Red Dawn seems to have all the ingredients of a surefire Hollywood success.  It’s a remake of a successful 1984 film featuring Charlie Sheen and  Patrick Swayze about a group of teenagers banding together to save their small U.S. town from a Soviet invasion.  The new cast of up and coming stars have already been featured in blockbusters like Thor and Transformers and seem tailor made to appeal to the tween and teen audiences that have fueled recent hits like Twilight and Harry Potter.  So why is MGM spending more than a million dollars to digitally edit the finished film and delay its release until November 2012?  Because in the new version the invading force is a Chinese army, and in Hollywood today, you do not want to upset the Chinese, who sanction only 20 foreign movie releases per year.  (The “digitally re-mastered” enemy moviegoers will see is led by a much less commercially important North Korean force).

It’s another example of a new reality for Hollywood where screens abroad now account for nearly 70% (and growing) of box office revenue, according to the L.A. Times, and studios cater all elements of production to international audiences particularly in emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China whose growth has helped studios survive a massive drop in DVD sales.  So, how’s Hollywood changing and can Communicators learn from their efforts? Read More »

3?  Just a measly 3?  C’mon, already. I mean, when you think of every foot that’s been unceremoniously shoved into its corresponding mouth during this entire year, how could you possibly limit the list to just 3?

But, as a communications professional, I will attempt to fulfill the mission as assigned by the stern taskmistress who runs the show here at the Insider…starting with:

#3: The Governor of Texas Can’t Count to 3
Gaffe: During a November GOP debate in Washington, DC, Rick Perry (the ever-so-momentarily leading contender to challenge President Obama) stated in no uncertain terms that when HE becomes president, his first order of business will be to eradicate three federal agencies: Commerce, Education, and…uhhhhhhh…the, uhhhh….

Lesson: (eesh, where to start?) If you’re gonna be specific, you’d better be…well…specific. If you’re gonna make inflammatory, controversial statements, you’d better be able to back them up. If you’re gonna prove that you’re smart enough to be the next President of the United States, you’d better be able to count past two. Read More »

Hopefully by now we have all escaped the craze of crowded malls for the last time in 2011. We’re down to the wire—the holidays are here! That said, it’s never too late for a last minute gift for your fellow communicators.

So a year ago we were asking ourselves the same question: what are the top things on a communicators’ wish list. It’s been a year full of hard work but for many communicators, the wish list in 2010 looks pretty similar to the one today—check it out! As technology has gotten smarter, and our stakeholders’ expectations have changed, there are a few things I would add:

1)      Internal Collaboration Vendors: Technology has moved us beyond discussion forums or internal “Facebook”-like sites and enabled our intranets to act as business collaboration tools with social activity streams that put relevant content and people in front of our employees.

• Check out this best practice from MITRE and explore vendors with collaboration capabilities

2)      Message Planning Support: Now, the dream gift for most communicators and marketers would be access to NeuroFocus—access to neurological research which maps the emotional connections and associations that stakeholders have with certain products, messages, or experience to scientifically plan messages and campaigns. Teams like Frito-Lay have seen the monetary returns on this type of information.

For those communicators who are unable to strap an EEG to your stakeholders’ heads, the CEC has developed a close second—a new Writing for Impact Workshop. This half day session digs into tactics for deep stakeholder understanding to help you reflect stakeholders’ interest, values, and language as well as how to prompt action through the way we write or package messages. Really, it’s a gift for the whole team.

• Learn more of schedule a session for your team here. Read More »

As 2011 draws to a close we look back more than 200 blogs published by CEC Insider during the calendar year.  The posts featured below were our top 5, having been downloaded by more CEC Insider readers than any others.  They address five communications topics that, while all different, are sure to remain of interest to communicators in the new year.  

3 Skills to Improve Your Job Security

• Job security does not exist. One of the most effective ways to ensure your future employment is to develop new skills continuously.   Since launching the CEC’s overhauled competency framework in the spring, nearly 1,000 communications have already taken the Skill Maturity Assessment to indentify and address the skill gaps of themselves and their team. In this blog, we examine the three weakest skills of most communicators.

