Tag Archives: communications

2025: Do You Have a Communication Strategy? You Should

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As many businesses and non-profits begin to turn their attention to 2025 planning, one component that should not be overlooked as part of a success strategy for the new year is communication or comms planning. An effective public relations campaign can prove to be both an affordable investment in growing your organization as well as in deepening important reputational relationships that can help sustain for- and non-profit organizations in troubled times.

Here are five critical tactics for B2B organizations to consider when developing 2025 comms strategies.

  1. Highlight Industry Expertise. In the world of B2B marketing and communications, clients and partners look for actionable, tested expertise. By positioning your subject matter experts as thought leaders through authoritative content, you position your brand as a potential resource for your target audiences while demonstrating your deep understanding of, and vision for, the industry you’re in. That content can include contributed articles to respected trade outlets, white papers, industry reports, owned video content and feature-length broadcast interviews on hot topics or industry trends.
  2. Develop Authentic Messaging. Whether your audience is business or consumer, the public at large is tired of being sold to or fed boilerplate marketing messaging. Don’t sell. Instead, tell stories to highlight the purpose and values of your brand that address the concerns of your audience. No one looks for a sales pitch; they look for anecdotes, reviews and stories in which they recognize themselves or their priorities. Your audiences are more likely to turn to the sources of those stories or analogies when seeking solutions and opportunities.
  3. Focus on Data-driven Solutions. B2B audiences look for track records of success supported by hard data. Highlighting successful partnerships or projects supported by numbers and real-world outcomes creates a point of distinction and gives trade journalists something to work with when telling stories that can shine a light on your brand. This can also include information on lessons-learned and client testimonials.
  4. Be Prepared for Crisis Scenarios. From online review sites to social media platforms, the public-at-large can rapidly shape public perception of your brand in minutes or hours. By preparing for likely crisis scenarios and developing actionable protocols to deploy your response messaging, your organization stands a better chance in weathering whatever storms may come. Paramount to protecting your brand in a crisis scenario is developing messaging that is honest, authentic, empathetic and deployed with thoughtful speed.
  5. Pursue a Broadening Media Landscape. While rumors regarding the demise of journalism have been abundant in the past decade or more, the reality is the media landscape has broadened considerably. Where there once existed only print, broadcast and online, there are now podcasts, streaming platforms, vlogs, subscription-based email newsletters, audio-based social channels and even industry-specific Slack communities. The options are seemingly endless. Start by understanding the audiences you hope to reach and how they consume media. Then, plan accordingly.

If your 2025 marketing or business development plan lacks a clearly defined comms strategy, you are missing countless opportunities to convert the work you’re already doing into compelling storytelling that can move the needle for your brand. What’s worse, you may also be completely unprepared to defend your reputation if you find yourself facing a communications crisis. Make sure you have a 2025 comms strategy ready to go before January 1, 2025. And if you need help, Kimball Hughes Public Relations has nearly 30 years of expertise to help you make the most of the year ahead.

Navigating Conference Season: Take-aways from a Philly Cyber Risk Summit

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It’s conference season and this week I was fortunate to attend an industry event with a global draw – without hopping on a plane or train – in my hometown of Philadelphia. Insurance carriers, brokers, cyber risk assessment, breach recovery experts, legal, security, privacy professionals and more traveled to the City of Brotherly Love for three days of discussions on cyber risk hosted by NetDiligence®. For me, the event provided a valuable opportunity to learn about trends and challenges in the ever-evolving cyber space, to connect with clients, make new connections and of course check in with and coordinate meetings with trade reporters and editors on site.

As a public relations professional who has spent years working closely with the insurance industry, I know enough about cyber risk and cyber insurance to be dangerous. However, the speakers at the conference offered eye-opening insights on challenges in the cyber risk space, emerging risks including artificial intelligence, new technology and best practices for risk mitigation. Now, I know enough to keep me up at night.

For example, top cyber scams noted by Experian Head of Global Data Breach Resolution Michael Bruemmer included those related to fake news (particularly bad during election season), natural disasters, charities, sextortion (which can even include a photo of the recipient or their house) and QR codes. What I learned about QR codes maybe should have been obvious – it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between a legitimate and illegitimate QR code with the naked eye.

