. While all languages are different, they are similar that we all say the same things basically every day to each other.  We just use different sounding words.

Chickasaw language is an oral language passed from master speakers to this generation. It is now taught at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma through a grammatical text written by Pamela Munro and Catherine Willmond, Chikashsha Kilanompoli – Let’s Speak Chickasaw. Our language is endangered. There are only 182 or so fluent elder speakers left.  For more information about Chickasaw Language resources contact the Division of History and Language for the Chickasaw Nation, Language Revitalization program 580-436-2603.

This is my way of sharing what I have learned with those who may not live here in Ada, using technology to share the language and values of our past and present vibrant Chickasaw culture.  Subscribe to my YouTube channel here: http://bit.ly/aUfo5j.

I hope you enjoy these videos.  I am by no means a fluent speaker. I have been studying language for 3 years and every day I continue to learn more. My intention with these channels is to use the ways in which I work to connect with others who are also interested in language to keep it alive and relevant. I am a 21st century Chickasaw woman, a working mother using social media to communicate in today’s technology.  We are a nation of American Indians who continue to thrive on the legacy of those who came before us, surviving, adapting and ultimately thriving in this modern world.

Chipisalacho – I will see you.  Share your questions and thoughts with me by subscribing to this blog.

Two years in November the Ku Klux Klan in Ada somehow managed to put recruiting flyers into the paper delivery of the Ada Evening News.  Citizens of our fair small town woke up to find this heinous message when they read their morning news.  This past week while in NY, a group of 9  young men calling themselves the Latin Goonies, tricked a 30-year-0ld man into coming to a “party” where they had two teenage boys already captured to torture and sodomize the man for being gay.  See the news story and wordpress blog about it here:  hate crimes in the bronx.

It’s all about Christian values in Ada, OK.  Treat others the way you would treat yourself.  The Golden Rule.  In NY, the message is all about tolerance, though there are controversies going on about a mosque near ground zero, and the city is filled with the legacy of immigrants who have seeded this nation and continue to do so today.

What is this inherent conflict in our humanity which seems to compel us to be hypocrites?  How do we become aware of this before we act on it and subconsciously teach it to our children?  When will we become a better race of people / humans?

On Thursday night a man on the street walked up to me and my date in New York and asked him to buy some roses for the lady.  My date refused.  The man then asked for a donation.  My date went ballistic on the guy and for hours later tried to justify his position to all within earshot.  The rose man was from Nigeria.  My date was from Beverly Hills.  We were in the company of other LA and NY hotshots who have made their fortunes the American way.  Nevertheless, I felt sorry for Nigerian Rose Guy.  He didn’t ask for the hand-out first.  He wasn’t “hustling” us.  He needed money.  I’m not stupid.  I know a panhandler when I see one.  But even if he had been one, giving him $5 which was approximately 1% of the money we had just dropped on dinner, seemed reasonable.  I almost did give the man some cash, but I felt it would embarass my date.  What now does that say about me?

Treating others with respect and dignity no matter their station in life is a value I was taught as a child.  Treat others as you would be treated is something I learned at church also as a child.  I am raising a child in this crazy world.  I am raising him to have these values.  I am also raising him to be tolerant of others who are different.  After all, we are the legacy of both American Indians and Scot/Irish immigrants.  I am raising him to value hard work, but to be responsible for those who are less fortunate than he is.  Yet, while these values may ring home to many, I am sometimes told they are idealistic, unrealistic and create others who will take advantage of my child.  So, what then, should I teach him?

Right now I live in a world where commerce fuels the social services that enable the Chickasaw people to thrive.  This is not a socialist or a purely capitalist model.  It is simply a model of commerce that is driven by core values.  Values concerning healthcare, education, affordable housing, children and elders.  Values the American way is still struggling to embrace.  If I don’t teach my child the values that will make him better as a human being, who will? And if I don’t, he will learn other things, make other choices.  Not only he, but millions of other American children too.

How then can we NOT teach them something better to live by?  Should I teach only how to make the Almighty Dollar in any possible way you can?  Andrew Carnegie was said to have been  haunted by the decisions he made creating his fortune and the way he treated people all of his life.  Later he donated millions to charities to salve his conscience, but I wonder, did it work?  You can have all the money in the world, but if you don’t have time to share it with those who are important to you, who cares.  Every rich man dying on his deathbed right now is probably wishing he had just a little more time.  I am sure we all would wish for that when the time comes.

