Public Relations Tips and Tricks for Small Business Professionals
December 30, 2011 Leave a Comment
My Team of Experts, Inc. will close effective December 31 and I will be officially retired. This blog along with our company Facebook page will be discontinued. We can still connect via my personal Facebook page and LinkedIN. Thanks to all of you who have made the past 10 years such an exciting adventure.
Ciao y’all …
Patricia Golden – former president of My Team of Experts Inc. and future ??? (I guess we’ll have to wait and see!)
September 1, 2011 1 Comment
After a very successful decade delivering public relations services to Charlotte’s small businesses and nonprofit organizations, I am pleased to share with you my plans to retire at the end of 2011 and close My Team of Experts Inc. During the past 10 years, My Team of Experts provided retained public relations services to 83 small businesses and nonprofit organizations and played a role in more local stories about local small businesses and nonprofits than any other Charlotte-based PR agency.
It wouldn’t have happened without such an extraordinary group of people who worked with me. Thanks to Cindy Bear Scoggins, Karen Murray, Kara Harrington, Lisa Holm, David Pollack and Jennifer Walker, we were able to shine the spotlight on so many deserving entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders who are making a difference in our world.
Yesterday was Jenni Walker’s last day with My Team of Experts Inc. She is now the proud owner of Walker PR Group, LLC. Over the past eight months, we have been gradually transitioning many of our clients to Walker PR Group. I am so pleased that she decided to strike out on her own and continue to serve the small business and nonprofit community in this way. Jenni can be reached at Jennifer at WalkerPRGroup dot com and 980-339-8041.
The logical question is what will I do next? I will continue to serve clients until the end of the year, but then what?
My plan is to relax, travel, enjoy more time laughing with family and friends and explore new interests. I’m sure I will uncover hidden talents that I’ve not had a chance to develop before. And I’ll let that lead the way into the next phase of my life.
Thanks to all of you for your support and friendship!
Patricia Golden, President
My Team of Experts, Inc.
September 30, 2010 Leave a Comment
I was recently asked my opinion on the public relations campaign that the Charlotte Chamber, Charlotte Center City Partners and Charlotte Regional Partnership plan to embark upon. My comments were published in the September 17, 2010 issue of The Mecklenburg Times in an article titled “Group seeks positive press for Charlotte” by Caitlin Coakley. But they don’t fully express what I was trying to communicate.
It is no secret to anyone who knows me how much I love Charlotte. I love the city and I love the people who live, work and play here. I even love those goofy politicians with whom I disagree more often than not. And so I care deeply about how we continue to project our established reputation as a place where people choose to put down roots.
The communication strategy and messaging will depend largely on the PR agency that is selected. (My Team of Experts is not bidding for this project.) But the entire effort may backfire if the chosen agency decides to distance our city from the banks because of the troubles in that sector. Charlotte’s banks and related financial services are important to our nation as well as our community. We may have been knocked down, but we certainly have not been knocked out.
But even our big banks started as small entrepreneurial ventures. And this is where Charlotte’s strength lies … our entrepreneurial spirit. We are a community where business opportunities abound and where optimism greets the day. From the roots of entrepreneurship grows jobs and disposable income and entertainment and community service and an environment that beckons corporate headquarters to move here.
It is my sincere hope that Charlotte’s public relations campaign will base their strategy on the rock solid foundation of what makes Charlotte great — entrepreneurship. Because I really don’t want this effort to backfire.
Patricia Golden, President
My Team of Experts, Inc.
September 2, 2010 Leave a Comment
Providing good and effective customer service is one of the linchpins of positive public relations for your business. That is especially true when it comes to professional sporting events. No matter how much they love your team, your fans won’t come back if their gameday customer experience isn’t up to par, and your public image will suffer. With that in mind, please enjoy the below article by MTOE client Ed Gagnon, President of Customer Service Solutions.
Gameday: Turning a Single-Ticket Purchase Into a Season Ticket Holder
by Ed Gagnon
It’s understandable that many sports franchises idolize the Green Bay Packers’ situation. After all, every game the Packers play is sold out, regardless of team record, local or national economy, or their opponent. The list for season tickets is 74,000 names long, with an average wait time of 35 years for eligibility. If you put your name on that list today, right now, at the very second you finish reading this article, you’d be waiting more than a century for your tickets to Lambeau Field.
Of course, not every team can fill a 60,000 seat stadium to its rafters every single game with nothing but season ticket holders. Every other professional sports franchise in the country relies on a combination of season ticket holders and single ticket buyers to fill seats. But the ultimate goal is and should be to turn every single ticket buyer into a season ticket holder. A key to doing that is to enhance the gameday experience.
