Our neighborhood dentistry, East Village Dental Care, sends us a letter saying that because of the economic crisis they're not raising their fees.
Instead, "we have turned them back to 2006 prices!"
O, 2006—the salad days!
Convincing the ‘quants,’ convincing ourselves
In the free weekly newsletter for executive communications people that you should subscribe to immediately, I posed the same question that I posed here a little while back: How do you convince "policy guys"—and "numbers guys" and "science guys" and "strategy guys" that they have to be communication guys too.
Dow speechwriter Fletcher Dean replied that "it's tough to convince the quants"—has this guy been up against it for awhile, or what?—but said he's found half the battle is remembering ourselves of the value of our work.
On Dean's office wall is a quote by legendary ad man Bill Bernbach:
"The truth isn't the truth until people believe you, and they can't believe you if they don’t know what you're saying, and they can't know what you're saying if they don't listen to you, and they won't listen to you if you're not interesting and you won't be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly."
Any questions?
Nothing more credible than a leaked memo
Thanks to Ron Shewchuk for pointing us to a segment on Canada's Business News Network. Asked about the wisdom of Citigroup's recent employee memo that, when leaked, drove the stock up 38%, Edelman Public Relations CEO Richard Edelman endorses the notion of communicating to the financial world by getting the word to employees first.
"Employees are now the new secret credible source for corporations because there's a lot of horizontal communication that happens to friends and family. I think too much of the communication has just been straight at the analysts in the past."
Well, it's actually not all that new—Crescenzo and I were reporting on "employees as brand ambassadors" more than a decade ago in The Ragan Report and an imbecile company I worked with actually created a newslettter full of good news that employees were to share with everyone they knew. (The title of the newsletter? Why, The Ambassador, of course.)
But the notion of influencing analysts by deliberately giving a leaky workforce information that might raise the stock—this is novel. Of course, the way Dick Edelman explains it—keep employees in the loop and transform them into credible resources for analysts—it sounds great.
In fact, let's just leave it at that, shall we? And let's head up the elevator and see if we can't get some of those IR funds to supplement the employee communication budget.