By far, the most disturbing 2011 event for me was the Japan earthquake, tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster that spurred massive leaks of radiation. While the crisis led to yet another change in Japan’s leadership (the governing Democratic Party elected Yoshihiko Noda as the new prime minister in August -  the sixth person to hold the post in five years), that change led to no better handling of the situation as the tragic events unfolded.

What I remember most is the anger that bubbled up as Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government created as much mystery as possible around the amount of radiation being let off by the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant – the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. I’m still haunted by the matter-of-fact statements made by plant workers, bidding goodbye to their families for at least “many months,” to contain the toxicity emanating from the bedeviled reactors. To this day, I can’t recall any reports of what ever became of those unfortunate souls. Did any of them make it back out of the reactor facilities?

And then, there’s the kicker. Japan’s emperor Akihito comes out of the woodwork to comfort a lost and terrified nation. The emperor’s speech was his first-ever televised address and it was the first time any Japanese emperor has given a speech directly to the people on television during a national crisis. I wonder if the emperor realized what an irreversible PR nightmare was in progress. Did he sense that the trust and confidence of an entire people in its government was at stake? Was he somehow trying to bridge the gap between the Japanese government’s need to save face with the world by minimizing the appearance of chaos and the need to be honest and transparent with the Japanese people when they needed it most?

For many Japanese, the crisis brought with it a wave of doubt as to whether or not their government, an institution that has enjoyed a trust not seen in the U.S. for decades, was telling the truth about the realities of the disaster and the harm it was doing to people. When the government says that, on one hand, everything is just fine at the plant, but on the other hand, seal yourselves inside your homes and try not to breathe the air from outside, even the most loyal Japanese nationals began to lose trust.

This was a chilling reminder to me that as a PR practitioner, trustworthiness and transparency are my most valuable assets. Failing to communicate or waiting too long to communicate during a crisis can strip people of the calm they desperately need during that time. And it’s one of the things people tend to remember when the crisis is over or subsides. If Japanese citizens continue to lose trust in the government’s truthfulness or competence, then Tokyo will face another crisis, this one of its own making. Once that trust is gone, saving face will be out of the question.

If you haven’t already, chances are you’re finalizing your list of New Year’s resolutions. You know, go to the gym more, get organized, eat healthier, stick to a tighter budget, stress less …

Which got me thinking. Now is also the perfect time of year for organizations to really think about improvements they can make when it comes to their advertising plans. I’m not talking about an entire overhaul here, just some simple suggestions. Minor tweaks, if you will.

1. Be more social. Launch a new blog or a new Twitter feed in support of a specific product or service. Really go after that niche audience. A very specific blog or Twitter feed is a great way to differentiate yourself without the worry that it might undermine your existing marketing efforts.
2. Help others. Build a contest tab on your Facebook page to benefit charity. Ask your followers to vote on a charity, or perhaps recommend their own, and then make a donation to the most popular choice. It helps you build Facebook traffic, generates some viral buzz around your brand and makes life better for those around you.
3. Be more eco-friendly. There are lots of ways to make your organization green, but what about your advertising? We say, save a tree and try digital if you haven’t already. Scrap that brochure for a QR code. Or turn that annual report into a microsite. It’s the perfect way to test the effectiveness of a new media and help the environment at the same time.
4. Push yourself. Let’s face it, at one time or another, every client has been presented with more than one creative concept at a time. If your concepts tend to gravitate toward more conservative ideas, 2012 is your chance to try being a little bolder. I’d venture to say that the more creative the concept, the more it resonates with your audience. And the more attention-grabbing and memorable it is, the better your return on investment. Thus, what you might tend to view as a “risky” choice, in actuality is the “safe” one.
5. Look to the future, not to the past. If 2011 was a great year for you, “Congratulations!” If not, there’s nothing you can do about it now. It’s a new year, which means a new beginning. Figure out what worked and what didn’t. Learn from your mistakes and move on.

Now that we’ve got some ideas out on the table, here are some tips to help you follow through.

First off, commit yourself to trying just one to start. Then, make a plan on how you’re going to achieve it … and tell someone. That’s right, stick your head outside of your office right now and yell, “Attention everyone! I am going to (insert New Year’s resolution here). Ok, maybe not, but you get the idea. Not only can colleagues hold you accountable (oftentimes with just the right amount of good-natured peer pressure), they can also be there with a little positive encouragement when you need it most.

Have any other advertising New Year’s resolution ideas? We’d love to hear them.

