Jayme Soulati, Author at soulati.com

Live With A Loving Heart

11/17/2015 By Jayme Soulati

It’s what I teach my child every day—live with a loving heart.

I had to write about that and remind people to do so because where I walk, live, read, breathe, eat, and play, love is absent. There is so much anger amongst people right now; there is so much animosity and inability to smile or be friendly.

Most of all there’s no compassion.

Is it because I’m older now, and I can see through the angry façade of folks who might be protecting something inside or who are envious or suspicious of loving kindness? [Read more…]

BASF Love In Business Campaign

11/13/2015 By Jayme Soulati

Is there love in business? BASF, the 150-year-old conglomerate, thinks so.

In my hunt for good podcasting fodder, I was leafing through Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s The Year Ahead 2016 issue. When I landed on a full-page spread by BASF, which I thought made audio and stereo equipment, I came across this tagline:

We create chemistry that makes more power love a cleaner drive.

Eh? I read it again and again and still could not decipher whether it was referring to computer hard drives (as the left vertical image was of a super highway often depicted as the speeding Ethernet), or whether it was the clean fuel as depicted on the right vertical image in the ad. The blue heart conjoining the two images then made me wonder if ‘chemistry’ was the entendre for ‘love.’ [Read more…]

Nurturing Dementia In Friendly Communities

10/25/2015 By Jayme Soulati

There are too many stories of friends, family and neighbors with dementia getting scammed by a crook who wants their money or valuables. It saddens me immensely. That’s why I immediately sat down to write after reading this Wall Street Journal article, ‘Dementia-Friendly’ Cities.

Turns out that Paynesville, Minn., a town of 2,400 friendlies, is ‘dementia friendly’ and they nurture dementia.

That means the folks who live, work, sleep and eat in this small Midwestern community are nurturing their elders and being kind to a aging disease no one wants, everyone fears, and for which there’s no cure.

I applaud and admire the elders of Paynesville who created this nurturing dementia mentality.

The article states, “The number of Americans 65 and older with Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, is projected to rise 40 percent over the next 10 years, to 7.1 million from 5.1 million, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, a national nonprofit group.”

Apparently, the movement to nurture dementia is taking off in Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Arizona, and West Virginia, to name a few. There is a national pilot program called Dementia Friendly America modeled on the work in Paynesville and Minnesota’s 36 dementia-friendly communities that is turnkey for other locations to help those 65+ manage this age-intensifying condition.

Cross-disciplinary organizations often collaborate to put such programs in place. In Paynesville, there are volunteers who help with caregiving, buying the groceries, with yard work, and more. Foundations and healthcare companies also help implement the community-wide programming so that people with dementia and their loved ones can receive some comfort on their path.

Nurturing Dementia Is About Changing Mindset, Like Good PR

The public relations aspect of this national program provides great opportunity for collaborative community relations with the goal of helping humanity. It’s heart marketing at its finest, and you all know by now I have a podcast called, The Heart Of Marketing.

Before the disruption in technology began to turn entire sectors on their heads, we did grassroots public relations. We built relationships in communities with influencers and leaders. We listened to the community to understand problems they wanted solved. We heard from businesses about their resources they wanted to put into play in the communities. We approached foundations and non-profits to see what role they wanted to be accountable for. We set out to change mindset and cultural shift.

Plans were drawn up. Everyone got marching orders. Action happened, and goals were reached with good-old community relations and relationship building. This was all before the time of social media; it was called traditional public relations.

For a national program like this, more people can be reached. There are more ways to engage families of people with dementia and to nurture dementia with technology.

I’m so happy the Wall Street Journal covered this PR story. It’s a good thing when we get to read news of collaboration and the principles of heart marketing that I tout on my podcast with John Gregory Olson. When your role is oriented to caring for a community, you need to constantly adapt with the needs of the people.

Why I Will Cancel Advertising Age

08/31/2015 By Jayme Soulati

No offense Rance Crain. In my book anything the Crains do is golden, coming from a Chicago girl (no I’m not native, but my child IS, so there). I will cancel after subscribing for many years as a loyal customer of the print edition.

I was around when B2B was its own magazine and then it merged inside its sister publication, Ad Age, and then it disappeared completely.
I was around when there was at least a smattering of public relations news somewhere in the publication, and then there was none.
I’ve been around since the campaigns like ‘how many licks does it take to reach the center of a Tootsie Roll pop’ were the norm and there was more dispersed coverage of all campaigns than just those that cater to the big advertising guns.

Alas, we ‘fair to middlin’ (what my grampa used to say)’ marketers no longer compute. We don’t have the advertising dollars to play in the same sandbox as the big guns, and the reporting shows.

[Read more…]

The Return of Social Media Engagement

08/13/2015 By Jayme Soulati

We’ve come full circle. We’re returning to social media engagement. As I daily peruse the social media sphere and the lists of bloggers who still write daily, good for you, I am conscious of one thing in this chaos of disruption.