While it is the most talked-about aspect on the radio, the television, in sports magazines, and in online columns and blogs, a winning team on the field, court or ice is only one part of a fan’s experience on gameday. When season ticket sales are flagging, when your team builds a new venue or if you are working with a new or just-moved franchise, you need to look at everything a fan comes into contact with during his or her time at that venue.
Keep in mind, as well, that free and low-priced options like parks and recreational areas are becoming more and more popular destinations for middle and upper-income families hit hard by economic downturn. They’re looking for entertainment and family activities that won’t break their bank. This means that if they are spending the money to attend your ballpark or stadium, their experience needs to be great to get them to come back. It also means that now more than ever, season tickets to a sports team are a significant investment. You have to make that investment a payoff for your fans.
Having a winning team run out of the locker room helps immensely. Having several other diligent and responsible teams elsewhere in the stadium will help even more. These teams are your customer service teams. Your concession stand workers, your vendors, your ushers, your security team, the vendors in your fan shops and your cleaning staff are all a major part of the gameday experience. The only way to know if these teams are playing a winning game, however, is to carefully review them on an ongoing basis.
Each fan encounters dozens of these team members during a single game. Team members are there when a fan gets up to purchase a hot dog or a souvenir. They are there when fans need help finding their seats. Their handiwork is present when a fan uses the restroom or visits an on-site museum, hall of fame or recreational area. For each of these experiences, at least one if not several employees must interact with fans.
You can see how customer service becomes of the utmost importance, not only in terms of generating supplemental revenue through concessions and souvenir purchases, but also when it comes to that fan considering the purchase of season ticket packages in the next season. A local fan could choose another local sports team or another unrelated activity over yours if the element of a positive experience is not present in their initial dealings with your customer service team. After a poor experience, many fans say to themselves, “If they treat me this poorly, are this non-responsive, and appear this disorganized when I’ve paid my money and made the effort to go to the game, why don’t I just sit at home and watch on TV?” Or maybe they’d say “Why don’t I find some other entertainment activity to take my money that appreciates my business more.”
There are two ways in which you can review your customer service teams. One is simple observation, and the other is through mystery shopping. Both methods involve making careful and educated assessments of venue employees’ service skills and behavior in the presence of your fans.
Observation, whether scheduled or unscheduled, is a fairly straightforward method of review. A designated reviewer, many times from an independent organization, will show up on-site and take note of customer service behavior, cleanliness of venue, ease of entry and exit, vendor demeanor and security risk. All of these factors will combine to give you a fairly accurate score of your venue’s gameday experience in customer service terms. The main issue with this method is that the employees may know when they’re being watched, and this could impact their performance – remember the Hawthorne Effect.
Mystery shopping is more covert in nature but seeks the same end. That involves sending an independent reviewer to a game posing as a fan and having that reviewer sample each gameday experience throughout the course of the day. Ease of purchasing tickets, ease of finding seats, volume of the loudspeaker, visibility of the game, attitude of vendors and ushers, effectiveness of merchandise or ticket sales staff, attitudes of fan relations staff, and entertainment value of peripheral activities – such as Halls of Fame or kids’ play areas – are taken into account from a purely consumer-based standpoint. Again, these variables combine to give your mystery shopper an accurate report on a fan’s gameday.
Whether you choose to conduct Observations or Mystery Shops, here are some steps to follow.
First, observe your front-line employees, those who deal with the public regularly as part of their job. Take note of visual cues first. What is their vocal tone? What facial expressions do they use? Take note of body language, and posture. All of these initial visual cues are indicators of your customer’s experience with that employee; they tell the customer exactly what the employee thinks both of him or her as well as what that employee thinks of the venue itself. Body language and tone of voice convey respect – or a lack thereof – to the customer.
Second, observe the actual experience the customer is having beyond the interaction. Is the employee exhausting all options to answer a guest’s question or to sell or to serve, or does he or she pass the guest off to another employee, or pass off the customer to a website, or worse yet, simply dismiss the need or concern altogether?
Third, note how easy it is for the customer to find where to go, what information they need, and what they need to do on their own. Are the facility and its processes so self-evident that a first-time customer is as comfortable as a long-term customer? Or do the customers get lost, look confused, or always have to ask an employee for help?
