Strategic Outreach Experience

My experience spans Fortune 500 companies to fearless entrepreneurs.  A sampling of my strategic outreach experience is below.  Let’s begin.

Thought Leadership

For Infosys (via Golin Harris – 2010)

Designed media relations and Thought Leadership program for IT services giant Infosys (US$5 billion revenues, global)

For Lumen Legal (2006-2008):

3-year program of perspective papers and guest editorials written for CEO David Galbenski, articulating his vision for a new era of legal services for the business world.  This was followed by development of a unique Information Management paradigm for litigation e-discovery.

Re-branded the company (including re-naming it / with related research), and executed internal communications (core values).

For GMAC Insurance (2007-2008):

Executive communications and editorial during roll-out of a new menu-driven system that helps auto salespeople to sell high-margin insurance and warranty products; positioned as one way to offset slower new-vehicle sales.

Specific Results from my Writing and Media Relations Work

PR readership is one thing, specific sales results are another.  Here’s some of my favorite anecdotal results from articles that I have written, with my related media relations activity also noted.

-For a Midwest regional provider of corporate legal services, insightful perspective papers inspired an editor-written feature article in Inc magazine. Immediately, the company broke into the national scene with inquiries from the largest New York law firms.

-For an automation builder, the second door to open in the appliance industry was caused by a case study about the builder’s first appliance-industry project.  No salesperson had previously been able to penetrate this prospect – the article did it.

-For a small specialist in truck driver recruitment technology, getting Exxon to endorse  their services in an article put them in a whole new league, and big clients came on board quickly.

-For a new nanotechnology product that increases fuel economy, early case study work overcame skepticism from editors (the “snake oil” syndrome),  enabling extensive coverage in a key market and the credibility needed to pitch major freight carriers.

Atlas Technologies: messaging focused on the technology in use

Innovative Communications Strategies

Authored Pull to Push: the new E-marketing Continuum, on the use and integration of RSS.  This article appeared in PRSA’s PR Tactics magazine.

Clear and Compelling Messaging

For Southern California Edison – IT Services (2009-2010)

Internal communications (Change Management): Edison’s IT serves their 18,000 employees with everything from laptops to major data handling initiatives.
Formulated corporate communications for Edison’s ERP installation (SAP), the largest ERP transformation in the energy industry.

For CerMet – nanotechnology product   (2008-2009)

Created and directed intensive PR saturation program to promote a new product that reduces friction in engines and increases fuel economy; the product was fighting for credibility in a market cluttered with snake oil and big claims

Ability to Simplify Complex Technology Issues (Writing Samples)

Perspective Paper (IT/Logistics – 2006): Why the Dynamic Supply-Chain Environment Demands a Hosted Software Service

Excerpt:

The Bottom-Line IT Objective

Ultimately, progressive IT professionals are focused on helping their company quickly match solutions to problems, applying technology to quickly drive results.   They understand the business imperative and leverage capabilities of available software components instead of hard-coding every process.

Proven, purchased software and hosted applications provide far more options than 20 to 30 years ago, when IT professionals were called upon to build applications from the ground up. Many of those projects linger with us today as cumbersome legacy systems.

Maintaining a bias toward home-grown business software is counterproductive…as is prejudice against hosted solutions that aren’t controlled internally.  Neither serves the stakeholders and users who rely on IT tools.

Underestimating the functionality required for finished-vehicle distribution visibility is also common. The software must accommodate numerous process variances, unlike software for highly repetitive tasks such as accounting.  The question is: can your internal IT department cost-effectively build proprietary software that achieves more than basic visibility…software that enables effective distribution management?

Once it’s built, does your IT department have the resources to work with logistics personnel on an on-going basis to adapt and evolve the software? Tracking and optimizing vehicle distribution are not well suited to static “one-and-done” software solutions. Hosted Software Services are ideal for this task.

Beware, also, of standardized supply-chain software that is it is not designed for the specific application. Does it make good business sense for an IT department to attempt to build a mere facsimile of “best-of-breed” packages designed specifically for supply-chain management, when they could simply identify the best-of-breed and integrate the real thing?

The Security Concern

Security is often brought up as a reason to reject the Hosted Software Service (HSS) solution. To be sure, the HSS provider must have a comprehensive disaster recovery plan and sufficient system and data redundancy. But, in the end, most experts agree that the World Wide Web has less chance of being totally disrupted than client server-based solutions.

If we can do our banking on-line, trade stock and manage billions of financial transactions yearly, it’s certainly possible to securely integrate hosted applications for tracking functions for finished product distribution.

Further, the HSS model is proven and becoming the tool of choice for other key processes, such as CRM and sales management.  The success of www.salesforce.com is a testament to this trend.  And an HSS is not just for small to medium-sized companies that can’t afford custom solutions.

Conclusion

The question for both corporate and IT management is this: Is your company best served by building a custom application from scratch, or can the business objective be better served by finding the state-of-the-art solution, and quickly integrating it so it can solve the logistics problem?

Supply-chain visibility and management can be an unwieldy task and a difficult challenge. It requires an attentive, committed team to maintain connectivity and on-going communication. Seek software and services from a company that durable-goods product logistics, and understands the transportation modes, facilities and processes involved in the distribution chain.

In the end, how well this effort achieves the company’s financial and/or operational objectives is the only metric that counts.

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For Mitutoyo America (2002)

White Paper: The Value of Contact Scanning

Summary: This paper outlines how contact scanning of contoured surfaces on a Coordinate Measuring Machine (CMM) can provide higher data density that yields higher measurement accuracy, and can achieve these results in a much shorter inspection cycle time than the traditional point-to-point touch probe method.

Excerpt:

The standard process of jabbing the surface with a touch probe, then picking the probe tip up and moving it to the next point, has inherent limitations.  Keeping the probe stylus in constant contact with the surface is the alternative answer.  It’s not a new idea, but recent advances in control and data gathering software, and the ability to tame the probe and have it quickly react to a changing landscape, have now made contact scanning practical.

Continuous-contact, analog scanning on a CMM allows the user to define or inspect 3D surfaces with a high level of measurement “certainty” (i.e. repeatability and reproducibility) since many more points per inch can be obtained in a reasonable amount of time.  It can also be beneficial on many simple part features, including planes, cylinders, cones, forms, etc.  Continued.

For MAG Industrial Automation Systems  (2006-2008)

Developed perspective papers and major editorial programs to promote advanced manufacturing systems built by this conglomerate of North American and European companies.

Measurement and  Program Results

Verifying what’s important to the customer

For Southern California Edison (2009):

Analyzed deep research obtained through surveys and executive interviews that gauged customer perceptions and priorities, then designed a branding communications strategy and messaging program to specifically address weaknesses that were verified by the research findings.

Bottom Line Results: the 6-year journey to market domination

For Atlas Technologies (automation specialist):

PR, advertising and direct marketing in Year 1 and 2 of the program were key in raising awareness of a new Just-in-Time technology. The messaging evolved and so did Atlas market share. By Year 6, Atlas outsold all competition combined. In subsequent years, new automation products were successfully launched.