The presentations from the 2007 ABC Heritage Region Conference are online now. You can find them at: http://www.iabcheritageregion.com/conference2007/glance_presentations.asp

I’ll admit, Jim Lukaszewski’s session on “Getting to the Table” was a surprise. It was full of practical advise and insight, rather than theoretical platitudes.  Some of my key take aways? 

• All problems start as management problems (not communications problems). Management problems are also leadership problems.
  • Be sensitive to the management perspective and leadership issues
  • Find a way to help them do the job more effectively
• CEOs are process thinkers. Communicators are intuitive thinkers. We can come with ideas all the time. It drives them nuts because they can’t see the evidence behind the idea. Find a way to give advice that fits their style.
• It’s their business. They get to do what they want.
  • Do things that will help them move on their own
• When they call consultants in, it’s because they’re scared. It’s not about the staff communicator. It’s about him.
• You must become comfortable working within the “clash of ideas.” That’s what’s required at this altitude.
• Three key steps:
  • Talk to them about something beyond their knowledge base
  • Give advice in real time/on the spot (no going away to write a plan)
  • Help them with what to do next

 It all requires work on the communicator’s part.  You must intentionally learn more; you must steep yourself in things that matter and train yourself to fit their style. For anyone who truly aspires to being the trusted adviser of a CEO, I’d recommend catching Jim’s full presentation when you can.

Dara Lacey asked whether the speaker presentations from the 2007 Heritage Region Conference would be posted to the web site. They will. In fact they may be there as early as Monday.  Check them out.

“As communicators, we have the ability to save lives. Powerful communications before a crisis and rapid communications during a crisis has the ability to move people out of harm’s way.”  That was the argument made by Gerard Braud in urging everyone at the Heritage Region Conference to pay attention to Crisis Communications Planning. 

Braud, a New Orleans area resident, used Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech crisis to drive home the role communicators can play in saving lives.  In New Orleans, for example, the mayor delayed ordering an evacuation of the city to check with the lawyers about the liability  involved.  At Virginia Tech, no one talked until 10 minutes after the second shooting and 29 were dead.   

Said Braud, checking with the lawyers was something that should have been done on the mayor’s first day on the job.  At Virginia Tech, the university knew that e-mail could only reach 8,000 on-campus students, only a portion of the impacted community.

There is, he said, a big difference between an emergency operations plan and a Crisis Communication Plan — and if you’re in communications, you’re in charge of crisis communications. What does that mean? You need to plan ahead. Because you must be communicating with all your audiences within 1 hour. If you do not, you risk being seen as hiding the truth, being incompetent, or both.

A crisis communications plan is your lifeline. It contains pre-written, pre-approved key messages for all audiences to eliminate the lost time spent trying to formulate news releases when adrenaline is flowing and emotions are running high. It tells you when to use your text messaging, e-mails, web postings, other tools – and what to do when the power is out. 

A crisis communication plan tells you what to do. It needs to be an action plan, not a policy manual. It needs to be in binders and simple enough for anyone to execute, and you need to have it with you at all times (keep a copy at home, in the car and when you when you travel).

Gerard made a very compelling case; made the notion of preparing a crisis communication plan practical. Given the world we live in, we should probably take his warnings seriously. He has some free resources at http://www.schoolcrisisplan.com/resources.html

The Heritage Region Conference ended yesterday and the air travel home was uneventful, probably because I braced myself for delays.

I filled a notebook and have presentation copies rich with good ideas and insights. The speaker line up was excellent and community of professionals outstanding. As tired as I am now, it was definitely time well spent. We did not have much time to blog, however, so we’ll keep posting after the fact to highlight some more of what went on and what we learned.

One very interesting development relates to Heritage Region webinar offerings. You may be aware that the Region started presenting webinars this fall, offering them at a very affordable price (around $80, I believe) and also making them available on playback. Upcoming webinars will feature Catharine Yates of Watson Wyatt, Angela Sinickas, and case stories from Chevron and Merck. Check out www.IABCheritageregion.com for schedules etc.

The Region has also entered an arrangement with Ragan Communications for reduced pricing on their webinars, which really ramps up the professional development options we all have. The discount is a substantial $150 off, the resulting cost is $179. This arrangement also produces some income to fund additional Region projects. To take advantage of it, when you sign up on ragan.com for a webinar, use the preferred customer code HRBC7.  In the Connecticut Chapter, we’ll keep this as a programming option to help further reduce your costs.  Do you see any scheduled webinars beginning in January you’d like us to offer at the chapter level?  Comment here to let us know.