Life is about these tiny moments.  Some go by so quickly you can almost miss them.  Your character shapes the choices you may in those moments in each and every day.  We have many choices.  Your character is shaped by values.  There seems to be an intrinsic connection here.  In order to make the world a better place, no matter where we live, we need to work on making ourselves better humans.

Walk the talk.  Treat others as you would be treated.  Be tolerant.  Our country was founded on religious and social freedoms.  Teach your children to do better than you have done.  Be an example.  Make a difference.  Change.

Each of these dimensions of who I am have shaped and helped me adapt to the changing world of business that I constantly live in.  Yesterday, I had a great conversation with some people from Australia who are here in New York with me for a conference.  We were talking about social media and how its applicable to businesses and brands and the question came up about “Why do people want to do this anyway?  Talk about themselves in such a personal way on such a public forum like Facebook or even Twitter?”

I’ve given this quite a lot of thought over the last year or so and here’s what I’ve come up with.  First as it relates to business this social media  phenomenon reminds me of the dot.com/internet bubble madness (minus the financial stakes of course) occurring in the late 90′s.  Advertisers, “gurus” and smart people of all sorts were predicting change on a massive scale:  no more newspapers, people wouldn’t use money anymore, virtual this, virtual that, etc.  And now 10+ years later, I scooped up a newspaper on my way out of the hotel yesterday, after paying bills and ordering some Christmas presents online, checking Facebook and Twitter and heading out the door for the conference, while checking my smart phone GPS for directions and emails.

Humans use technology for human reasons.  We explore space.  Why?  To find other beings to connect with somewhere out there.  When the first fax machines were introduced (yes, I know I’m dating myself) I recall the first fax I received after the installation was a “chain letter”.  We still get those sorts of things in “forwards” in our emails.  Social media is the latest way that we’ve figured out as humans to connect with one another.  We crave belonging to a group, being heard, feeling like our voice matters.  Our technological advances are limited by our own humanity.

I’ll take that radical thought one step further:  We can build spaceships and probes that travel past the Milky Way galaxy.  We seek contact with other life forms but are limited in our perspective by the understanding of our own physics and chemical composition.  We assume if they are not like us, they cannot exist.  Maybe they do and we just can’t see them.  We assume that the best measure of the advancement of a civilization is its ability to destroy itself.  Paradox?  Irony?  This is a scientific theoretical calculation known as Drake’s Equation:  look it up.  Amazing but true.

Biotechnology advances every day, yet we argue over stem cells and cloning while children go hungry in the world. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point or at least I’ve managed to get your thinking rattled up.  Social media is the latest way we try to connect as people using technology and the very aspects of our nature that make us human:  becoming members of digital tribes to belong, speaking with our own voices to people like us and brands when they can understand how to human the “brand” experience and communicate with us.  All too often business leaders sit in their ivory towers and make decrees, “We shall do social media.  Go forth and communicate about our wonderfulness to others.”  Well, that’s what advertising has been doing for about 100 years.  We know it when we see it, sometimes are even entertained by it, but what makes social media important for businesses is that if we like you, we’ll tell you, and not the other way around.  So once the “brands” get that  point, they’ll see its a new way to play the game and the users are in control.  Sounds kind of fun.  Sounds like social media, too, will evolve just as the internet has done.  Looks like this latest innovation may hold all the emotional possibility of humanizing the marketplace and personalizing business just a bit more.  At least from all I’ve seen and experienced in this short time on the planet, we keep trying to integrate all aspects of our lives, creating even more time to pack more in, yet we desire connection, validation and a voice.  Social media gives us that sense of how cool and important and connected we are in the world, that we belong.  Walking down 7th Avenue in New York last night I heard probably 5 different languages and watched people talking in groups, tourists, city-dwellers, all with their phones or headphones and I realized that at the intersection of all these cultures we are still human and we continue to create experiences that are human, drama, art, music, literature, and yes, technology.

Hmmmm…first time I put all those thoughts in one place on paper.  What do you think?

We are such creatures of habit.  Often we compartmentalize our lives and rush about from one thing to the next so that when we have to slow down and take stock, it’s a harried unfocused blip in time.

I am focused on living a life of purpose.  Aligning my values with my work and my personal life is very important to me.  This major paradigm shift in my personal view of on life began with the birth of my son and its becoming a discipline that I have to work on daily.  I have a lot of bad habits.  Im-momachi as they would say it in the Chickasaw language.  The first step to changing a bad habit is to become aware of it.  I still tend to compartmentalize my life into personal and work and try to shave off time here and there in my busy day to get this or that done more quickly.  But am I doing it well or effectively when I operate this way?  Is this just a habit that I can change once I become aware of the pattern in my behavior.

