Strategic Communications: Taylor Wheeler

Growing up in rural southeast Alabama, I remember how important the  local  paper s were, even to a small child . Our small county had two papers that serviced our two biggest towns. I still have all the clippings of each time  I appeared in our paper: there  are  yellowed i mages of myself  in kindergarten when my class visited the grocery store and bank; in first grade with my friends on the playground;  even the times when with my last name was spelled wrong. It  was important  to appear in the paper, and pre-internet/social media, it was the place where you learned everything you needed to know about the week prior and the week ahead.    Our metro area daily paper was even more  important.  I will  confess that all the news  did not  concern me as much as the daily comics page and the Sunday sales papers did. But at our house, that paper was important—my parents would get it first thing in the morning, a...

 Hello, everyone!  My name is Taylor W. and this is blog is a look inside getting a master's degree in Strategic Communications from Troy University.   This blog will focus on themes of strategic communications. Some of the items I'll be sharing my insights into for the next couple of months are potential communication channels utilized by strategic communication professionals like print, broadcast, online, Web, mobile, multimedia, special interest, electronic publishing, new/alternative, blogs, social media, collateral media, and the next "big deal," You'll see posts here weekly as I progress through the class. It's like you will be taking it right along with me--except I'm paying for it and I get the grade at the end! If you find the topic and my posts interesting, make sure you add strategiccommunicationwithtaylor.blogspot.com to your bookmarks. While this blog and its content are part of my coursework, being well-read up on strategic communications and...

Strategic communications aren’t just about advertising, marketing, or public relations—strategic communication strategies can also be used internally when communicating with your employees and coworkers.   My current job deals with both—we have both internal and external audiences that we work with on a daily basis. While external gets the most attention, internal is just as important. The article by Nicole Fallon from the US Chamber of Commerce entitled “6 Tips for Adapting Your Leadership Style in the Post-COVID World” has several ideas that are targeted to leading in the new post-COVID workplace, but I was able to glean some leadership tips from this even though our workplace is back in traditional mode (Fallon, 2020).   Sharpen your emotional intelligence Business leaders are seeing the benefits of empathy and flexibility in this new work environment, but those qualities are always beneficial (Fallon, 2020). Every employee is a human being, and even though that human being...

Finding out if you are successful is easy for some things: did your football team win? Check the score. Did people like your product? Check the sales or reviews. But sometimes finding out if your strategic communications efforts are successful is more nebulous, particularly if the campaign you are running is more top-of-mind advertising than targeted to a specific event or outcome. The ways that we as strategic communications professionals measure our results is the topic for this week, and in my blog posting, I will be breaking down one of those measurement tools—the survey. At my current employer, we use surveys to gauge the annual results of each department among the relevant constituents. This is my first time using any type of measurement device in the workplace—at my previous place of employment, our success or failure was literally measured in whether we succeeded or failed to reach our fundraising goal at the end of the campaign. But at a community college, the public relations...

Our institutions of higher learning are OLD. The community college I work for is coming up on its 75th diamond anniversary. So yes, we are technically a Boomer organization. We are also a leader in our community. A significant percentage of the area’s healthcare workers come from our institution, as we supply many other industries and professions with employees as well. But just because the college is old does not mean its messaging has to be. As a leading organization in our community, we must be intentional in how we develop our messages and where we place them. One part of my job involves making sure that my college is reaching the largest segment of our potential students exactly where they are. But the question is...are we? Full Fabric, a company devoted to increasing colleges’ admissions and enrollment, has 10 “tried and tested” approaches to successfully marketing to the students of today (Tattersfield, n.d.). My post for this week will take those tips and apply them to my commu...

A leader with vision is extremely important in any organization, whether it is a business, a non-profit, or a volunteer organization. If a group lacks this or loses sight of its vision, it can slip into managing and checking the boxes with no focus on the future. That is what happened to a group that I am involved with in my hometown. I was recently named president of my hometown’s downtown revitalization group, which is a part of Main Street Alabama. Main Street Alabama is focused on bringing jobs, dollars, and people back to Alabama's historic communities. Economic development is at the heart of this statewide organization's efforts to revitalize downtowns and neighborhoods across the state Main Street programs are more than having great events and making downtown look better. At its core, Main Street is an economic development tool that enhances the tax base of a community, fosters entrepreneurship, builds community capacity, and creates partnerships among key groups in a co...

We start doing it as children. When Mom puts together the clues of a broken window, glass shards, and a baseball, she asks Little Johnny if he was responsible. “It wasn’t me!” is his reply. Or maybe he blames older Sister Susie for making him do it. He could try to convince Mom that a broken window was not as bad as when Timmy down the street backed his parents' car into the fire hydrant, or he could offer to superglue the window back together with the promise to practice more so his throwing aim improves. Or maybe Little Johnny plainly admits what he did and asks Mom’s forgiveness. These are not examples of a classic Leave it to Beaver lesson about responsibility—they are examples of tactics used in William Benoit’s image restoration theory. Benoit said there were five types of image restoration tactics that individuals or organizations could use whenever their reputation becomes damaged. We will look at each of those tactics, with an example of the strategy used in real-world PR ...