by Allison Ritter

As the leaves change color and the air turns crisp, businesses and organizations must adapt their PR strategies to align with the unique opportunities and challenges that the fall season presents. A well-crafted PR plan during this time can significantly enhance brand visibility, engagement, and overall success. Here’s why a good PR plan is essential during the fall:

Seasonal Relevance and Timeliness

Fall is synonymous with college football and the MLB playoffs, both of which capture the attention of millions of fans. Leveraging these sports events in your PR campaigns can create timely and relevant content that resonates with your audience. Whether it’s hosting viewing parties, sponsoring local teams, or creating sports-themed promotions, aligning your messaging with these popular events can make your brand more relatable and engaging.

Increased Media Opportunities

The fall season often sees an uptick in media activity, with journalists and publications looking for fresh, seasonal stories. By having a proactive PR plan, you can pitch timely stories, press releases, and feature articles that align with the interests of the media and their audiences. This can lead to increased media coverage and greater exposure for your brand.

Holiday Shopping and Consumer Behavior

Fall marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season, with consumers starting to make their holiday purchases. A strategic PR plan can help position your products or services as must-haves for the upcoming holidays. By highlighting special promotions, gift guides, and holiday-themed content, you can capture the attention of early shoppers and boost sales. 

Strengthening Community Relationships

Fall is a great time to strengthen relationships with your community and stakeholders. Hosting or participating in community events, charity drives, and local festivals can enhance your brand’s reputation and foster goodwill. A well-thought-out PR plan ensures that these efforts are communicated effectively, highlighting your brand’s commitment to social responsibility and community engagement. 

Conclusion

A good PR plan during the fall is not just about maintaining visibility; it’s about leveraging the unique opportunities that the season offers to connect with your audience in meaningful ways. By being timely, relevant, and strategic, you can enhance your brand’s presence, drive engagement, and achieve your business goals. Need help developing a good PR plan, call us. HBE can build your brand an exciting and robust PR plan for this fall and beyond. 

by Riley Carney Dernar

With the 2024 Olympics about to start in Paris, I started thinking about how public relations is similar to the Olympics. Both involve strategy, skill, and timing to shape perceptions and create memorable moments.

Strategy and Preparation

Just like athletes train hard for their events, PR pros meticulously plan their strategies. They analyze trends, anticipate challenges, and craft messages that hit home with their audience. Similarly, Olympic athletes train rigorously, study their opponents, and perfect their techniques to perform their best. Both rely on thorough preparation and a well-executed game plan.

Global Stage and Spectacle

The Olympics is a worldwide event where athletes compete for glory. In the same way, PR campaigns often aim for international reach, using media and digital platforms to spread their message. Both showcase talent, innovation, and cultural diversity, captivating audiences around the globe.

Excellence and Achievement

Both PR and the Olympics are all about striving for excellence. Athletes aim for gold medals and set new records. In PR, success means enhancing brand reputation, managing crises well, or launching successful campaigns that resonate with customers. Both fields celebrate achievements, whether it’s a perfect campaign or a podium finish.

Adapting to Challenges

The Olympics face logistical challenges that require flexibility and adaptability. Similarly, PR pros deal with crises, public scrutiny, and a fast-changing media landscape. The ability to adapt strategies in response to unexpected situations is crucial in both PR and Olympic competition.

Uniting Communities

The Olympics bring people together across cultures and backgrounds, fostering camaraderie and national pride. Effective PR campaigns can also unite communities around shared values, causes, or experiences. Through storytelling, advocacy, or corporate social responsibility initiatives, PR builds connections that resonate with diverse audiences.

Public Relations and the Olympics share a lot of similarities. Both require dedication, strategic thinking, and a commitment to achieving goals despite challenges. Whether you’re watching athletes compete for medals or launching a PR campaign, the similarities highlight principles of success and achievement.

by Mark Meltzer

I’m really excited about a client we’ve just started working with — the World Roller Derby League.