As you make these observations, take note of both negative and positive instances. If the negatives outweigh the positives, take a look at those specific negatives. Are there some – poor body language, inconsistent customer service, poor sales techniques, slow processes, etc. – that run rampant throughout the facility? If that’s true, it is not individual employees who are the problem; your organization’s culture and priorities are at fault. Have a retreat; train your employees; take a good hard look at your employee handbook, and examine your organization’s policies and processes. Are you, through those policies, in fact encouraging poor customer service by not training to and then enforcing good service behaviors?
In the end, it is the culture you create that most influences guests’ experience with your gameday experience. Make sure that what they walk into is a customer-friendly, enjoyable, clean, and safe environment, and convert more 1-game ticket buyers to season ticket holders. That’s good business for everybody.
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Ed Gagnon is president of Customer Service Solutions Inc., specializing in customer retention and growth strategies, training and research since 1998. He can be reached at (704) 553-7525 or by visiting www.cssamerica.com. He is also the author of Am I Great at Customer Service?
August 19, 2010 Leave a Comment
Battles over violations of non-compete and trade secret agreements can quickly turn into a legal and PR nightmare without proper guidance.
A new resource covering the complicated area of non-compete and trade secrets law is now available. The Employee Defection and Trade Secrets Practice Group of Fisher & Phillips will be blogging routinely at http://www.noncompetenews.com/. The blog can also be accessed through the firm’s website www.laborlawyers.com. Fisher & Phillips attorneys will address legal issues related to employee defection, employee recruitment and trade secrets protection. Some of the most recent posts include Implementing a Trade Secrets Protection Program, You just stole my trade secrets . . . Want some more? Can litigation place trade secrets at risk?, and Employee Retention and Attrition in Mergers and Acquisitions: Minimizing Risks of Employee Defection.
The Charlotte office of Fisher & Phillips has been a client of My Team of Experts, Inc. since 2004.
Patricia Golden, President
My Team of Experts, Inc.
August 2, 2010 Leave a Comment
At My Team of Experts, Inc., we are dedicated to providing both excellent PR services and expert advice to small businesses in the Charlotte region. That means giving all of our clients information on how to avoid PR mistakes proactively with preventative advice. No PR mistake is as large as the one that results in a lawsuit; in that spirit, we reprint the following article on avoiding disability claims, provided by Fisher & Phillips attorney Mason Alexander.
The Changing Definition of Disability
by Mason Alexander
Two years ago, then-President George W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Amendments Act (ADAAA) in order to provide greater protection to the disabled in the United States, as well as to strike a reasonable balance between employer and employee interests. Whereas the original ADA focused on the individual’s disability, proffering a stricter definition of disability, the ADAAA focuses on the discrimination at issue as it impairs the disabled employee. Scheduled for a vote on November 13th, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) allowed for a sixty-day period of public opinion on September 13th. While the new amendments retain the ADA’s original definition of disability – an impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities – it significantly revises how the classification of disabled should be applied and how the word disability should be interpreted.
The way that these interpretations and definitions changes, then, is in the definition of what constitutes a “major life activity.” According to the ADAAA, a major life activity is now defined as an action which “most people in the general population can perform with little or no difficulty.” Essentially, the bill which Bush signed into law and which the EEOC now intends to enforce allows for a significantly more liberal interpretation of disability, and therefore, a more liberal interpretation of what constitutes discrimination based upon disability.
The bottom line is that employers should now expect a number of discrimination claims based upon ADA-defined discrimination as they would for racial, gender, religious, and age-based discrimination. While no one expects ADAAA to cause disability discrimination litigation to shoot through the roof, claims will certainly go up. Employers must be ready for that.
The first thing you’ll want to do is to have a discussion with your company attorney regarding your vulnerability to lawsuits and complaints. Review your company policy with your lawyer and have him or her help you to determine whether or not it fits the new ADA. Take stock of your current employees and make sure that their job requirements and assessments do not contradict the ADAAA’s proposals and that they do not feel as though they are being discriminated against based upon a disability, perceived disability, or record of having had that disability – all key provisions under ADAAA. Also, keep in mind that a recent Washington, DC Court of Appeals decreed on July 21st that its provisions cannot be applied retroactively.
Similarly, hold open dialogues with current and prospective employees. Ensure through such dialogue that your workers feel as though their needs are being met and that you are open to accommodating any legitimate disability that they may have. Doing so can prevent your company from litigation and at the same time improve your relationships with your staff.
Mason Alexander is managing partner of the Charlotte office of employment law firm Fisher & Phillips. He can be reached at (704) 334-4565 or www.laborlawyers.com.
