Posted in Consulting

Ann Marie Mayuga

Communicate better with strong messaging, media success and managing your company reputation.

Ann Marie Mayuga, co-owner and partner at AMM Communications, one of the Top Public Relations Firms in St. Louis, Missouri. She understands that communications are dynamic, evolving and must always be improved. When you take this philosophy and build a business that helps companies and not-for-profits drive sales, communicate better, and hire well, you know that you’ve found a communications professional who is obsessed with client success.

Ann Marie’s career has always been in communications either for corporations, one of the world’s largest PR firms, and not-for-profits. She’s had her fair share of incredible PR and media relations experiences from helping clients land that must-have and coveted interview which put them on the national map and managing crisis situations to being an early adapter how of how social media platforms were the next wave of must-use tools to communicate with journalists and target audiences.

If you are curious to learn more about Ann Marie’s experience versus boring you with a list of what she has done and where she has worked in this bio, please take a glance at her LinkedIn profile, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ammayuga/.

Ann Marie has two key strengths — she is a critical listener, and she can help each client understand and identify the best messaging for their organization to drive sales. AMM Communications does not take a cookie cutter approach with each client. Frankly, that is insulting because as far as we’re concerned each person and business is unique as are the business development, communication and talent recruitment solutions we offer.

Ann Marie has been involved with a number local not-for-profit boards and still stays active with a few because she is investment with making St. Louis a great place to live and do business. She spends her free time running, gardening, and during the summer months pickling and jarring every possible vegetable from her garden. She is married to Ed, and they are blessed to have a happy pack of three bulldogs – two English and a precocious French Bulldog.

A Failure to Communicate? “Cool Hand Luke” and Public Relations

“What we have here is a failure to communicate” says the warden.  Have you ever heard your client say this? If you are in the communications/marketing field or a business consultant, this is the kiss of death. This movie has been one of my favorites since I was a kid, and while watching it again on Netflix the other night, hearing this line started me thinking about writing a blog about it.

As public relations consultants, Ann Marie and my jobs are to portray our clients and their companies in the best possible light, generate excitement about their products and services, and minimize the damage of any negative news through reputation management.  But, just like any human interaction, simple misunderstandings or lack of clarity can have a tremendous impact on the consultant/client relationship, escalating into more serious consequences in the future.  Consultants need to be 100% certain that they are conveying the clients’ point of view correctly.  So we strive for clear communications with both clients and the general public.  So if you are a consultant, here are three things that we recommend you do before moving forward with a public announcement or statement:

  1. Trust but verify – Just because a client says something is true doesn’t always make it so!  You need to trust that you clients are giving you correct information but you also perform due diligence and check it out for yourself.
  2. Repeat for understanding – Echo back what you heard to your client to make certain that you are on the same page.  It helps to take notes in bullet point form.
  3. Gain final approval – Before publishing anything , always wait for the client to approve the draft before distributing it.  This helps obtain “buy-in” from the client and prevents a potentially damaging retraction later.

If you follow these three steps whenever communicating with your client, you prevent a “failure to communicate” and much worse, spending the “night in the box” by losing a valuable client!

Social Media Networking Sustainability Course for Job Seekers, People in Transition, and Entrepreneurs – Ed Mayuga – AMM Communications

Recently, I have been working with a group of former Pfizer colleagues to help them develop their own personal brand and publicize their accomplishments via social networks, especially LinkedIn.  There is a tremendous need for job seekers and people in transition for information on how to use social media to uncover leads and networking opportunities, and I am here to help.

Those of you who have attended my Enterprise University classes, presentations on LinkedIn, and personal branding know that I am a huge advocate of the platform, especially with the recent enhancements LinkedIn has made.  I am introducing an online GoToMeeting webinar for a “Social Media Networking Sustainability Course for Job Seekers, People in Transition, and Entrepreneurs” at 10:00 AM EST on Thursday, February 17, 2011. Here is a flyer for the course:

If you are interested in attending, please send me an e-mail – ed@ammcommunications.com – and I will send you the login information. This introduction to my course will cover LinkedIn, collaborating on a wiki, and other social media tips and tricks! See you next week.

Your 2011 Sales and Marketing Plan… Have You Considered the Impact of Your Slogan or Tagline?

Small businesses often come up with slogans that aren’t descriptive of what they do. When you hear that a company brings you “the best service” without describing what that service is, then that tagline is very forgettable.  Or you may hear that a company offer “the lowest prices in town” but doesn’t specify which town that is, that company risks losing the attention of the consumer.  Worse still is if you take your current slogan or tagline and cover up your company name, then ask yourself, could this be applied to any one of my competitors, and the answer is YES, what then?  All too often, a company will develop a tagline based on the same tired cliches that the creator hears everyday on TV, radio, or reads in print.

This video has almost nothing to do with this blog post, but I thought that this sock puppet was funny!

At AMM Communications, we started our company 3 years ago with the tagline “The St. Louis-based Public Relations Firm” because we wanted potential clients in St. Louis, MO to know that we were based here but we had a nationwide reach.  Ann Marie and I sat down last week to reassess our slogan and we decided to tweak it a bit.  I did a Google search for keywords and found that “Public Relations”, “Consultant”, and “Greater St. Louis” were search terms that come up often, so we have changed our tagline to, “Public Relations Consultants of Greater St. Louis”.  Because we have released so much content over the past year with “St. Louis” and “Public Relations” from our original tagline, we still receive positive hits for our search ranking on those terms, and our new tagline serves to further differentiate us from our competitors in St. Louis.

So, as you rethink your slogan or tagline, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Does it says what my company does?
  2. Does it tell people where my company is located?
  3. Is it different from my competitors?

After you have developed your tagline, start using it in all your sales materials, on your website, and other places potential clients may see it!

Why a Public Relations Firm Can Handle Social Media for Clients

People often ask Ann Marie and me how public relations and traditional communications fit into a world where social media seems to be taking the forefront of how people obtain information and converse with each other.  My answer is “very easily” because in our view, social media is an extension of traditional “earned” media.  Earned media can be defined as placements, quotes or expert commentary which appear in traditional print and broadcast formats.  The world still reads newspapers, magazines, and listens to the radio and TV, and social media is an excellent way of supplementing this exposure.

Media Relations

Communications and conversations tend to be  the same no matter what the medium; its just that social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn discussions are more immediate.  Instead of waiting for a Letter to the Editor or rebutting a comment on broadcast media, a person can post her reply immediately.  In fact, social media can make publicizing a print media placement more targeted as different networks of followers might be interested in different things, so not all placements need to be sent to all networks.  This is much different than advertising or brand marketing, where the brand is placed for millions to see but only a few that are really consumers; social media can make this process more targets.

Public relations is about managing the image of a person or a company and social media is a great medium for “getting the word out.” This is why Ann Marie and I operate 4 Twitter accounts (stlpr, stl_pr, ammayuga, elmayuga ), 2 LinkedIn (ammayuga and elmayuga) and Facebook (Ann Marie and Ed) profiles for each of us, and a Facebook Fan Page.  This allows us to select which networks receive updates about our clients and also allows us to show a little of our personalities on our personal accounts.  So if you are a small business or entrepreneur handling your own public relations and marketing, we highly encourage you to sign up for multiple social networks and start building a following! 9GDSK8SE7TW