This Los Angeles-based league is a startup, but one with unlimited potential. The founders are the top people in the world of Roller Derby, with deep knowledge of the skaters and the sport. They’re also the folks who produced Fear Factor and American Ninja.

They’re starting up at the highest level, and they intend for it to be the big leagues of Roller Derby, with events across the U.S., Mexico and globally. Think WWE or Ringling Brothers, which operates several traveling circus troupes.

Their timing couldn’t be better. Women’s sports have become hugely popular, and should be even more so with the Olympics coming next month in Paris, showcasing world class athletes like superstar swimmer Katie Ledecky.

The NFL and the NBA are pulling away from network TV, and others like ESPN are looking for good sports programming. A TV executive we spoke with said there is very legitimate demand for Roller Derby on TV.

The new league has asked us to help put it all together. HBE’s job is to help find good partners: TV people, arenas, sponsors and potential team owners.

Why us? We have a lot of experience in sports. HBE started 30 years ago as the owner of the Colorado Silver Bullets, a women’s baseball team, managed by Phil Niekro, that has its own exhibit in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. 

We’ve also managed Olympic activations for Coca-Cola.

HBE Chairman and co-founder Bob Hope testified before Congress on Title IX, the landmark legislation that fueled the growth of women’s collegiate sports, and he served on the Women’s Sports Foundation with tennis legend Billie Jean King.

Bob has also helped ownership groups land several sports expansion franchises, including the Colorado Rockies and Miami Marlins. He knows how leagues are set up and how teams and leagues share revenue.

Mostly, the league wants somebody who knows who to call, and that certainly describes Bob.

And if the league is interested in how Mexican wrestling works, well, we have a few contacts there as well.

If you’re interested in getting involved with the World Roller Derby League in any way, please let us know. This is going to be a lot of fun and, I think, very successful.

by Hilary Bumm

There are surprising parallels between these seemingly unrelated endeavors. Leash up and explore how PR mirrors the art of raising a puppy.

Building Trust

In both PR and puppy raising, trust is paramount. In PR, trust forms the foundation of relationships between a brand and its audience. Similarly, when raising a puppy, trust is established through consistent care, training and bonding. Just as a brand must deliver on promises to maintain credibility, a puppy owner must fulfill their responsibilities to cultivate trust with their furry companion.

Communication

Effective communication is key in both PR and puppy raising. PR professionals craft messages tailored to different audiences, ensuring clarity and resonance. Similarly, puppy raisers use verbal commands, body language and positive reinforcement to communicate with their canine companions. Both require patience, consistency and flexibility to successfully communicate.

Adaptability

In the dynamic world of PR, adaptability is essential to navigate changing landscapes, trends and audience preferences. Likewise, raising a puppy requires adaptability to their evolving needs, temperament and environment. Flexibility, creativity and resilience are crucial in both realms to adjust strategies and approaches as circumstances evolve.

In conclusion, there are striking similarities between PR and puppy raising. Whether crafting a PR campaign or training a puppy, the principles of trust, communication and adaptability must be harnessed to achieve optimum results.

by Holly Brochmann

Emojis: You either love ‘em, or you hate ‘em. If you’re indifferent, you probably lean toward the latter category. In this digital era that thrives on impersonal forms of communication, emojis can inject personality into a text or email. They can convey humor, sarcasm, annoyance, or an array of other sentiments when words alone cannot. They are also fun, whimsical, and often even silly. So what about the use of emojis in a professional setting. Are they unprofessional? 

There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, at least in my opinion. It’s mostly a matter of personality and personal preference, though it can be a bit tricky when opposing viewpoints collide. As someone who has big emotions and is also in the business of communications, I’m on Team Love ‘em. With the help of emojis, there’s less room for misinterpretation of an intended tone in a message. For example:

1. I’m so mad at you

2. I’m so mad at you ????

The words are exactly the same, but the emoji completely changes the tone of the statement. Number one comes across as pretty literal – perhaps I actually am mad at you. But in two, it’s pretty clear that my “madness” isn’t genuine, and that my good humor about the situation is intact.

