filter by author: Heather Breslau

Cone Communications recently celebrated World Creativity and Innovation Week (WCIW), a global initiative started in 2002 to celebrate creativity, as well as encourage the expression of creativity through work, school or play. The kickoff on April 15, coincides with the birthday of Leonardo Da Vinci, one of the most recognized and talented artists, inventors and scientists of all time.

Employees were encouraged to track their activities through WCIW for the chance to win raffle prizes.

As part of Cone’s ongoing commitment to infusing creativity throughout our organization and client work, we decided to join the celebration this year. A committee of employees organized each day of the week around themes and activities that inspired us all to think and work differently, including:

• Encouraging staff to change their work locations – from sitting at a different desk, to moving a meeting outside, to not sitting at all during the day! Yes, believe it or not, we had several employees adjust their workstations so they could stand and work at their computers.
• Offering both private, as well as more casual, social environments to work in and introducing music or other stimuli. All are great ways to provide opportunities for employees to work in a style most conducive to them.
• Asking employees to doodle, illustrate and use visual note-taking techniques in meetings and brainstorms. This is a technique that we have started to introduce in client work sessions with the help of professional illustrators.
• Hosting 20-minute meditation sessions to allow employees to free their minds from the daily grind. People often report having breakthrough ideas or thinking up solutions when they wake up in the middle of the night or are shampooing their hair. Breakthrough ideas and solutions often come when your mind is busy with other tasks, and meditation is one way to encourage your brain to switch gears and relax.
• Facilitating “IMPROV” training from a talented and theatrically trained Cone employee. Improvisational techniques are helpful for building presentation and facilitation skills, as well as helping employees think about situations that arise during the work day in a different way.
• Sharing inspiring photos, campaigns and other commentary through Cone’s Facebook and other social media pages. Although we are accustomed to supporting our clients through social media entities, WCIW offered a great time to try them out in new ways for our own organizational communication purposes.
  

We continue to think about ways in which to infuse creativity into our busy work life. Not only does it help us offer stronger, groundbreaking ideas to clients, but it generates a culture that keeps our employees energized to work each day.

--Heather Breslau, Vice President

We all know the stats – over the past decade, network news audience numbers and ratings have continued to dwindle. The three major networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – have tried a variety of approaches in order to keep what audience they have and attempt to attract new viewers. The morning shows have shown more staying power, with “The Today Show” continuing to hold the number one ranking; however, hard news in the morning has dwindled, while the length of the shows grows. (Both NBC and ABC have added “the third hour” to their shows, which is mostly dedicated to celebrity news, pop culture and cooking.)

Moving Katie Couric, a morning show superstar on “Today” and the first solo female news anchor, to the “CBS Evening News” in September 2006 did little but further sink the evening news program’s ratings into a solid third place. The retirement of legendary anchors like Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings left NBC and ABC grappling with the gender, age and type of anchor that should replace them. Diane Sawyer’s more recent entre to the 6:30 p.m. slot has sparked some momentum for ABC, thought it’s still difficult to discern what one show offers versus another. The hosts may have different styles – Sawyer is known for communicating greater empathy, while Brian Williams attracts a slightly younger audience – but the formula for evening news has largely been the same. Night after night, everyone leads with the same big story regardless of the channel.

However, times may be changing. For the first time in a decade, evening newscasts have shown a slight gain in audience. One noted change that may have something to do with the ratings increase is in the format – the networks are no longer leading with the same story (gasp!). One channel may lead with a breaking story, another with an in-depth political story or another with an exclusive interview. Whether this is contributing to the slight ratings increase remains to be seen, but the networks appear to be shaking up the formula more than ever before. With the continued proliferation of social media to break news and make stories old within the time span of the evening newscast, it’s a good thing the evening news in particular is revamping its model.

Other interesting changes to keep an eye on both with morning and evening news:

“CBS Morning Show”: Two weeks ago, CBS debuted a new host and content strategy for its third-place morning show. Charlie Rose, a legendary PBS newsman who frankly doesn’t seem well suited to engage the mom audience in the morning, is now hosting what’s being touted as a “harder news” morning show, along with Erica Hill and contributor Gayle King. However, on his first days of the show, Rose didn’t appear to offer any hard hitting news at all – he conducted a relatively fluffy interview with Newt Gingrich – and covered celebrity news in the first hour, which is similar to the third hour of content on competitive shows. Perhaps this will change over time, and it’s too early to criticize the program out of the gate, but it seems CBS’s reformulation is not quite up to snuff yet.

“Rock Center with Brian Williams”: While most primetime newsmagazine programs (remember “20/20,” “Dateline”) have gone by the wayside, Brian Williams and NBC have recently launched a new show that is breathing fresh life into a relatively tired genre. Initial episodes include a mix of breaking news, with some creative content approaches and perspectives, integration of Web/social media content, as well as some light-hearted celebrity interviews or pop culture references. At least initially, the show appears to do a great job of covering breaking news in a fresh way and is integrating social media content that younger audiences should appreciate.

--Heather Breslau, Vice President

It seems hard to believe a website created in 2004 to help college students at Harvard share social information would have the power to help fuel political movements around the world. Wasn’t the idea to let students post their photos online and find out someone’s relationship status?

As the Facebook movie, “The Social Network,” wins Golden Globes and Academy Awards, the site is also receiving notoriety for helping assemble young political activists in Tahrir Square, Egypt. Social media, in particular Facebook, were prime vehicles for amassing young, pro-democracy supporters for rigorous political debate online and disseminating information on meetings and rally locations.

Today, the “April 6 Youth Movement” group on Facebook – which launched its page back in 2008 to help raise awareness for striking workers in Mahalla al-Kobra – has more than 86,000 members and it’s likely the Mubarak regime would not have toppled this month if Egyptian students and young professionals hadn’t leveraged the power of Facebook. Even a government-forced Internet shutdown couldn’t dilute the strength of the community offline.

As the pro-democracy wave spreads to other areas of the Middle East, this may likely serve as one of the earliest case studies of social media’s impacts on political movements. The brilliance of Facebook, with its 500 million users, is its ability not only to share and communicate but to literally create offline movements.

I wonder if this was Mark Zuckerberg’s vision as he programmed the site from his Harvard dorm room.

--Heather Breslau, Vice President