Reputation Management Caribbean

Services

Strategic Communications / Reputation Management / Image Building read more
Crisis Communications Coaching and Training read more
Becoming Savvy Media Communicators Coaching and Training read more
Enhancing Your Presentation Skills - Coaching and Training read more
Enhancing Your Public Relations for Small and Medium Businesses - Coaching and Training read more
Developing and Enhancing Media Relations read more
Events Management Solutions – From Socials to Large Conferences or Trade Fairs read more
Marketing Communications – Advertising and Branding read more
Internal Communications – Employee Engagement read more
Communications Audits read more

Strategic communications may be about reaching key stakeholders. It may be about reaching your own employees. In a promotional effort, strategic communications is all about reaching the people who actually buy your products or services.

Strategic communications is all about knowing what to say to those audiences. It is not just about message points. It’s about knowing who your allies are before you actually need them. It’s about stealth web marketing and carefully orchestrated grassroots campaigns.

Strategic communications offers limitless options. Our job, and yours, is to coordinate those options and make sure that no one stands in the way of success.

Without a strategic communications plan, the program is nothing more than a series of one-offs: disparate media comments without a unifying message, isolate marketing opportunities without follow-up or follow-through. The strategic communications plan identifies target media and target audiences. It assigns roles. The strategic communications plan makes collective effort possible.

Both crisis management and marketing require a strategic communications plan. In both cases, there are long-term as well as short-term objectives. In a crisis, there’s a brand to reaffirm once the smoke has cleared and public interest abates. The strategic communications plan maps out the reaffirmation. The purpose of a strategic communications plan is to ensure that the company brand doesn’t just recover, but is actually strengthened. As such, a strategic communications plan turns crisis into opportunity.

But a strategic communications plan is also dangerous if it creates the illusion that the company is in full preparedness mode simply because the plan is in place. It needs to be constantly revisited. It occasions regular discussion. A strategic communications plan is a living, changing, developing a organism

Strategic communications is all about targeting. It’s all about knowing who your real audiences are. In a crisis, those audiences are opinion-makers in the media. Strategic communications allows you to reach mass audiences through those opinion-makers, or to reach specific segments of that audience – a financial readership, perhaps, or lawmakers and regulators.

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Crisis Communications – ‘Be Prepared’

Crisis Communications Advice, Training and Coaching

The first thing most people do in a crisis is…nothing.

Journalists call when they want to – they don’t wait until your crisis team is assembled. In fact, you’ve only got a few hours before the first story takes shape. The only way to win the First-Mover Advantage is to execute your plan before the other side executes theirs.

Audiences trust people they like. Who is your spokesperson?

Pictures always trump words. What’s your picture?

Brand Protection

The most valuable asset companies own is the tiny piece of real estate in the minds of their customers and prospects. It means they recognize who you are and what you stand for.

Brand attacks are no accident. They are a strategy.

Financial Communications

From the largest to the smallest institution, count on one thing. If there’s money, people pay attention. And when it’s their money, they do whatever is necessary to keep it, grow it, or punish anyone who wasted it.

Investors large and small now have unprecedented tools for forcing companies to untimely or undesirable action – mergers, acquisitions, layoff, and downsizings – even as regulators flex their muscles and de-listing suddenly becomes an option.

Control at the start, or chaos at the end. You can’t afford to let circumstance dictate which it will be.

Issues Management

From politics to product marketing, success turns on how well you manage issues. Fighting a battle over an issue chosen by your adversary means you will have to explain your position. And when you are explaining, you are losing.

Solution: reframe the debate – get your position out front. Tell a passionate story.

Product Liability

When you’re under attack, the first instinct is to defend. Too often, though, it’s easy under pressure to forget the most important point of view – your customer’s.

What does the consumer think about the “no comment” she reads in her morning newspaper? Will the spokesman in a dark suit and red tie reassure her? Do people who plunk down money for what you sell want to hear from a “legal mouthpiece”?

In a product liability crisis, the messenger is more important than the message. What people see is far more important than what they hear.

Select and train the right messengers who embody trust verbally and physically. Then make sure what they say means something to your customers.

Countering an Attack

You are under attack. It’s in front of your most critical audiences. There doesn’t seem to be a place to hide. Your adversaries maximize news coverage about you at every turn. You’ve got to fight back. But you also have to pick the right time.

When you are under attack, your adversaries have all the advantages.

You need to get information.

What do your investigators tell you?
What are your liabilities?
What are your options?

Sometimes, the best media strategy is to say nothing, but you have to do it right. You have to tell it to reporters in a way that keeps them open to your message.

Sometimes it is best to orchestrate counterpunches from other sources.

Sometimes it is best to have esteemed allies who can tell your side of the story.

When you are under attack, first gather critical intelligence, then you can choose to merely escape or to counterattack.

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Becoming Savvy Media Communicators – Coaching and Training – Individual and Group sessions

Ready to face the media when the occasion arises? Concerned about being misquoted? Wonder why your interview ended up on the cutting room floor? Ever wondered how to present yourself, how to sit, what to wear, for a television interview? Are you crystal clear on your key messages which need to be communicated to your audience via the media? Can you remain on your agenda despite the alternative agenda of the reporter during a live television interview?