               Additional Resource: CEC’s Communications Skill Maturity Assessment and Diagnostic

  Spot the Symptoms of Change Fatigue Read More »

Today’s the day that CEC has been counting down to all year… No, it’s not the renewal date of your CEC membership – it’s our Christmas party (at least, it is in our European HQ, where I’m based). I must say, I’m looking forward to it, and most of the CEC crew assures me that they are as well. However, in speaking to several of my friends from other companies, I’ve been struck by their negativity, cynicism, and trepidation at the prospect of navigating an event that one of them described to me as “the most socially awkward of the year”.

Of course, for CEC’s audience of loquacious communicators, “social awkwardness” isn’t an issue – we’re good socially! But remember – not everyone else is. What happens at one of these parties when you’re stuck between the weird lady from the IT help desk who’s pushed past you at the coffee machine all year, the social recluse  from Finance who prefers spreadsheets to his own family, and the spotty graduate whose name no one can remember, but is irritatingly keen to impress?

This, of course, leaves you with two options. One is to politely excuse yourself and head for the bathroom, the bar, or – if things have got really bad – home. The other is to use your skills as a communicator to enable some social interaction between your colleagues.

Building Social Connections

And funnily enough, this is something that CEC can really help with. One of the things we often get asked is how communicators can encourage peer sharing among employees. As companies become more complex, organizational barriers increasingly prevent employees from connecting, sharing and learning with each other. And, interestingly, the same principles that will help a couple of socially inept guys from IT to open up at a Christmas party will also apply to creating an organization in which peers open up and share their expertise with each other. Read More »

Everyone knows that the ability to hold one’s tongue is the most important skill to practice with family over Thanksgiving. After all, if you don’t speak, you can’t get in trouble for what you really think.

Going mute, however, isn’t the healthiest way to enjoy the upcoming holiday. Practice these three communications skills from the 16 skills of a modern communicator to get the most out of the words that you do say.

Dialogue Enablement: I enable dialogue and facilitate peer-to-peer interactions in my communication strategy where appropriate. I can spot—and help others spot—opportunities for creating a narrative around a given message.

On Thanksgiving, family members travel from near and far to convene in one place for a decadent meal. Shortly after the initial hugs and requisite statements that, “You look so good,” each person turns his attention back to their device of choice. Your brother flicks his finger on the screen of an iPad to dictate the trajectory of AngryBirds. Your mom asks Siri on her iPhone, “How do I make cranberry sauce without cranberries?” Maybe you all just have less to say now that you can monitor each other’s movements on Facebook?

Don’t let this scene happen to your family! Someone’s going to have to facilitate conversation, and that person can be you. To get the family to drop their device and start to communicate with one another, I recommend that you take a topic of shared interest—let’s say your family’s last vacation together to the beach—and follow these simple strategies:

1. Ask open-ended questions. For example, “What was your favorite part of our trip to Ocean City this summer?”
2. Make sharing safe. Show genuine interest in everyone’s perspective. Avoid a critical or dismissive posture. Don’t say, “Dad, really? You liked those oily boardwalk French Fries? That’s disgusting.” Instead try, “That’s interesting, Dad. Can’t say I loved the fries, but I did have a delicious crab cake one night.”
3. Forge connections. Point out links or contrasts between family member opinions. Aim to cultivate a “network effect” of communication among the family rather than a series of direct exchanges with you. For example, note “Mom, it’s interesting that you and <brother> both commented on the large crowds on the beach. Where would you want to go next year to avoid the crowds?”

If this approach sounds far-fetched for the dinner table, give it a shot back in the office with the help of CEC’s Dialogue Self-Service Tools.

Negotiation: I take time to understand business partners’ views and find “win-win” solutions. I stand strong when faced with pressure to perform non value added activities.

Read More »

When I was a kid, we had a piano in the house. It was an attractive piece of furniture in our family room. I say that, cause no one in our family knew how to play it (beyond say, “Chopsticks”).

But (for reasons which still elude me), we once had it professionally tuned. Now, I’d seen pianos being tuned before. It’s done electronically with a device that analyzes each note and indicates whether it’s flat or sharp. But the guy who tuned our piano had no device — cause he was totally blind.