Many in our industry are watching this process as a first step in cracking down on “greenwashing” –deceptive marketing or PR spin meant to portray a company as being environmentally friendly. The phrase was actually coined in response to those hotel cards asking us to reuse our towels and sheets for the duration of our stay to lessen the environmental impact of doing laundry. However, there are certainly plenty more egregious examples commonplace in the work our industry produces today.

I wouldn’t recommend we pin all our hopes on the FTC swooping in to save the day and clean up the practice of greenwashing, though. Their Green Guides review has been ongoing since 2007 and it appears it still has a way to go.

I don’t know that marketers really need to wait on guidance from the FTC here. If we as marketers are doing our jobs right, we should already be in compliance with whatever their directive is likely to be. We should already be working to a higher standard than “avoid misleading consumers with unfair or deceptive claims.”

That standard should be “advertising with integrity.” We, as an agency, owe you forthright consultation on plainspoken and genuine communication with your consumers. You owe your consumers authenticity, trustworthiness and promises delivered. If we all market under the belief that our name and our reputation are our most prized possessions, the FTC’s guidelines really shouldn’t have any significant bearing on our marketing practices.

What do you think? Does striving for higher ground in marketing practices cover FTC Green Guides compliance? Any particularly absurd instances of greenwashing you’d like to share? We’d love you to join the conversation.

Wondering what to do for next year? (It’s never too early to start planning, although October is when you really need to hit the ground running.) A lot of it is pure preference. But if you’re still on the fence, here are some things to consider.

1. Who is your audience? Even as the number of grandmas and grandpas receiving iPads as gifts is increasing, email probably isn’t the best way to reach senior citizens. On the other hand, if your target audience is tech savvy and glued to their smart phone, email blasts make perfect sense.
2. What seems most fitting for your company? Obviously, if you’re a printer, or if your communications rely heavily on direct mail the rest of the year, traditional cards are probably the way to go.
3. Do you have a thorough email address database? If so, email blasts can be an inexpensive alternative to printing and shipping a traditional holiday card.
4. What’s your motive? Are you looking to do something different and fun? Are you going to link your email blast to a website? This year, our agency did its first email blast/interactive holiday microsite and the results have been very positive. Not only is it a lot of fun, we’ve attracted people who might not have normally visited our website thanks to its viral nature.

Take a poll. How many traditional cards and how many email cards have you received? We’d be interested to hear. Also, do you have thoughts one way or another? Let us know.

• comScore: U.S. online sales for Cyber Monday amounted to $1.25 billion. An increase of 22% compared to 2010.
• IBM: 33% increase in Cyber Monday online spending from 2010 to 2011. In that same survey, IBM found that 10.8% of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site.
• Monetate: While desktop computers still accounted for the majority of website visits from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, the number of website visits decreased from 2010 by about 7 percentage points. Mobile devices and tablets saw an increase of about 7 percentage points.

The record-setting amount of money spent on Cyber Monday, along with increased use of mobile devices during the Thanksgiving weekend, are further evidence of mobile device market share growth in 2011.

We saw this trend coming. The thought of statistics like these was the impetus for the mobile-friendly site for high-stakes retail brand La-Z-Boy. The key features of their website could have been more easily accessible on mobile devices. So in our redesign, we pulled forward the aspects of the site most useful to mobile users, including a store locator and product search and share functionality. Copy was optimized for ideal mobile viewing.

It’s fair to say we don’t see these trends reversing anytime soon. In the U.S., 90 million people own smart phones. And 79% of mobile Internet users have used a smart phone to help with their shopping (Google/IPSOS Reid 2011). Plus, there’s going to be a 272% increase in the number of tablets shipped this year over 2010 (IHS). That’s right, I said 272%.

What does this all mean? As more and more people transition to smart phones and the demand for tablets increases, the utmost consideration should be given to optimizing your site for on-the-go digital consumption.

Having a mobile-friendly website is an essential step in connecting with customers. Your potential customers will move along to your competitor’s site if your site is difficult to view, takes a long time to load or does not load properly in their mobile browser. A mobile-friendly website needs to follow the rule of “less is more,” aiding potential customers in ways such as finding a retailer, comparing prices or reading reviews.

Have you noticed an increase in traffic to your website from mobile sources? How often do you turn to a mobile device to access the Internet? Did you use a smart phone or tablet to make a purchase Black Friday or Cyber Monday? We’d love to read your thoughts – share them in the comments section below.

The U.S.’s more relaxed system of political advertising can make life extremely difficult for non-political marketers leading up to an election. Cutting through the noise to reach average citizens or key sub-sets of the population can feel impossible during this time.