Oh, and to everyone who posted comments but couldn’t see them…we needed to moderate and approve them for posting! Told you we were newbies!

Greetings from Cincinnati!  A few observations for the folks back home.

The Muzak is playing in the lobby and most conference attendees have gone to bed or slipped away to a quite bar nearby. 

We were entertained this afternoon by a guy from Starbucks who looked like Billy Crystal and whose first job was running the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland, where he told the same lame jokes every ten minutes.  Still, he had some cool stuff to share about his current (and much better) corporate gig. For example, Starbucks has 145,000 employees, most of whom DO NOT have access to a computer at work.  This fact creates some serious challenges for the internal communications staff.

Of those who do have a computer, how many e-mails do Starbucks employees receive each day?  Would you believe 3000?  And how many interruptions do they get an hour?  Try 10. His point?  Limit communications and limit the vehicles for delivering them. 

A Peter Sellers look-alike led a session on “moving images” that covered the creative strategies behind three wildly different video projects.  Some examples: he uses negative questions to solicit honest, unscripted answers; he uses B-Roll to punch up in the editing process; he asks the same questions of all interviewees so one can finish another’s point.

There’s lots more I’d like to share…but technical glitches are making this far more difficult than it ought to be.

 More tomorrow.

Bob

Whew! I’m finally in Cincinnati. Well, actually, we’re in Covington, Kentucky. That’s something like East Hartford is to Hartford, but with the Ohio River in between. The river is a bit more accessible, both visually and access-wise, than the Connecticut is. There are restaurants on boats — and a haunted boat tour of the USS Nightmare. Bridges are a very prominent element of the Cincinnati skyline. It reminds me some of Pittsburgh in that respect.

My relief in arriving has nothing to do with the flights out here. All were pretty much on time, flawless and my luggage made it. However, the week leading up to the conference was especially hectic. I’m here in part to learn what all is involved in staging one of these conferences, since I’m chairing the 2008 event that will be held in Hartford. So, in addition to my real job responsibilities, I was dropping off and picking up “save the date” postcards, picking up lollipops to glue on to the postcards (did you know they were originated in Connecticut?) and prepping my promotional presentation. Not all that bad under normal circumstances, but this week the job required getting everything ready for two back-to-back trade shows. Oh, and college friends we haven’t seen in about 10 years are coming Tuesday, so the houses needed a bit more attention than normal. Figures.

This morning I sat in on the Regional Board Meeting and learned how many committees got late starts on their conference duties. I wouldn’t have guessed given the line-up they’ve pulled together. It does, however, give me confidence about next year’s event. We’ve already lined up our first keynoter, Robert Dilenschneider, former CEO of Hill & Knowlton, author and IABC fellow. I’ve also got some very well-connected folks lined up to work on other speaker arrangements.

This afternoon it was a leadership forum; some sessions focused on helping chapter leaders with recruiting, programming, etc. There were many useful presentations, and I’ve got a ton of notes, but what stood out for me was the panel of senior IABC leaders. These are folks who have been in the organization for many, many (many) years and have held high-level leadership roles. 

David Kistle, ABC, a former IABC Chairman and someone who worked for 3M and now works with a PR agency, said that his IABC experience has allowed him to hone his leadership skills as well as develop “a network that is incredible” and includes people in the US, Canada, South Africa and more.  Camille Downing, an independent, said that 80% of her clients are IABC connections and Barbara Puffer, ABC, an independent, says that every job and every promotion in her career could be linked to IABC — and it allowed her to retire from corporate life at 49. Mark Schumann, ABC, Towers Perrin, illustrated the value of the IABC network with a story about being in Tokyo needing to do a press check and discovering that no one at the printing plant spoke English.  He called a local IABC member, whom he did not know, and explained his predicament. Forty-five minutes later, she was at the plant with him explaining that the green was the wrong color.  He also told the story about how he ended up with his Towers Perrin job during a District conference.

Cool stuff.

It was interesting starting this blog.  We started with goDaddy but it was so confusing, we abandoned the effort.  A board member has a friend that has a blog on this site, so we decided to use it.  And it was free!  Has anyone else recently begun a blog?  What has been your experience?