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Good Plans Don’t Break

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Yesterday, my contractor tore through old dry wall in the family room and removed plumbing in a closet to cap off a wet bar. The plan was to make this room, built on a slab adjacent to a garage and two outside walls, livable during cold weather. With insulation to code and new dry wall, we’d be able to do our thing and not freeze (the heat never reached that room from the lower-level furnace about 800 feet away).

Good plan, eh?

Yes, until the first signs of termites showed up, and then the infestation of live ones, along with the fresh mouse droppings just under the bar countertop being removed IN the family room.

Good plan broken? Nope, “just” a derailment.

 A need for squeamish flexibility on my part to alter this and that, add some steps that require my immediate education about termites, a call to several experts, including the current service provider who apparently has not been delivering great service, and stop-gap measures (literally) to plug some holes. And, perhaps some solid wishful thinking that this, too, shall pass.

Segue to the blog and the trials and tribulations to launch. Those who read my tweets of pain during those horrid IT nights attempting to do what I didn’t know I didn’t know but eventually got a feel for appreciate what I’m talking about.

A good plan starts with the end result. It’s accented with steps required to reach and attain that goal and outcome. To blog:

  1. Get a Web host of your own and publish your blog on your own server. (That requires a lot of ancillary steps to make happen.)
  2. Select a foundational blogging platform. In my case WordPress (a fabulous content management system one can even use for a Web site).
  3. Choose a theme of the 1,194 available (I went with Headway and crashed; now am running Thesis). That was another obstacle with tech issues galore, and I had no idea without help to solve that issue.
  4. Design the blog with colors that match (easy, you think?), branding that flows, and a bunch of widgets that ensure a reputable image at first blush.
  5. Find a voice. Write daily. Fuel controversy. Feed commentary. Market the blog. Do SEO.

Within each of these steps are little land mines that cause derailment for any number of days, weeks, and even months. Currently, I’m on step four trying to solve branding issues.

The moral to these true and happening-now stories is about planning. No one attains a goal without a good plan and steps from A to B to get there. Success is about flexibility and permission (from self) to explore other options and avenues which may take you down a rickety path until you get righted and back on track.

No matter how established you are, know that good plans don’t break, they just take longer to make happen. Exploration is education.

Objective or Strategy?

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I so love a challenge. Tweeps @jennwhinnem and @greggvm suggested I wax poetic on the confusion between an objective and a strategy in a public relations proposal.

In trying to explain, it’s a bit of a challenge. So, please reference Effective Public Relations by Cutlip and Center  (the same, hopefully updated text book I used in college) for their professorial approach to teaching this distinction. @Greggvm (he’s a 3-G kind of guy) suggests strategies drive tactics, and I agree.

When writing a public relations proposal, spend the longest time developing objectives and strategies. Once you nail these, the tactics cascade in support of strategies. Back in the not-too-distant day when I worked in Chicago at Ketchum/Corporate Technology Communications under the tutelage of Paul Rand, current president of Zocalo Group in Chicago and also president of Word of Mouth Marketing Association, our account team sat for hours arguing the difference between objectives and strategies.

Here are simple guidelines from my professional point of view…if you have another approach, please share!

  • Business goals are required in a proposal to align communications strategy.
  • Program objectives are broadly stated i.e. “Increase market position 20 percent by 2012,” or “Decrease negative online reputation by 10 percent for product X.” Include three to four objectives, not more.
  • Strategies support objectives, and remain somewhat vague, for example,  “Launch proactive integrated communications campaign.”  Strategies complement objectives; feature five to six strategies to support the larger goal.
  • Program elements (or tactics) follow; strategies drive tactics. Highlight tactics after providing a list of target audiences.

Once a proposal is approved, a more tactical plan with timeline follows. It’s easy to forget there ever was a plan, but re-visit the original plan and stay the course. This also helps reduce scope creep, and you agency practitioners will know exactly what is meant by that!