Seeing Yourself Through Your Child’s Eyes: A Personal Story

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It isn’t often that we get a chance to see ourselves as our children see us. But I recently received that gift when my daughter Jackie wrote the post, “My Life Growing Up with a Powerful CEO as a Mom” for the Daily Californian blog (cleverly called The Daily Clog). For those who don’t know, the Daily Californian is the student-run newspaper at UC Berkeley.

The post was created in honor of International Women’s Day, but when I read it I have to admit I didn’t feel like the powerful, fearless woman she described. I was more a pile of mush. (Funny how our kids have a way of doing that to us.)

Why did her words have such an effect? Maybe this except will help explain it:

“While she has always amazed me, growing up with such a busy mom was hard at times. Not understanding why she was always working was difficult as a child when a lot of my friends’ moms were home more often. But as I grew older, it only impressed me even more that she could single-handedly run not only her own company so successfully, but also her family. I’ve learned so much from having such a strong and hardworking mom. While I sometimes struggle to voice my opinions, my mom tells it like it is and doesn’t take anything from anyone.”

Although there might be some debate as to whether that last sentence is a virtue or a liability (LOL), I am so proud that Jackie was able to see past the things she may have wanted strictly for herself in order to understand the bigger picture. I am also glad that she found inspiration for her own life in my story.

Isn’t that what we all wish for? That our kids will take the best parts of us and use them to become even better?

I was also touched by this statement:

“The greatest lesson she has taught me is to believe in myself, even if no one else does. Her mantra is, “˜think you can, think you can’t, you’re right either way.’ And while my dad and I make fun of her every time she says it, it really is true if you believe in yourself, anything is possible. If you don’t, you’ll have no chance of achieving whatever it is you want.”

Yes, I do say that a lot, but only because I truly believe it in my heart of hearts. Jackie is one more proof point that it is true.

As you can probably tell, I am one very proud and humbled parent. But it’s great to see, after all the trials, tribulations, laughter, tears and battles that go along with raising a child, that in the end our relationship not only came out intact but that she sees me in such a special light. All I can tell you is the feeling is mutual.

May you all have the opportunity to see yourselves through the eyes of your children, and may you like what you see.

Taking the Animal House Approach to HIMSS20

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When news came down the Thursday before HIMSS20 was set to begin that the conference had been cancelled due to covid-19 concerns, it was tough to tell whether that loud sigh that rippled across America was relief or exasperation.

On the one hand, everyone who was on pins and needles waiting to see if their projects and presentations would be done on time were likely relieved to dodge a deadline bullet. Managers who weren’t sure whether it was prudent to send key staff to a potential covid-19 incubator (including me, quite frankly) were happy to have that responsibility taken off their shoulders.

Still, a lot of time, money and effort went into preparing for HIMSS20, and many health IT companies were counting on it to help them boost sales. They had to feel like Bluto Blutarsky (the late, great John Belushi) in Animal House after discovering Delta House had been expelled from campus, who famously said “Seven years of college down the drain.”

(I was going to share a video clip of that statement, but the only one I could find is definitely not safe for work. So you’ll just have to see it in your mind.)

Yet now that the initial shock has passed, it’s time to remember an even more famous Bluto quote: “Nothing is over until we decide it is!”

Yes, HIMSS is putting together virtual conference, which may be helpful. (I say “may be” because they’ve never tried it before so it will be a learning experience for all.) Regardless, however, there’s no need to wait for or count on the virtual conference to fulfill your HIT marketing needs. Because there is plenty you can do on your own to turn those frowns upside down. Here are a few examples:

  • Turn announcements and presentations into your own virtual events. Even if you’ve never done them before there is plenty of technology that makes creating webinars, podcasts and virtual roundtables even than ever. Especially if you have a great HIT-focused agency like Amendola to help.
  • Reschedule in-person demos and meetings as phone calls/online meet-ups. That time was set aside anyway. See if you can keep the appointment virtually.
  • Convert your HIMSS messaging into content pieces such as data sheets, infographics, white papers, case studies, videos, etc. Don’t forget customer presentations too. They can easily be converted into case studies, byline articles and sometimes even journal articles.
  • Take the effort you would have put into follow-up calls and emails after the conference and do them now.
  • Share everything you’ve created on social media. It’s probably the ideal time, because with more people working from home, or staying in rather than going out, social media is getting more attention than ever. Use all the channels available to you LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and wherever else you think your customers and prospects will be.