In a personal setting, even if my communication is with someone I don’t know very well, I have no problem letting my personality show through the use of emojis. I’d say I use them in at least 85 percent of my personal messages.

In a WORK setting, however, these are the general guidelines I follow:

1. With colleagues or industry peers who know me well, emoji away.
2. When communicating with someone new and I am in a position of authority, I’ll use them, but not in abundance and only as needed. I’m not worried about coming across as unprofessional – it’s more important to me that my tone and intended meaning are accurately communicated.
3. When communicating with someone new and THEY are in a position of authority (a superior, client, job interviewer, etc.) I follow their lead – if they use them, I will, too. If they don’t, I don’t. In this case, I feel it’s better to err on the side of caution. I don’t want to be seen as frivolous or unprofessional if that’s how they view emojis.

At the end of the day, the use of emojis doesn’t warrant a huge debate. Yet I still took the time to write this blog because emojis are a detail, and to me, details matter.

What’s your opinion about emojis at work: yes or no?

by Bob Hope

Every human wants to feel significant and appreciated.  But that can sometimes seem like an impossible goal.

After all, there are eight billion people on earth, and each of us is only granted a relatively short and finite time on earth.  There are millions of solar systems and planets.  Our significance can cynically be seen as not more important than a speck of dust in the continuum of time.

I think I solved that dilemma.  I ventured to a very remote place 25 years ago.  It is the Agalta Valley in the state of Olancho in rural Honduras.  Olancho, if you don’t know, is known as the “Wild West” of Honduras.  Its theme was printed on T-shirts that read, “Olancho.  Come if you will. Leave if you can.”  It was a place of legend.  The legend was the “Lost City of the Monkey Gods.”  The ghosts of the monkey gods were supposedly in the mountains, and anyone who ventured into the valley would be cursed.  Luckily, I didn’t know that.

We traveled eleven hours from the airport in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, the last several hours on treacherous dirt roads winding through the mountains.  When we approached a river or stream, the only option was to find a shallow place to drive through.  There were no bridges.

The only people who lived there were the natives whose homes were tiny houses made of mud bricks and whatever other materials they could gather to use for construction.  They were lovely people, but they had nothing.  Somehow, they didn’t seem poor.  They were happy; they just didn’t have any possessions.  They also didn’t have schools.  It was a place that time and the government had forgotten.

I asked teenagers what they wanted to do when they grew up.  Their responses were based on what they knew.  All the girls wanted to have babies and live in their villages.  The boys wanted to be truck drivers (there were only a very few trucks) and ranch guards.  It was a remote but very simple life.

I was charmed and wanted to do something to help.  An organization called Honduras Outreach, based in Atlanta, had built a ranch there, and church groups had begun visiting and working in villages installing cement floors, building latrines and basins for washing.  That didn’t appeal to me.  I asked if there were other options.  I was told they wanted schools and asked if I could bring some people from the states and help them figure out how to build schools.  I agreed to try.

That was a quarter century ago.  Since then, each spring I gather a group of friends and friends of friends to travel to the place.  There are now over 50 of us.  We’ve helped fund and build marvelous schools, schools that would rival anything you might have in your community.  In a country where only about 60 percent of youngsters ever go to school and only about 60 percent of those make it through sixth grade, our students all graduate from high school and almost all go on to college.  They are bright, bright-eyed, and even though I don’t speak Spanish, they speak English.  It teaches clearly that education is the solution to almost all problems when it comes to building a community and converting difficult living conditions into living in a paradise.

I just returned from this year’s trip.  The school complex is beautiful, and the students are even more beautiful. They are filled with hopes and dreams.  When asked what they would like to do in their lives, answers include being a doctor, or a scientist or a computer programmer.  The schools are mostly built and just need upgrading and maintenance.  When we arrived, there was a brand-new cement building that would become the first grade and kindergarten.  Our group quickly had it painted and ready for students.  There were other projects at the school, but with 50 of us, two teams volunteered to travel to somewhat remote (an hour and a half away) mountain villages and put in the cement floor in homes, build latrines and basins for bathing.  Others divided up to do assorted projects, like installing 125 water filters in homes so they would have clean water to drink.