For businesses, the top risk, according to NetDiligence, remains business email compromise. As to why the risk remains so high despite corporate teams working diligently to implement safety measures and train teams to spot these emails, Bruemmer said it’s the smart pitches from the criminals that appeal to human weakness. They just keep getting more creative.

Outside the sessions, I spent time roaming the exhibit hall and making new connections. Representatives were on site to talk about their cyber risk technology, mitigation services, cyber data mining services, e-discovery and more. While the usual water bottles, pens, mints and cozies adorned the tables, a robot, like a modern version of Rosey from the old Jetsons’ cartoon, roamed the floor proffering champagne from exhibitor KYND for attendees.

Additionally, I had the opportunity to connect a few clients with attending media for background conversations. At Kimball Hughes PR, we encourage our clients to leverage their attendance at conferences like this for potential media introductions or onsite interviews. Not only can conferences bring value in terms of continuing education credit, new business meetings and client relationship building, meeting with media members, who are often on-site at these events, can pay dividends in establishing you as a trusted source for future articles or even in a conference wrap-up piece.

We often suggest our clients bring us along to conferences where media is attending for boots-on-the-ground support. This way, we can coordinate additional on-site meetings, assist in fielding questions, assist in bringing trending conference topics to the conversation and seek out opportunities to comment on articles currently in the works.

While I’ll be happy to trade my dress shoes for sneakers in the days ahead, this industry conference, like so many others, was a fantastic opportunity to learn, further relationships and build new connections.

Stay tuned for more conference round-ups as members of the Kimball Hughes PR team continue to round the conference circuit throughout the month.

Share of Voice: Why it Matters and How Your Business Can Stand Out

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As we continue to navigate a fluid economic reality, many business leaders are on an ongoing mission to cut costs and justify spending. Endeavors that are immeasurable are frequently the first to go.

Public relations can easily fall into this category. Marketing can too, but the reality is there is no direct, measurable, line from PR to sales. But before company leaders label PR efforts as unquantifiable, they should look to the following data point, which can confirm their message is getting in front of the right audience thanks to their PR and marketing efforts: Share of Voice (SOV).

SOV allows companies to measure their brand awareness, health and visibility against industry competitors. It can be viewed as a measure of potential awareness by your target audience of your business and its branding. SOV is a trackable metric that demonstrates where your business stands among competitors in a given period of time. It can also demonstrate the PR and marketing tactics or messages that were most successful in raising awareness for your brand.  

At the same time, SOV can also provide insight into the most successful PR and marketing tactics of your competitors, giving you an even better idea of what might work for your audience. Further, SOV can point out any potential disconnect between what competitors are talking about and where your business chooses to focus its messaging.

Getting to Know Your Numbers

Calculating the metric is not rocket science. It requires aggregating your company’s media mentions and gathering data on industry competitors and their media mentions from the same points in time. Ideally, you’ll want to measure your SOV and that of your key competitors to get a benchmark before launching a PR campaign. Then, measure again during and after the campaign, to see how your company’s SOV has fared against your competitors.

The results can be eye-opening. We have found our clients see tremendous value in the metric – value they can bring before their board, investors and leadership team to pair with the organization’s overall efforts to achieve critical goals.

For example, at the end of 2022, a global insurtech company reached out to our agency looking to build SOV in the American insurance media market. At the time, they only had a 9.1% SOV and were struggling to breakthrough. Our team studied the approach of their competitors and developed a new, non-promotional PR approach focused on the dynamic personalities and interests of the co-founders and the state of the insurtech and insurance industries more broadly. This approach had a knock-on effect of demonstrating the company had its finger on the pulse of its core audience and their needs.

By avoiding outdated industry topics and blatant self-promotion, focusing on current trends and educating insurtech customers, we were able to secure dozens of media interviews and contributed articles for the company. By the third quarter of 2023 – just 9 months into our engagement – the company had established itself as the dominant voice among its competitors in the insurance media, with an SOV of 77.8%. This growth has corresponded with increased sales numbers and inbound product inquiries.

