MP&F Strategic Communications

I sat down — virtually, of course — with David Plazas, director of Opinion and Engagement at USA Today Network Tennessee, to discuss the unique challenges journalists face in today’s world, and how we can all do better to communicate with civility during such divided and polarizing times. If you look historically, there’ve been all sorts of attempts to defame different people; there are terrible things that people have done to try to delegitimize systems. What I’ve found through measures like Civility Tennessee, being involved in efforts like Bright Heart, and even having conversations with people on my podcast is that people are craving these moments of conversation and discussion, but oftentimes are afraid to get involved because they don’t want to be bullied or I think discussions on politics are tense naturally, and on religion they’re tense; but imagine if we took the time to just listen for a little bit.

Keep your online event much shorter than an in-person event Zoom and online meeting fatigue is real for many professionals. Use an online streaming/meeting tool that is familiar for your guests Is Zoom, Webex or another online meeting tool most commonly used by your audience? Build excitement in advance of the event From social media teasers to email reminders, to the event invitation, use these touchpoints to build excitement and keep the event top-of-mind for your audience.

Short of direct referrals from friends and family (which we support as well), we have found unpaid testimonials from real people to be the most effective drivers of conversions in marketing campaigns for clients in industries like health care, education, real estate and senior living. Community cover girl is face of campaign With COVID-19 protocols limiting our ability to shoot fresh photography inside our client’s 32 independent living communities across the U. S., our team needed to get creative in order to avoid stock images and exterior shots in our social advertising campaigns. We worked with our client’s regional directors of Sales and Marketing on a testimonial-driven campaign that led with quote graphics from real residents and family members in the communities and culminated with locally shot photography of “cover gals and guys” who felt great about the communities and wanted to share that feeling in photos. Student and graduate success stories are the foundation of all marketing and advertising for Job Corps, a U. S. Department of Labor program that offers free career training and education for eligible 16- through 24-year-olds at 120-plus campuses across the country.

Every time you hit “accept” on terms and conditions you never read, every time you connect a new app to your Facebook account, and every time you submit your email address to get results on a trending quiz, you are giving away valuable information allowing advertisers to target you in the most personalized way (for you) and most profitable way (for them). Recently, however, American marketers have experienced our own version of the GDPR with the unrolling of the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), the largest privacy act for the most populous state in our country. If you’re not going to rely on the advertising platforms themselves to make you CCPA-compliant, you can actually remove the LDU restrictions to collect data on California users again. Adjust national targeting: At the communications agency where I work, we’ve segmented California out of all national advertising campaigns, managing it separately for better analysis and to preserve our performance at the national level.