Accentuate the Positive, 3.0

This marks one year of PR blogging for John Wagner over at On Message.

He’s worth the read if you are so inclined.

One of the reasons I moved to WordPress was the flexibility to divvy up my categories. And one of the catergories I wanted to highlight on the return of the blog was stories from my Red Cross experience.

I probably should have been logging and blogging a lot of those experiences as I was in the moment. But had I done so at the time, I would have been failing at my job. There are very few times when communications are that critical — and during the first few days of Hurrcane Katrina I was running through 18-hour days of critical decisions on the fly. There were some good lessons there — and this is the place where I will share them.

But as long as I am at it, I might as well introduce you to my boy.

This is Ryan at 15 months, and he likes to charge at the camera. I’ve tried to tell him that the “hand in the lens” tactic is so overdone, but he doesn’t care what the public thinks.

It must be nice to be a toddler. Food is for play, and you get to watch a lot of Blue’s Clues.

Please bear with me while I get this thing re-cranked. I have to go through more than 100 previous Blogger posts:

• cleaning up broken pics
• adding categories
• fixing formatting quirks
• adding back comments

Any volunteers? Didn’t think so.

It’s taken me a while to get back on the horse, but I figured if I was down for a spell, I might as well upgrade my technology.

I’ve moved the blog to my own server, and I’ve got it running on WordPress 1.5.2. I already like the look and feel — and may use the content management to do some things I couldn’t before.

Now — how do I go about getting people to subscribe here again..?

Blogging is going to get slowed down for a little while, as I prepare for a tour of duty with the United Way as a “loaned executive.” That’s basically where your company decides you’re valuable enough to help raise money, but expendable enough to do without.

There are some exciting things on the horizon, however. Seminars and personal coaching is beginning to pick back up, and there are a couple of organizations out there waiting on proposals to move forward. I’m also working on getting some of this seminar material on tape.

A lot of the information I provide to my consulting clients works within the small business environment as well. Yet these are the same businesses that don’t have the resource or budget to bring me in for a large presentation.

I’m working with some pretty heady people on a format that will be easy to follow, engage the listener, and be more cost effective for those clients “in between.” I’ll be announcing more about those products as we get closer to rolling them out.

With that in mind, I’d like a bit of feedback from you. What sorts of solutions are you seeking when it comes to better media relations and interviewing? What are the biggest pitfalls in your interoffice communication? How much would you benefit from being able to better tell “your story?”

Your input and encouragement are most welcome…

Ike.