SOV is a powerful metric.  It can demonstrate the value of a strong, consistent and coordinated public relations campaign in partnership with good marketing. While there still is no direct line from PR to sales, a considerable uptick in SOV demonstrates your message is being broadcast, and if done correctly, it is broadcast to the audience most in need of receiving that message. As year-end planning begins, consider incorporating this metric into your 2025 planning to help make your company the top voice among your competitors.

Lacing Up for Good: Enhancing Team Communication, Collaboration by Giving Back

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This Spring, the team at Kimball Hughes Public Relations is lacing up our sneakers and tracking our steps to raise funds for those in need through the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation’s annual Step Up challenge.

We have found philanthropic activities like this not only support charitable causes, but they also enhance our employee culture, team morale, and bring us closer together. As professional communicators, we’re always striving to find the best channels for our clients to use to reach their target audiences. In a new age of remote work, channels of internal communications are changing and we’ve found one of the best ways to communicate and deepen relationships with colleagues is to work together for social good.

As we’ve all heard, giving back and volunteerism have become core tenets of businesses across industries in recent years. There is a clear business case for philanthropy, as the next generation of workers have a clear interest in working at businesses that back up their values with action. Further, recent studies have shown that customer loyalty may improve at socially responsible businesses.

We believe giving back and volunteering events that emphasize collaboration and bringing communities together find more engagement.

Our client Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Insurance Company (PLM) is also getting fit and having fun while building comradery among team members and raising funds for vulnerable children and communities. Each spring, employees form a team for the Insurance Softball League of Philadelphia, which raises money for local nonprofits while gathering regional insurers for friendly softball competition. Employees have the opportunity to get to know each other outside the office, get a little exercise and breath in fresh air while helping those in need.

With the IICF Step Up challenge, employees, friends and families in and around the insurance industry can form a team and compete with one another in a fitness challenge, measuring their steps, pedal strokes, sit-ups and virtually any other activity against the teams of other companies. Kimball Hughes PR is proud to have been a part of Step Up for the past five years and we have enjoyed learning more about each team member along the way – whether it’s a penchant for morning dog walks, an after-work jog, a Peloton ride or hike through the woods.

Consider reigniting company culture with a collaborative philanthropic initiative this Spring. We’re having a blast. Check out our progress so far here:

Employee Travel: Preparing for Summer Travel

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For Kimball Communications, summer is packed with conferences, workshops and events. Our employees attend conferences across the U.S., and since we cannot physically be together each day it’s important to have a plan before traveling. You, too, can keep everything running smoothly by following this simple, yet effective strategy.


Eelke de Blouw / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)
  • Prepare ahead of time. Have an internal meeting to go over everyone’s travel plans. Be sure you know when and where everyone will be throughout the summer. Keep a calendar of employee’s travel arrangements and daily schedules.
  • Stay connected. Technology is key. Skype, voice call, text and email will keep everyone informed.
  • Be aware of time zones. Remember, there’s a good chance you will not be on the same time zone. Schedule calls with each other appropriately.
  • Delegate tasks. Make sure all your bases are covered. Assign timely tasks to colleagues. This will ensure deadlines are still met and will simplify things tremendously.
  • Reach out to clients. Ensure clients are aware when you’ll be out of the office. It’s important to let clients know there will always be someone they can reach out to if a problem or question arises.

How do you stay connected during travel? Follow #KPRontheroad to see where we’ve been, and where we’re going, this summer.

Photo credit: Eelke de Blouw / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Responding to Consumers on Social Media

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It’s vital to respond to posts, tweets, questions, etc., on social media, but there’s a right way to handle responding. It’s important to be present for your customers. You certainly do not want to be a ghost on your social media accounts. Below, we explore the right versus wrong ways to respond.

ivanpw / Foter / CC BY
  1. Wrong: Do not acknowledge a mistake a customer brings to your attention via social media. Right: No matter how small the mistake, always acknowledge a mistake and apologize promptly.
  2. Wrong: Listen but don’t respond. Being a ghost and not responding to customers is not a good reflection on your company/brand. Right: It’s important to respond to both positive and negative posts.
  3. Wrong: Respond to everyone with a generic message so everything is consistent. Right: Craft responses that can be personalized to handle different types of comments.
  4. Wrong: If there’s an issue, don’t ask for personal information such as an email address or phone number when responding. Right: Ask the customer to email you (be sure to provide an email address that will go directly to you and not a generic email response center). This also ensures the conversation will be handled privately and not online.
  5. Wrong: Take your time to respond to followers. Right: Ensure someone at your company responds to posts in a timely manner and directs the posts to the appropriate person if there’s a question or issue.