We understand the challenge from both sides. We’ve rolled up our sleeves for a good-old political election from time to time, and we’ve certainly worked on behalf of non-political clients to get their message out during election season. There’s no definitive formula for doing this successfully, but here are a few tried and true methodologies we have employed to increase the chances of a breakthrough:

1. Pay attention to what the media is covering and know the issues candidates are discussing. If possible, organizations might try to find a relevant link and tie their messages to larger national issues. Issues that the candidates are not discussing will be harder pressed to garner media attention during an election year.
2. Become part of the discussion. Position the organization’s leaders as experts by writing position papers and op-eds, by hosting events, and by providing the media with research and briefings on issues to educate the public.
3. Find partners to maximize the strength of the organization’s voice. Organizations should remember that there are others across the U.S., even in their home state, that focus on and care about the same issues. Like-minded organizations coming together will make a stronger impact promoting messages rather than one organization attempting this on its own.
4. Use media tools such as YouTube, blogs and social-networking sites in conjunction with traditional media outlets to focus on the issues important to your organization. Utilizing various media tools will strengthen the impact of messages and will allow a broader reach.

Doing these things can certainly help marketers’ chances of cutting through the election season clutter. The critical element to any activity in such a noisy marketplace is maintaining a laser-like focus on your message and repeating it every chance you get in the right places at the right time – even if it has to be during an election year. Do you have any other suggestions that have worked well for you? If so, we’d love to hear them.

As copywriter, I’m here to tell you it’s not because we don’t want to go back and tweak what we already created. Or that our feelings are hurt. (Our skin is thick and we’re not afraid of eating dinner at our desks.) It’s truly because we want someone besides our parents to truly remember not just the creative, but the message.

After all, when you tend to go on and on and on about who did this, why they didn’t do that, where it was or wasn’t done, who it affected, how much it cost, why they may or may not do it again, why we didn’t say this before, and where this or that is going, people become lost. Confused. Uninterested.

TARTA (click work to expand)

As you can see, this campaign has one simple message with one very arresting visual. There’s no picture of a bus. No full-page report explaining every detail of why TARTA is better than driving. By telling people to simply stop guzzling gas and ride TARTA instead, I walk away understanding (and remembering) what TARTA was trying to say.

HCR ManorCare (click work to expand)

This example is similar to TARTA in that the headline and visual are quick reads that are intriguing and draw you in. HCR ManorCare has more extensive body copy, but the visual and headline remain clear and concise. I get it. I understand it. And I won’t look at a razor the same way ever again.

Toledo Northwestern Ohio Food Bank (click to play spot)

Sometimes people think that tight budgets are a bad thing. Not necessarily. Often, it forces to you really get at the heart of what you’re saying. This is a prime example. We had to quickly and effectively draw people in and get then to understand that people in Toledo aren’t able to feed their families.

If you have any examples of advertising you’d like to share that show why sticking to one message is so important, we’d love to see them. Of course, if you have examples of an ad that’s got everything but the kitchen sink in it, feel free to share those, too.

Perhaps lawyers convinced the university to hunker down. Or maybe somebody thought any backlash from stonewalling the press would be mitigated by whatever action they’re planning to take. Maybe it’s happening too fast. Maybe there’s lack of consensus. Whatever the case, Penn State’s communications is a crisis in and of itself, one that will add months of life and millions of dollars to the situation. More people are going to lose their jobs.

The lesson here is not that your company or university needs a crisis communications plan. That goes without saying. The lesson from Penn State is that your crisis plan is useless if it hasn’t established how you will respond to situations nobody saw coming. That includes horrible acts and cover-ups by people in positions of trust.

Going forward, it will be important for Penn State to align itself with the public’s outrage at the situation. It must keep its messages compassionate, credible, consistent and concise. And above all, it must take action to prevent this from ever happening again, and communicate its preventive actions widely and frequently. In the absence of information, guilt is assumed and things will only get worse.

Our process was made significantly easier by 40+ years worth of lessons learned doing this very same type of work on behalf of our clients. Hard-earned lessons have led us to best practices, the latest of which we’d like to share with you: the Brand Evolution Task Force, or the BETF as it’s come to be known around here.

How the BETF Was Born

A brand taskforce, in and of itself, is nothing revolutionary. We’ve helped clients build these teams to steward change in virtually all of our rebranding efforts over the years. The BETF is a little different though; it marks a step forward from approaches we’d used in the past.

The BETF came to be while planning a major rebranding initiative with one of Hart’s largest healthcare clients. With more than 5,000 unique brand touchpoints, we anticipated this was going to be a lengthy undertaking.  But with just two months to ready its public launch, we would need an ultra-fast, ultra-efficient and ultra-streamlined way of doing things. The BETF was our innovative answer. Now, it’s standard operating procedure.

