You, Too, Can Learn From U2
Emanate PR – July 1, 2009
Last week the Emanation met to discuss Professor Nancy Koehn’s Harvard Business School case, U2 and Bono. What can a bunch of PR professionals learn from the phenomena that is U2? Actually a lot. Dissecting the overwhelming genius, minor missteps and amazing luck of one of the world’s most popular bands may not make us rock stars but it reinforced many of the tenets that we have always known are true about success. Straight from the troops, here’s what we all can learn from U2:
Discover a passion for what you do and keep rediscovering it.
Be truth tellers – always have a POV.
Work with people who share your ideals, your humor, your work ethic, and your beverage choice (okay, I added the last one).
Give everyone a voice and a share in the rewards.
Invite in talent who bring something new to the party.
Invest in the business – you’ve got to spend money to make money.
Ask for and respond to feedback – frequently.
Take risks to capitalize on the next new technology.
Use your power – and in our case, it’s words – to make a difference (and this doesn’t mean to our bottom-line).
Work as a team.
Be willing to sacrifice short-term gain for long-term success.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, the shorter your brand name, the bigger you can make it on posters. From here on out, call us MN8.
Kim
How Are You Feeling?
Emanate PR – June 25, 2009
Used to be that only pregnant women and your very closest friends and family got to tell you how they’re feeling. Suddenly, sharing feelings is all the rage. Breezy updates from current and ex-colleagues, personal friends and high school classmates are a constant on Facebook, and “friends” get to react to each feeling with a thumbs up or thumbs down.
Want to know how people are feeling all over the world?
http://www.wefeelfine.org/ does a beautiful job of listening and then making the feelings knowable. Every few minutes, this site searches posted blog entries around the world for the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". It records the full sentence, and categorizes the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (sad, happy, depressed, etc.), and includes age, gender, and geographical location of the author. The result is a database of several million human feelings that can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices.
PR has an important role to play in this sea of emotion. Where our discipline has traditionally claimed “monitoring” as a key skill set, I’d argue that one of our most important contributions today is a new level of listening. It’s by actively listening that we are able to tap the arsenal of PR tools available – influencer relationships, traditional media relations and social media as the glue – to drive engagement for our brands, products and services. It’s by listening that we can take the overwhelming outpouring of emotion and make it knowable and actionable for our clients.
By the way, I feel fine and hope you do, too.
Kim
