Can’t Beat an Ol’ Fashion Face-to-Face Roundtable Discussion

The first year I started Farrell Talbot Consulting, I worked on one of my favorite projects to date – a project with the Chautauqua Institution. The yearlong assignment was to help drive high-level media interest and industry leadership participation to a series of roundtable discussions. During that time, we conducted several roundtable events in New York City and Washington, DC, around timely issues such as Ethics in Capitalism, the Middle East and the Role of US Faith-based Communities and Cuba: Friend or Foe.

The Institution is a not-for-profit organization that sits on 750-acres of the Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York State. Each summer, the Institution hosts a nine-week event season with public speakers, entertainment, events and classes – with a total of over 100,000 attending these scheduled public events. (ww.ciweb.org).

The roundtables we worked on together were conducted during the “off-season” and were a way to drive media attention and awareness to the summer sessions and create dialogue and relationships between highbrow thinkers, influential leaders and the press. The roundtables drew an impressive list of attendees and high profile media such as Newsweek, CNN, the Washington Report, Miami Herald, the New York Times, NPR, Vanity Fair and many others.

From the focus on Ethics in Capitalism in early 2009 to the role of religion during modern times, each roundtable event seemed to evoke a spirited discussion among the participants.

These were powerful events – and a communications, relationship-building tactic I had not thought about using or recommending for a few years. But, the face-to-face discussion was certainly one that was effective and should be considered more often by large and small companies alike.

These were closed-door sessions and fostered dialogue that not everyone needed to agree to, or come to a conclusion on—but they were respectful, empathetic, and free from judgment when sitting around that table.

As President of the Chautauqua Institution Tom Becker used to say, “Bring an open mind, a hungry soul and a willingness to wonder. Your rewards will be outstanding.”

I think I might need to resurrect the roundtable for some of my clients! In this day of conference calls, SKYPE and instant messaging, we could use a little more of what Becker suggests as we physically take the time to sit across a table from one another.

Free Flowers and Beer

A guest blog post from Patrick Farrell, President of Sniper PR, one of Farrell Talbot Consulting's media strategists, chief social media guru, and my smart younger brother.

Twitter – just the thought of it can make companies cringe.  The social networking site continues to be a mystery for some companies and can cause them a boat-load of frustration.  There is a constant struggle to post timely and impactful original content that engages influencers and reaches the right influencers.  Simply put, companies know that they should be tweeting, but they’re not sure why.

There are multiple reasons why an organization should consider engaging in a Twitter program. These include:

• Your customers are on Twitter and you should be too
• Twitter creates visibility for your brand
• There is incredible opportunity to control your own message

I want to share with you two great examples of another reason to be on Twitter, though – a chance to communicate and engage with “real” customers that care about your brand.  Enhancing the consumer experience is king these days, and Twitter is an incredible tool for this.

Sending flowers to my wife on Valentine's Day is an important husband duty; and so I arranged to send flowers to my wife’s work using 1-800-Flowers. She called me on her way home to discuss her day, and to my surprise, she never received them. I was not happy! The 1-800-Flowers website was down and the hold time for customer service was an hour (Not surprising given the day!) I decided to take my concerns to Twitter. And it goes a little something like this….

Wow- glad that worked out. I am even teaching my wife a thing or two. She had this interaction with Sam Adams a few weeks ago. She opened her beer and noticed the bottle was broken at the top. It went a little something like this…

Per Sam Adam’s directions, my wife drafted and sent an email to them explaining what had happened.  You can imagine her surprise when she received the following letter:

The power of Twitter! As you can see, from the customer point of view, Twitter is a tool that enables customers to connect with brands in a manner that was previously impossible.  Common annoyances can be taken care of quickly and as a result a company’s targeted consumer will remain loyal to a brand.  While it can be scary at first, Twitter is simply like swimming.  Sometimes you just need to jump in the water – it’s fine.