When I was a young consultant with a now no longer existent worldwide consulting firm, I received some invaluable Stephen Covey training concerning The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Admittedly, at the time I saw the benefit, but again was  feeling like it was just something else I had to do for my continuing education credits.  Six weeks of workshops and journaling, and 10 years later I can still remember those tenets or at least most of them. Remembering, however, is not living them.  Being aware and changing a habit that is counter-productive to your personal life goals and strategy requires discipline and self-reflective qualities only revealed with time and through  retrospection.

Reporting reminds of these elements:  time and retrospection.  I am learning how to “unlearn” the way I compartmentalize my life so I can be more effective in my work, personal and family life. Quite possibly, I hope, I may be more productive with time management when ALL my priorities are aligned in the right context and the right order.  I am sure that this is a lifelong process, but the key “a-ha” moment for me was when I realized:  it doesn’t all have to get done today just figure out the important priorities for the day and put them in order, whether personal or work-related and hit those top few.  When I take time to reflect, and strip away the “noise” as one of my gurus, Chris Brogan recently wrote in his daily blog (see http://www.chrisbrogan.com), it works for me.  I get the important things done, everything else seems to fall into the right order of priority and if I have to change direction, I have an understanding of my overall course of action to guide me.

Things are always going to fall in the cracks, I think.  There will always be compromises.  Life will always be busy, but this helps me understand and take the time for the reporting required in all areas of my life – including work.  This perspective keeps me on track in all these areas.

What are your strategies for staying on track in your crazy busy life?

Back to building on the thoughts of strategy and alignment, influence seems to be very important.  As a consultant, influencing others is critical to your success and the success of the organization too even when you have to communicate difficult or oppositional messages. Influence is important to recognize in others too, so that if persuaded or already “on board”, those folks can help you influence the strategy and alignment message in your audience of key stakeholders.  Those efforts, too, take time.  How do you prioritize the efforts?  It’s almost as if you need a strategy to “sell” or “evangelize” the strategy before you even begin.  In some organizations, upper level management says, “strategy-smategy”, just do it”, but that approach is counter-intuitive to a longer term vision.

Contrary to popular business wisdom, just because the higher-ups command action it doesn’t always follow that  mid-level management or support staff will enable the strategy or even understand it and how it applies to their own daily work.  People need to be part of the process at all levels of the organization in order to understand and “own” the strategy.  When they own it, and understand alignment in terms of the work they do every day, they are quick to figure out how to enable the goals and tactics necessary for the strategy to be effective in their part of the business.

Everyone wants to feel as if they contribute and that their work matters.  That’s why I think influence is so interesting and multi-faceted within an organization.  Strategy cannot just be golden words that tumble-down from the ivory towers of the C-level executive management.  It has to be absorbed and articulated by everyone required to enable the strategy at all levels of the organization.

What do you think?  Do you have examples of how influence can be enabled throughout an organization?   I sometimes think strategy can come from the bottom-up in an organization.  Have you seen this phenomenon occur in your realm of influence?

What are some of the challenges of strategy and alignment in your organization?  What are some approaches to handling these challenges?

In business and in our personal lives, I think it works the same way.  Without an overall guiding mission or value proposition, how can you be in alignment with either a business strategy or in your personal life?  And like your wheel alignment, even when you have a firm structure, the road conditions, mileage, etc., in other words the wear and tear of a constantly changing environment both in life and on the road mean that the framework needs adjustment and fine-tuning over time for optimal performance.  After a while, sometimes the tires just need to be changed entirely because they can no longer perform.  Sometimes the entire framework needs to be changed because it’s too old or no longer relevant to the journey at hand.

Communication at all these stages is critical when this analogy applies to work and real life.  As I’ve noted before, communication is difficult.  Trust, respect and credibility are required when tough messages need to be delivered.  These values need to be present on both sides of the communication taking place. People can be trusted and respected enough to understand how change could possibly impact them and leaders should respect their people enough to be upfront and honest.  After all, if you are good leader, you hired good capable people who besides working for your company, go about their lives daily making decisions on how to live their lives, raise their children and manage their affairs.  They can take, and deserve, honest forthright communication from you when it affects their lives, even if you don’t think they will like it.  Communication is the core of what we do each and every day, from our families to our workplace, it’s what either keeps us on track, or the lack of appropriate communication can cause you to veer off track.  It’s hard and sometimes we don’t want to do it because it makes us uncomfortable, but it’s vital to the health and success of our personal and professional relationships.

What are some of your leadership communications challenges in the workplace?