Building Your Own BETF

Here’s how we structure the BETF at Hart to ensure a streamlined and efficient process. We hope a few of the best practices we employ will help you with your rebranding process as well.

• Building the BETF right is job one.

We build the BETF as a joint team: strategists and creatives from Hart and stakeholders from our client. This collaborative approach is key, as it cuts approval times, ensures our concepts and client expectations are always in line, and it focuses both organizations on the ultimate goal. If you’re doing your own rebrand, then your “client” is the myriad of internal stakeholders who will have a say in this process.

• Once formed, the BETF’s first undertaking is a comprehensive audit.

The BETF is ultimately responsible for the look and feel of every piece of an organization’s branded communication – marketing materials and internal communications pieces to parking signs and name badges. An audit will allow you to schedule, prioritize and make sure nothing is missed.

• Develop a playbook.

We use this playbook as a roadmap for the rebranding process. It tells us when and where different team members and different job functions need to plug in and out of the process, what they should do and where we can consolidate to save time. The more collaborators you have on your rebranding project, the more important this playbook will likely to become.

• Use technology to streamline the process.

For us, this marked one of the most significant leaps forward as we created our BETF. In collaboration with the client (above), we needed to incorporate dozens of stakeholders and thousands of touchpoints, all while accommodating compressed timelines. Spreadsheets and email once did the trick, but they’d clearly become outdated.

We now rely on tools like Basecamp, Dropbox and others that support “live” documents. This enables individuals on the BETF to alter and annotate each other’s work – even when they’re in multiple physical locations – while avoiding the dreaded “version confusion.”

• Keep the process dynamic and moving on multiple paths.

Develop representations of the brand’s guiding elements first. Then one team can use those representations to get to work on brand touchpoints (websites, advertising pieces, etc.), while another continues work on brand elements like logos. Save time with multiple teams working concurrently, and then marry all the elements at the end. This practice, in particular, was key in streamlining our process enough to meet production deadlines for our healthcare client’s launch (beginning with a Super Bowl spot).

• Add in a heavy dose of project management and quality control.

The BETF isn’t all strategy and creative. The project management and quality control teams will help you get it right the first time, avoiding costly delays down the road.

We’ve learned project management should exist as a dedicated specialty. An AE with an Excel doc may work fine on a small project, but on a large, complex project, it pays to invest in more substantial resources. A project manager implementing the methods and resources of an organization like the Project Management Institute will generate excellent ROI.

I encourage you to employ some of these tactics in your own rebranding process. Whether your organization is 15,000 people with 5,000 touchpoints, or 50 people with a few dozen touchpoints, I think you’ll be amazed by the speed and efficiency your own BETF will afford you.

What have your previous rebranding experiences been like? Any best practices, lessons learned or general tips to make a marketer’s life easier that you’d like to share?

What’s more, a true rebranding effort is more than changing the color of your logo. (I like to think of this as the equivalent of dabbing a little anti-wrinkle cream under your eyes. It makes you feel better, but the results aren’t always noticeable. Trust me, I’ve tried.)

A true rebranding effort requires you to think about where you started, who you’ve become and what you hope to be. In fact, Hart recently rebranded itself so we could focus more on the incredible new insights and services we have to offer.

Four signs that it’s time for you to think about a brand makeover.

1. Your positioning statement just doesn’t fit anymore.
   Businesses are like people. We change over time, and if our brand doesn’t follow, it shows. So if your existing mission and values don’t reflect your current core beliefs, it’s time to tweak and refine.
2. You’ve experienced a life-changing event.
   If your business has grown, your services have changed or you’ve added new products, that changes the way you do things. In fact, that’s exactly what happened to us here at Hart. We had expanded not only our staff, but the services we provide to reflect the changes in our industry, and it was time people knew all we had to offer.
3. People are bored with you.
   They won’t necessarily come right out and say it (okay, maybe some of them will), but technology and communication are changing at record speed. Attention spans are shorter. You have to stay current and interesting, or you’ll lose people. Literally.
4. You just don’t like the way you look anymore.
   Let’s face it, even bell bottoms had their day. That said, make sure you’re not just changing to change. Your new look should reflect who you are.

To see how it works, take a look at the rebranding work we’ve done for clients like ProMedica and Root Learning.

Also, we’d love to hear any thoughts you’d like to add. For instance, have you rebranded recently? Do you have any other suggestions for “signs it’s time to rebrand?” Do you have any advice for those thinking about rebranding? Looking forward to hearing from you.