Whether you are doing a one-on-one interview with a television or newspaper reporter, speaking before a group of people at a press conference or industry gathering, or responding to reporters' probing about a major crisis, you must be prepared.

We will equip you with the tools needed to interact with the media and provide insight on how the media works, what is news, and how to make the most of any interview situation.

There is no greater secret weapon in business than to know how to persuade people of your ideas and mission via the media. This is what you will learn in the Workshop- Becoming Savvy Media Communicators.

Do you think of yourself as a good speaker or communicator? Do you get standing ovations when you deliver public presentations?

When it comes to handling the media these skills become useless! A media interview is unlike any other conversation you have in your daily life. It is the only conversation where you have absolutely no control over the context of how your words will be presented to the final audience. We will teach you the tricks of the trade so that your message is so sharp, clear and memorable, it won’t matter what the media do with it!

You may be a polished platform performer. Again, totally irrelevant to how you will come across on TV. Television is not a hard medium to master, but if you don’t know the most important secrets of that medium, you will come across as stiffer, fatter, less convincing and more monotone than you do in real life.

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Enhancing Your Presentation Skills - Coaching and Training

Is the fear of speaking in public hurting you personally and professionally? Do you lose control over your body? Dry mouth? Quivering voice? Sweating? Increased heart rate? Do you forget what you planned to say?

Do you require hours of preparation before you can talk before a group?

Does your fear of speaking prevent you from asking questions? Do you worry about sounding foolish and having people laugh at you?

There is no greater secret weapon in business than to know how to persuade people of your ideas and mission. This is what you will learn in the Workshop- Enhancing Your Presentation Skills.

You will learn the basics every good speaker should know. You can learn to communicate the exact message you want. You can get your audiences to take the actions you desire and in the end your nervousness will melt away in the process.

Contact us to discuss further

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Enhancing Your Public Relations for Small and Medium Businesses - Coaching and Training

There's no doubt that publicity and public relations are powerful marketing tools for your small and medium businesses. If you've decided to step up your PR efforts, or you want help publicizing a new business, you may want assistance from an expert. Choosing the right PR agency can help your company achieve star status, but selecting the wrong one can be a costly mistake.

Knowing what to look for in a consultant or agency will help ensure that your PR campaign is a success. We can help you with the following:

Build awareness about your company

Promote the launch of a new product

Handle media relations

Provide media training and coaching

Conduct market research

Arrange and coordinate speaking engagements

Create and coordinate contests and promotions

Create press releases, press kits and other publicity materials

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Developing and Enhancing Media Relations

Media relations suggest a great deal more than press relations. Media relations encompass all the specific skills needed for press relations, but also broaden the campaign to include online resources, third-party supporters, publishing opportunities, speaking engagements, and events like town meetings or press conferences.

Media relations take press relations to a higher strategic level.

Media relations are based on personal relations with the people who run the media. Media relations entail a concerted strategy, not just to pitch the story, but to create new stories in the client’s interests. Media relations begin with a strategy and evolve new strategy. Media relations leverage every favorable opportunity. Good press coverage is used to generate more good press coverage.

Effective media relations combine the vision to see new possibilities with the experience and acumen to implement them.

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Events Management Solutions – From Socials to Large Conferences to Trade Fairs

We are a full service, face to face Events Solutions Company producing impactful conferences, launches and custom meetings. We take an integrated approach to planning and executing events. We will work with you to set goals and objectives that align with your corporate and or marketing and sales strategies. From there we will provide you a complete end-to-end solution from idea generation to on-site management.

Content development
Audience Development
Marketing
Logistics/Events Management

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Marketing Communications – Advertising and Branding

Do you know the most frequent of all mistakes in communications? People talk too much. Their error is in thinking that communications means, “Let us tell you everything about ourselves.” By comparison, the impatient Nike found that even “Just do it” was too many words. Its communications alternative is now a single distinguishable check mark and the sound of the “swoosh.” You can hear it as you read these words.

Consumers receive 3,000 to 5,000 messages a day. Yet try to remember three messages from yesterday. It’s called clutter. In one sense, mass communications isn’t communications at all. To cut through the communications clutter, find your swoosh.

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Internal Communications – Employee Engagement

Your employees and your partners read the newspapers and watch the television news. Any communication strategy that deals with sensitive issues in the external media must be backed up by a strategy for internal communications.

Internal communications can be nothing more than a blast e-mail, if that is all that’s required to explain an ambiguous newspaper article or address a persistent rumor. But internal communications can also be a more extensive plan entailing staff meetings, Web site postings, and, often, separate internal communications for different segments of the internal population.

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Communications Audits

Communications audits are as vital to business continuity as business insurance. Communications audits assure that crisis plan templates are updated on a regular basis, and that crisis team members are trained in basic communications skills.

Communications audits also ensure that media contacts are systematically handled during normal as well crisis periods. What happens when a reporter calls for any reason? To whom is the call directed? Are all company personnel regularly presented with policy on press inquiries, including strict rules for what they can and cannot say?

To the extent that communications audits have existed in the past, they were primarily exercises carried out by the corporate communications department. Increasingly, however, the challenges of brand protection have expanded the burden beyond single departmental silos.

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