Yes, the cancelling of the live, in-person HIMSS20 conference may have seemed like a disaster. But it doesn’t have to be.

With a little creativity, and perhaps a little help from your friendly neighborhood PR and marketing agency, your final take will echo Delta House’s Flounder:

Using PR and Storytelling in Your B2B Marketing Strategy

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Your company has a story and people want to hear it.

Remember the last time you heard a great story? If you’re anything like me, it was probably a movie or T.V. show. Since the entertainment industry makes money by telling good stories, this makes sense. But in our fast-paced, tech-driven society, we rely on text messaging (guilty!), email and IMs and we don’t take the time to tell stories like we used to.

In the Don Draper, Mad Men, days of advertising storytelling was relatively simple. Come up with a catchy phrase and call it day. Now that we are bombarded with marketing campaigns on a 24×7 basis, it is harder to cut through the clutter.

That’s where storytelling and public relations come in. But what does it take to tell a really good story? Especially in a B2B environment?  

Not too long ago, I was asked by my marketing team to think about a B2B brand that really made an impression on me. Of course, my first reaction was come on. B2B + engaging content = doesn’t add up!

But then I thought about it and remembered a simple phrase that a sales representative from Wrike told me, “what you need is a single source of truth.”

If you aren’t familiar with Wrike, it’s a project management platform that can be shared across teams and business. It really can be that one source of truth rather than combing through endless emails to find that one URL or status update that you might have accidentally deleted because you tried to check your work email on your phone while at happy hour (I’ve only heard via storytelling that these things can happen!).

That phrase single source of truth will never leave my brain. Because it is precisely what my brain needed to hear to solve my need for organizing information.

Now I am an unofficial brand ambassador for this company. And that is the power of knowing your brand’s story.

At the end of the day, your story shouldn’t be about you at all. It should be about the things that matter to your buyer personas, but it should also be personal. (Yes, even B2B can be personal; we’re still humans in the work environment).

Never underestimate the value of making an emotional connection in the B2B world especially in healthcare. With health IT becoming more and more saturated, the B2B landscape is changing and it’s becoming more critical for strong B2B brands to do what strong brands do around the world engender trust and reduce perceived risk.

We have critical problems to fix in healthcare and every single client I work with creates technology that betters the lives of so many patients, physicians, nurses, payers the list could go on for days. But sometimes getting to the root of how this technology is shifting the healthcare environment is challenging.

Successful public relations activities rely on being able to tell powerful and insightful stories. Storytelling is an important aspect to public relations strategies because it allows companies to better connect with their audience.

Here are four ways your B2B brand can become a good storyteller.

1. Start with a broad narrative that helps tell the story of your company.

Purpose is essential to a strong corporate culture and it is often activated and reinforced through narrative. Individuals must learn to connect their drives to the organization’s purpose and to articulate their story to others.

A professor at Harvard University developed a simple framework for those hoping to develop a narrative approach to their purpose-driven organizations: “Self, Us, Now.” Self looks at the real-life events of the leader or leaders that created a company it helps to establish the values that will ultimately become the values of the organization.

Us’ aims to connect those values with broader shared values of your audiences or stakeholders, e.g., clients or employees. By weaving these personal narratives into the narratives of others, you create a common narrative for the group or organization.

And finally, now’ is the urgent call to action for those who wish to achieve the same purpose as your organization.

2. Consolidate your narrative into an elevator pitch.

Now that you’ve develop what I like to call the soul of your company, it’s likely a lengthy narrative as it should be since your company is solving some of healthcare’s most complex challenges. The elevator should pull out some of those key emotion-grabbing narratives and concisely explain:

  • Who are you?
  • What do you offer?
  • What problem do you solve?
  • How are you different (unique selling proposition)?
  • Your call to action

3. Adapt your elevator pitch into something that could be used as an “About Us.”

Now that you have a well-developed narrative that explains your unique identity, craft your story! Evoke an emotional response in your buyer persona. Provide a simple and clear value proposition, establish your credibility, and give a call to action. As they say, the best way to sell something is to not sell anything. Earn trust and loyalty by telling a compelling story to help stick in your customer’s mind.

4. Frame up your narrative against core themes that can represent your overall business.

Likely you’ve got a lot of products but talking about each product separately can quickly become overwhelming. If it’s overwhelming for your marketing team, then it is overwhelming for your customers too. Work to identify the core themes that your products can be categorized into. Then tell how those themes are solving our most critical problems.