It is an amazing experience.  Everyone in the group thrives on the joy of helping others, meeting new friends and better understanding what’s important in life.  One of the most amazing things is how people in our group bond and become lifetime friends.

Even those who reluctantly came on the trip are committing to come back in the future.  I am not suggesting that a trip like this is for everyone.  Sometimes our group members come once, and that is enough for them.  However, for everyone, it is an experiment to find a purpose and passion in life that adds to their own sense of significance and inspires them to give back some of the blessings they’ve accumulated.

I love this trip, this work, the people who have become friends in Honduras and greatly love the people who travel with me to this very remote place in the world.   You should consider trying it.  There is a chance that you might be hooked on it forever.  If you want to give it a try, our annual trip will be March 1-8 next year.  You are welcome to join us.

Why are people so mad? What is causing us to become so firmly planted in our ideas and beliefs that we cannot even engage with someone who may differ in those beliefs? It saddens me! So, what can we do to be happier and to coexist? 

There is such heightened polarization in the world, in our country, in our neighborhoods and even in our families. And when you couple that intolerance with the abundance and fascination with guns, we have a real catalyst for tragedy. Is there anything we can do?  I believe there are several things we as individuals MUST do.

First, accept that we are all different; we all have the freedom to believe as we choose. We may live in a neighborhood to which some have applied a label – racist or liberal or wealthy or poor – but the truth is, most neighborhoods are not generic, even if a label has been applied. Look for the good in each other. Find the commonality. We are all human! I am reminded of the remembrance Stephen Colbert shared about this friend Toby Keith after Keith’s recent death from stomach cancer. The two seemed to have very little in common. In fact, Cobert recalls that before meeting Keith for the first time, he stopped and said to himself, “He’s your guest. Make him feel welcome. See who he is.” When Cobert did that he said, “We hit it off like a house on fire. I couldn’t believe how much I enjoyed talking to him. And, evidently, Toby had a good time, too…” Certainly the public personas of these two would show them as adversaries, but they became good friends. They maintained different political views and different beliefs about many things, but they found their commonality, their humanity. Rumi, a 13^th century Persian poet and scholar said, “The lamps are different, but the light is the same.”

Second, be happy! For many, that is an overwhelming and difficult task – and may even seem selfish. The Dalai Lama argues that it is just the opposite. Unhappy people are more self-absorbed than happy people, who are compassionate, helpful, and generous. That is why it is your purpose as a human to seek happiness. The key to happiness is peace of mind. This cannot be bought. Inner peace must come from within. The Dalai Lama espouses that the purpose of life is to be happy. Being happy involves understanding the difference between the sensory or physical and the mental feeling of joy. The sensory/physical is usually short-lived; inner/mental joy sustains itself.

“Be happy” is an easy phrase to say but much more difficult to actually be. Personally, I start by trying to be grateful for what I have. At my age, when I wake up each morning, I am grateful! One more day to enjoy! And before I go to sleep each night, I try to name three things I am grateful for that day. It could be an enjoyable conversation with a friend or family member, a beautiful sunrise or, on a more difficult day, simply that the day is finally over! I try not to worry too much about things. Worry isn’t helpful.  If I have a problem, I try to think of the best plan of action (or sometimes the worst that could happen) and then let it go.  That is not always easy. Mark Twain said, “Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.”

When I am able to do these things, I am happier, and I am a kinder, more tolerant person. “Remember, our purpose is not to separate ourselves from one another, but to join forces and collectively enhance the well-being of humanity,” Marcus Aurelius 

Or stated another way – A Muslim, a Jew, a Christian, a Pagan and an Atheist all walk into a coffee shop…and they talk, laugh, drink coffee and become good friends.  It’s not a joke. It’s what happens when you’re not an A!@#$%^.