Social media managers, do you have any additional tips to share? Comment below.

Photo credit: ivanpw / Foter / CC BY

Filling in the Blanks

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If you learn anything in public relations, it’s that when you leave a communication vacuum, people fill it with their own information. And the information they are left to fill in is not often flattering. So, you would think the big airlines could apply that lesson to their customer service. Apparently not.

Edgar Barany / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

I had settled in on my Delta flight back from New Orleans, connecting in Atlanta en route to Newark. Just before take off, the pilot tells us that because there was significant turbulence when the plan arrived at Louis Armstrong Airport, they needed to do a physical inspection. In just a few minutes we’d be on our way.

A few minutes later, he breaks the bad news. A mechanic has to perform the inspection and they do not have anyone in the Big Easy to do the job. They are flying in someone from Atlanta or Minneapolis to do the job, and it will be “a few hours.”

Once we begin to consider the implication of an airline not having a mechanic at an airport to do an inspection, we deplane en masse and head to the Sky Club, bar, ticket counter or wait at the gate to rebook our connections.

Fast forward to “a few hours” later and they announce we will be boarding at 1:55 p.m. At 1:55, a flight attendant strolls out of the gate, so I inquire. He sheepishly tells me they have been told nothing by Delta but their schedule says 4 p.m. I share my new information with my new airport friends and lead a line at the counter to rebook my rebooked connection.

My airport friends and I tried to laugh, but for those sitting and waiting with no information, it was anger, disgust and murmurs of “Delta sucks.” All the $25 food vouchers and apologies by the faultless flight crew could not help.

Delta left their worried, anxious customers in the dark for over an hour. Their crew and airport staff lacked both the information and authority to advise and mitigate the fallout among angry passengers. A few communications basics could have helped:

  • Know your audience is tired, worried and anxious, so communicate frequently.
  • Be forthright (we wouldn’t board at 1:55) and honest as circumstances developed (we might be leaving as late as 4 p.m., but hopefully sooner)
  • Acknowledge what we experienced (inconvenience, frustration) so we knew they cared.

People understand mistakes, but when left in the dark they fill in the blanks – and it’s not an image an airline or anyone else wants.

C’mon Delta, you have the resources to do better.

Photo credit: Edgar Barany / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

10 Steps to Being Presentable: Giving Great Presentations

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I’m getting ready to train a client group on delivering effective presentations and thought I’d revisit this sometimes scary topic.

Gary and his trusty cheat sheet. Notice how big the font is? That makes it easier to read at a glance.

Gary and his trusty cheat sheet. Notice how big the font is? That makes it easier to read at a glance.

We’ve all been on the other end, in a room with someone standing rigidly at a podium next to a screen where a PowerPoint is about to bore us to tears. Slide after slide filled with data we can’t read and a monotone speaker who looks at the screen more than the audience. We gain nothing more than we could have gleaned from a report and just can’t wait for it to be over.

So when it’s your turn to give a presentation, how do you make it a good one? Here are a few tips based on more extensive advice (and video training) I’ll be sharing with my client:

  1. Know your audience. This helps in so many ways. Make sure your material is geared toward their needs, not yours. If necessary, find out what they want to know in advance.
  2. Get over your nerves. How? Practice so you know your material. The more you know your stuff, the more at ease you will be. But don’t practice in front of a mirror. That just makes you feel weird.  Videotaping yourself, on the other hand, works. Also, don’t worry about perfection. That’s putting a lot of pressure on yourself. Just try to be engaging and interesting. If so, you’ll be better than most.
  3. Nail the open. But how? Unless you are absolutely certain your joke will work, don’t do it. Instead, ask your audience a question. That engages them and is an easy way to get moving in the right direction. And please, don’t try to memorize your opening. Again, that’s too much pressure to be perfect.
  4. Make sure your technology is fool proof. If not, don’t use it. A funny video from a popular movie or television show can be a great icebreaker. But show it to others first to make sure it works. And if the video, PowerPoint or audio is not tested in the facility where you are speaking, just skip it.
  5. Speaking of PowerPoint, it’s not necessary, too often boring and takes away from what the focus should be – your words. If you have important data to share, send it in advance or use it as a hand out. Just hit the high points in your speech.
  6. Make it interesting. That means you don’t read from a script or use big words or jargon. Instead, use stories, case studies, examples your audience can connect with. And tell your audience why they should care about what you’re saying. That is why they’re there.
  7. Don’t get hung up on verbal tics, like uh and um. Many people do it and you should learn to avoid them. But that’s a daily self-training (I heard one trainer recommend putting “uh” in a circle with a line through it and leave it on your desk. That way, as you are talking all day, you are conscious of it). But when you’re presenting, just let it go and keep talking.
  8. Create a presence. We’re not all gifted speakers who can walk the crowd and feel comfortable. But you should use your hands, use your voice so it’s not monotone and at least move a few steps and shake that icy grip you have on the lectern. Try it, it feels good.
  9. Prepare for problems. You go blank? Keep a one-page cheat sheet in front of you so you can quickly glance and find out where you are. You have technical difficulties? Go in with a back up and just move on. If you don’t dwell on the technical problem, neither will your audience. You’re audience does not seem interested? Then ask them questions.
  10. Speaking of questions. Many people ask the audience to hold questions until the end. Why? Because they don’t want to get sidetracked and lose their place. But if you have a cheat sheet, you have no worries.

The 2013 Communications Intern

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While we recently posted on the current meaning of social media, we’ve also got a new perspective on the 2013 intern. In the coming year, interns – from public relations to social media and graphic design positions – should look at their internship search and their experience in a new light.

1. Change your way of thinking.

After completing two communications internships, one of which turned into my current public relations assistant position at Kimball Communications, I suggest a new way of looking at internships.

Think of an internship as a highly important class in college or as the new “grad school.” Communications majors do not often go to grad school after college – they go to work. But, first, you have to pay your dues. If you think of completing an internship as taking an educational course that will help your career, and you plan for the investment accordingly, it won’t seem like just an extra “thing” that you have to do on top of your undergraduate classes. Internships are unfortunately added expenses, but they are necessary in today’s job market.

And, don’t just think of internships as resume builders; they give you an opportunity to start building the skills to break into the communications industry. It’s up to you to take advantage of this. Ragan’s PR Daily suggests ways to do so in these 50 tips.

2. Understand what you’re searching for.

When I was pursuing internships in undergraduate school, I discovered two types of internships: 1) Those that offer a-part-of-the-team experience and 2) Those that hire interns to work from the bottom up – which isn’t necessarily negative.

If you know your top goal is to work in a highly competitive corporation or industry, then running errands or faxing media alerts is sometimes just a stepping stone in that particular job. You have to start somewhere if that you want to go into a specific field.

However, if you have no preference for an industry and are looking for a general communications internship, then search for one in which you will gain quality experience. Don’t settle for an internship where all you do is get coffee if you don’t want to be sitting at the receiving end one day.

Simply put, decide where you want to end up and search for the appropriate internships, with the right people, to lead you to that goal. Also – be prepared to change your end goal on the way. As many have said, internships are sometimes more about what you don’t want to do than what you want to do. For specifics on landing an internship, Ron Culp, PR expert and professional director of the graduate PR and advertising program at DePaul University, offers advice in his blog.

3. Prepare to be well-rounded.

While some communications internships may have a title, not all internships are specific to that title. Interns today can specialize in a certain area, but are still asked and expected to fulfill other projects. So, be prepared to schedule social media posts as an event planner or edit a video in between drafting an article.

Also, get used to the idea that PR agencies are going partially or fully virtual, and so are internships. The renowned Internship Queen Lauren Berger gives the positives of virtual internships in this article.

More importantly than the work itself – students or post-grads need to absorb their overall time in the office. These experiences introduce the language used in the field and the different types of office atmospheres (we prefer a casual environment here.) This understanding of office cultures is all a part of being a communications professional, and it will help prepare you for any type of job you go after post-internship in the 2013 PR and social media world.

Here at Kimball Communications, we’re looking for our 2013 graphic design intern and we look forward to your applications.