Think about it. A blind piano tuner (watch the video). Born without sight, this guy’s hearing was so super-sensitive, he could immediately detect the slightest imperfection in each note, and adjust it back to pitch-perfect just by listening.

To him, an out-of-tune note is like a physical discomfort, and he’s the doctor who relieves patients of their pain.

In some ways, that’s what we communicators do. Only not with musical notes, but rather, with words. When we hear something that’s not right — we just know. It gets under our skin, and makes us uncomfortable. In some cases, it triggers our gag reflex and makes us wanna lose our lunch. And we’ve gotta fix it. Read More »

1:53 PM- I’m in an elevator and it’s shaking violently.  As it pinballs back-and-forth between the walls of the elevator shaft, metal screetching on concrete, all I can think is please let me get to my floor in one piece.  The elevator continues chugging along until it reaches my floor.  The doors open uneventfully and for the next few seconds I feel an intense feeling of relief — must have been an elevator malfunction.  I’ve made it!

As I leave the elevator bay and turn the corner to my hallway, my stomach sinks and I feel a surge of panic come over me — I see my colleagues rushing for the emergency exit.  I want to know what’s going on, but I don’t have time to think it through.  I jump in line and ride the wave of bodies down the stairwell, corkscrewing 17 floors to the street.

As we pour on to the sidewalk I can see that everyone has their cell phones out, contacting friends and checking websites to figure out what just happened.  “My twitter feed says that it was an earthquake, 5.8 magnitude,” someone says.  “Apparently it spanned from the Carolinas to New York.”  My phone buzzes with text messages from family wondering if I’m okay.  Thankfully, at least from what I can gather, everyone and everything is fine. Read More »

Last week, I stumbled upon “What Friends Are For,” a post written by a colleague at Iconoculture. The post, shared below, calls into question the value of our online friendships and makes me wonder if a company can ever really be a friend?

Competitors try to beat Facebook by shrinking the Web
By Robert van Alstyne, Editor, Media/Entertainment/Technology

Facebook is great for perusing present-day pictures of old high school friends, but when it comes to providing information that’s truly useful or relevant, the site is shaky at best. As social media evolves, emerging services are expanding the meaning of “friend” to include savvy informants, not just acquaintances.

Twitter now boasts 200 million users and has become the de facto news hub for millions of Americans (Mashable.com, 16 July 2011). The freshly launched Google+ mushroomed to 20 million users in less than a month by allowing consumers to share digital dispatches broken into discrete social groups (Reuters.com, 26 July 2011).

The number of microblogs on Tumblr has tripled in the last six months, reflecting consumers’ preference for interacting within a circle that’s wider than their Facebook network but equally sociable (NPR.org, 15 June 2011). StumbleUpon, a people-powered Web crawler that presents users with customized search results based on webpage rankings of others with similar tastes, actually topped Facebook in US Web traffic in June 2011 (TechZone360.com, 6 July 2011).

Consumers want to untangle relevant insights from the wild and woolly Web, but “personalized” doesn’t always mean personal. Brands concocting modern marketing strategies must think beyond Facebook and move toward the new social-media power players that prize relevance over randomness. Read More »

Favorite summer activities: lounging poolside enjoying a long summer read, hanging freshly-washed linens on the backyard line, competing in triathlons.

Favorite line from Step Brothers: “Son, we literally have never done ANY of those things.”

OK, perhaps I’m waxing nostalgic about summer activities that exist only in my mind (y’oughta join me in here some time, it’s fun!) but reading a book or two between now and Labor Day isn’t out of the question, right?

Maybe it’s more likely to happen in seat 11C on a flight to Chicago than in a private cabana at The Mirage, but still…as a lifelong communicator, if you’re looking to enrich your spirit and expand your library, here are a few titles I can personally recommend:

What the Dog Saw
OK, I’m a sucker for Malcolm Gladwell, and I’d read his grocery list if they published it.  His fourth title is more a collection of New Yorker essays than a composed book (like “The Tipping Point,” “Blink,” or “Outliers”) but it’s still a great read. And you’ll never think of ketchup in the same way again. (coincidentally also on his grocery list) Read More »