Storytelling can’t be mastered overnight. It takes practice but it is worth it as there is nothing more powerful than making your content and news relatable to your audience. Tell good tales, and you’ll quickly find your audience will see you as a true thought leader and they will come to you.

Walking the Tightrope between Great Content and SEO

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It may not quite be Lincoln and Douglas, or even great taste/less filling. But the debate about which is more important to a brand’s online presence great content or search engine optimization (SEO) continues to rage on.

On one side you have the writers. Especially the “old school” writers (like me) who launched their careers long before Al Gore invented the Internet.

When I started writing we used typewriters electric ones. I’m not that old. The total focus was on the quality of the content. Clever, attention-grabbing headlines that led into powerful, motivating body copy that carried the message in an interesting way was “all” that was required.

Then came the Internet, and with it the omnipotent search engines. No longer was it enough for headlines and copy to be creative and interesting. The data wonks said it also had to include certain keywords that would tell the search engines a particular page or document was relevant to the search the user was conducting.

In other words, if the user is searching on the term “crazy bunnies” it was important for those keywords to appear in the headline, and in the little words that came after. Especially the first paragraph.

While that makes sense from a data point of view, it definitely created a dilemma for writers. Having a brilliant headline was no longer enough, because you weren’t just trying to capture the attention of humans. You also had to capture the attention of the machines.

That situation set up a sort of chicken-and-egg dilemma. You could write the best website, or article, or other content in the world, but if no one could find it in a marketing world that increasingly relied on search what was the point?

On the other hand, if your document was easy to find due to liberal use of keywords but not very interesting or engaging, again what was the point? You’d lose the audience you’d worked so hard to capture.

It also led to practices such as keyword stuffing (including keywords out of context for the sole purpose of raising searching rankings) and a host of other tricks such as putting keywords on a page in the same color as the background so they couldn’t be seen by humans but would be read by web crawlers. Didn’t take long for the search engines to figure that one out.

Keeping the balance

Fortunately, Google (and other search engines no one really cares about) have continually updated their algorithms to go beyond simple keywords. They are getting better and better at determining the context of the content to ensure it’s actually relevant.

Still, keywords are important to success. So how do you reconcile the desire to write content that reaches people on a deep, human level with the need to tell the machines yes, this is the information they’ve been looking for?

Here is a process I’ve found to be effective.

  1. Start by knowing which keywords are ranking for the topic you want to promote. If you don’t already have a list, you can use Google AdWords, a free service, to plug in some terms that are relevant to your product/service. Then see which ones have relatively high search volumes with low competition. That will tell you what terms your audience is likely to be searching on, and how difficult it will be to rank high for them. The goal, of course, is page one above the fold. Be sure to check Google’s suggested substitutions too. There may be a more effective word or phrase lurking in there somewhere. Of course, if you have an agency (such as, oh, I dunno, Amendola Communications) you can hand that work off to them.
  2. Once you have your list, set it aside. Then develop the content in a way that is the most interesting and speaks to your audience(s). Don’t worry about keywords right now. Just make sure you’re telling a good story that demonstrates your knowledge and/or experience and convinces your target audience that you would be the best choice. In other words, write as though the Internet doesn’t exist.
  3. After you have great content, go back and look for places to plug in your keywords. Start with the headline and the first paragraph. Is there a way to work in your most important keyword? Then sprinkle in others throughout the rest of the content. In some cases it may require a bit of rewriting, but often you’ll be surprised at how easily a keyword can be substituted for another word or phrase. Writing in this fashion, rather than trying to write to the keywords initially, will help the keywords fit more organically, and will keep you from writing dull and, well, robotic content.
  4. Finally, when you think it’s ready to go have someone who hasn’t been involved in the process read it to ensure those keywords are fitting in as well as you think they are. Taking this extra step doesn’t just help with human readers, by the way. With the sophisticated machine learning many search engines are applying these days it will also help minimize any appearance that you’re trying to “game” the system. Instead, your keywords will fit in the context of your content, and you will be rewarded by Google, the Great and Powerful.

Walk the line

Great content and SEO don’t have to be treated as opposing forces. In fact, they can (and should) work very well together.

By focusing first on what you want to say, and then bringing in the flags that will help that great content get seen, you can bring customers and prospects to your website and make sure they’re delighted once they get there.